In The Shame Machine, mathematician Cathy O’Neil provides an anecdote about George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama shot down by a would-be assassin, then frequented in the hospital by Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a Black congresswoman. They ended up the two operating for president in 1972. Chisholm is a towering ethical figure. Wallace is not.
Chisholm prayed with the paralyzed Wallace, O’Neil writes, despite the bitterness her workers felt at her kindness toward this vile gentleman. Chisholm knew empathy, and which is not the exact same as kindness. “I would not want what occurred to you, to happen to everyone,” she explained to Wallace, in words and phrases no question powered by expertise with threats from her individual daily life.
Wallace lay there. Possibly then he felt shame for his earlier, shame drilling to the marrow.
The Disgrace Equipment deftly and adeptly presents the scope of “shame,” that emotion we’ve all felt, be it general public, concealed, dismissed, or tormenting. O’Neil, creator of the acclaimed Weapons of Math Destruction, examines that moral, righteous, appropriate shame—the sort that Wallace may well have felt beneath Chisholm’s smooth eyes.
There is disgrace introduced on by our failures to in good shape in to the norms of culture, generally appropriate—drunk driving, parking in a handicapped place, undertipping. Or, O’Neil describes, tiny men and women punching up to shame govt inaction or corruption.
And there is shame pushed by social media’s algorithms that decide what gets boosted to make sure we see it: the shame equipment that exploits our insecurities that we’re weak, unsightly, unloved, and that people who violate our individual norms should be unlovable.
In the course of The Disgrace Equipment, O’Neil dissects this manipulative disgrace triggered by social media, how we deploy it, not with moral bravery, but just the selfish fulfillment of getting the loudest of the mob. Businesses punch down by firing an worker caught up in the net despise-cycle persons change their neighbors into pariahs, to really feel righteous with no ever shifting their own beliefs.
Chisholm didn’t need to do that to disgrace Wallace. Her
