How DOES that happen?

A comment posted by 'Delia' at VDH / PJ Media included this nugget:

... When my mother had to go on welfare she was mortified about it and having to use that ‘monopoly money’ was an added humiliation… [Now] you have people buying cigarettes and beer with EBT cards with NO shame whatsoever. How did that happen?

 

This lack of shame is, and has been before, one of life's great mysteries. I will never forget these words from Jabotinsky's 1911 essay, "Instead of Excessive Apology" --

 

"The neighbors live and are not ashamed....  Do our neighbors blush for the Christians in Kishinyov who hammered nails into Jewish babies' eyes? "

We immediately understand from his question that they did not... blush.

"Not in the least,-- they walk with head raised high and look everybody in the face; they are absolutely right, and this is how it must be, as the persona of a people is royal, and not responsible and is not obliged to apologize..."

 

 

Lest some eeejot come along and willfully misunderstand my point, I am not equating the use of food stamps to buy beer with the commission of atrocities in a pogrom. Nor am I trying to give you nightmares. I'm simply suggesting that a lack of commonsense shame does not augur well for our society, and that Delia's question - "How did that happen?" - is more worthy than one might think at first glance.

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Before there can be shame, there must be behavior that's considered "shameful" by the culture at large -- and what the culture at large considers shameful is heavily influenced by what its elites consider shameful. In late-czarist Russia, participation in pogroms -- including even hammering nails into babies" eyes -- was not considered shameful; in fact, progroms were either organized or approved by officials at the highest levels of the czarist government. If Russian noblemen and highly-placed czarist bureaucrats -- as well as officials of the Russian church -- thought pogroms were okay, there was no reason for the serfs and plebs who did the dirty work to feel any shame, and of course they didn't. Structurally, our present-day situation in America is no different. All kinds of once-shameful behaviors are no longer considered shameful by our largely left-wing elite -- and, as a result, we have people performing in "Jersey Shores" without shame, people using the vilest of obscenities in public without shame, people discussing the most intimate details of their personl lives on TV talk shows without shame, and people using food stamps to buy Bud Light without shame. The American left has, since the 1960s, been doing everything it can to normalize, conventionalize, once-shameful behaviors. This is what happens when an elite rots from within, and admits into its ranks debauched and dissolute people whose only ticket of admission is their personal wealth. From there on, it's only as matter of time until shame vanishes from the society at large. As the adage has it, fish always decays from the head.

[Elan]

Shame is easy to lose, hard to recover. As to how it happens, it happens slowly, and then quickly. It takes a monumental effort to re-establish it, but the first step is realizing the need to do so, simply by looking around. So this is an essential post, and a essential comment by Mannie.

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