Using her powerful story telling techniques including her own experience from weight-loss surgery, O’Neil argues that the long-term solution to this societal problem includes its recognition, and plentiful use of the good human characteristics of kindness and compassion ... Thoroughly researched, well written, timely, and easy to understand, O’Neil’s book can and should find a wide audience.
What O’Neil adroitly illustrates is that shame is often a lonely experience, which is perhaps why it is so easy to exploit it for profit ... O’Neil carefully dismantles how we abdicate our social responsibility for caring for the vulnerable when we indulge in the notion that poverty and drug addiction result from a failure to self-actualize. It’s hard to argue with the author’s condemnation of what she calls 'punching down,' a targeted brand of humiliation that allows structures of power to transfer blame onto exactly those who have been injured by them ... Where The Shame Machine seems to rattle off its tracks is in O’Neil’s discussion of what she refers to as 'healthy shaming'—let’s call it a lateral punch ... Though O’Neil outlines how the lateral punch often successfully influences behaviors that result in a genuine collective benefit (she provides Covid-19 vaccinations as an example), she neglects to fully excavate what role sheer pleasure plays in our impulse to shame in those situations that have neither obvious victim nor victimizer.
The Shame Machine is not a diary of O’Neil’s grief but instead a data-driven, anecdote-fueled narrative of the multitude of human experiences that are targets for ridicule and others’ reward. She vividly portrays the indignities of poverty, addiction, aging, dementia and other conditions we all may face but hope to avoid, and she shows how the pain experienced by people with these afflictions can be used for others’ financial and social profits ... sad case studies do more than chastise enterprises that seek to profit from others’ suffering. O’Neil’s exposés also evoke philosophical questions ... But I wonder if O’Neil has gotten it right. If shame is a mechanism for changing others’ choices, why do anti-vaxxers defy social pressures or even legal mandates to get the shot? ... I’m also not convinced that shame is always intended for profit ... Beyond these points of contention, O’Neil offers a provocative takeaway.
Confused ... The matter is kept vague and the reader is left to guess that she believes (as all too many do) that there is some sort of mystical force guiding history towards the triumph of her personal convictions ... O’Neil seems relieved to discover (or invent) this concept of 'healthy shame' because it lets her off having to worry about cancel culture (which in fashionable circles is held not to exist). This healthy shaming can be recognised because it always 'punches up'. Presumably the relevant power differences will always be clearly legible and the moral issues at stake never remotely ambiguous ... O’Neil’s awkward faith that enormous social media companies might have a role in social progress is odd in the context of a book that devotes many of its pages to the big corporations that, O’Neil says, shame us for our fatness, smelliness, ugliness and poverty to make us spend money on products we don’t need. I agree with her regarding those corporations, although I think the present orgies of public shaming represent a phenomenon unprecedented in recent history ... To me, this seems a crude and even reactionary vision of how to advance moral progress. It would not have been difficult to condemn it more confidently. I ended by feeling that this book on public shaming had been hamstrung by a fear of . . . public shaming.
O’Neil distinguishes between shame that 'punches down' and shame that 'punches up' ... Such distinctions are bound to be controversial—too categorical or potentially condescending, portraying people as more abject than they might see themselves to be ... O’Neil...encourages readers to try to think more deeply not just about what shame is but what it might be for ... O’Neil gives the example of Hopi 'shame clowns,' who poke fun at transgressors in a ritual that offers 'ridicule and then redemption.' The purpose of the ritual is reintegration, not ostracism ... This seems far removed from how many people experience shame nowadays, whether as a participant or a spectator, looking on with amusement or horror as some nonpublic person gets a very public comeuppance in a social-media pile-on. O’Neil inevitably touches on these kinds of scenarios in a book whose subtitle refers to 'the new age of humiliation'.
... although it contains its fair share of pseudoscience-debunking, including an admirably lucid explanation of how diet programs massage statistics to artificially bolster their success rates, it is largely a work of social criticism ... Perhaps the most powerful shame machines of all are social-media companies, to which O’Neil devotes the middle (and best) section of the book... The Shame Machine contains no attempt to define shame, much less to distinguish it from neighboring sentiments, and the book’s conclusions can be muddled as a result. Few of O’Neil’s general pronouncements about the emotion of the hour advance beyond truisms ... Despite her book’s premise, there’s no reason to think that companies capitalize more on shame than on the other negative feelings on offer ... And, worse, O’Neil ricochets between characterizing shame as a social state and as a feeling.
... it’s not always so easy to follow her account of how the shame machines work, what they are, or what to do about them ... O’Neil tries to clarify the differences between good and bad shame, or good and bad shamelessness, by repeatedly (unto repetitively) classifying efforts to shame someone as 'punching up' or 'punching down.' The former is a good and just re-alignment of power; the latter is abuse. Yet amid shifting contexts and value systems—to say nothing of widespread moral opportunism—'up' and 'down' are dangerously undefined ... The book would like to be optimistic ... Homeless people could be given public housing, she argues, and people with drug addictions could be treated, with their habits decriminalized. But self-righteousness is a useful weapon; even now, Republicans are denouncing safe-injection centers as a scheme to hand out government-funded crack pipes.
[A] wide-ranging, global consideration of shame ... While the argument’s core is solid, some examples equivocate and oversimplify ... Readers will be taken on a broad and meaningful survey of the 'shamescape' from incels to Google AI to masking and vaxxing to addiction recovery.
Thought-provoking ... She tells these and other stories with grace and wit, and effectively disputes the 'phony science, cognitive dissonance, and self-preserving flattery' often used to justify shaming others. This is a unique and riveting look at a crucial yet little understood aspect of modern life.
