Shame and Insult

Suppose that an extremely filthy man points out that there is a spot of dirt on your clothes. What will you feel?

Will you say that the filthy man, being so filthy, has no locus standii to point out the fact that your clothes are dirty? Will you feel insulted?

I don’t know about you, but I’d feel shame, not insult. The fact that the other guy was filthy would make it worse, not better. I would feel humiliated that I had to hear those words from such a man.

The fact that the filthy guy is not evenhanded in pointing out stains in others’ clothing would make no difference to me, because shame is between me and my conscience. Shame is what you feel when you have violated a principle that you hold dear. If you don’t feel shame, then it is easy to make it a point of honour and cry that you were insulted.

3 thoughts on “Shame and Insult”

  1. There is a group of men. Each person in this group has dirt somewhere on his dress.
    One man in this group, let’s call him biggie, shakes hands with many of the people, and smiles and chats with them. He comes to you, points to the stain on your shirt and exclaims that you’re too dirty to be talked to.

    You either hang your head in shame, with your tail between your legs and whimper.

    Or growl at the obvious insult.

    I don’t know abt you, but I’d go with the growl.

  2. But if you’ve already accepted that man as a “biggie” and think that his views matter more to you than what your own conscience tells you, then you have already lost the battle for self-respect.

  3. You are confusing the notion of being insulted as one in conflict with the issue of internal conscience. This is not true.
    Note that there is this separate issue of global status (and hence the word “biggie” was introduced), which overlays any issues of morality, and an asserting of one’s status is an essential component of one’s self-respect, and is also a strategic thing.

    You yourself acknowledge that it was a political factor (of relative importances) which determined the visa-denial i.e. the man shouts about your shirt stain not because of the filth, but because he thought you did not have a status enough to do more than whimper, and yet you say that one need not be insulted by it? Because we should be moved by our conscience?

Comments are closed.