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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I think anger needs to be carefully directed to be useful, but my real issue is the addition of shame there. That's the part that accrues it the label thought terminating cliche in my eyes. All cliches are thought terminating in a way - they are like stereotypes, a useful heuristic that applies most of the time, so you can reference it and go about your day instead of having to constantly interrogate your thoughts and feelings on the subject. So if you had just said the old version of this - revenge is unproductive - I would have agreed with you, revenge is just gratification and should never be a goal - maybe a nice side benefit, at best.

But shame is a very useful tool for social cohesion - it promotes following the law without involving the law, it strengthens group identity and harmony, it encourages empathy by allowing for a wider range of expressed emotions and most importantly it fosters accountability - so if you are going to say it's unproductive you need a good reason. Just adding it alongside revenge skips right past the reasoning.

Eta: I agree constructing a media ecosystem out of spite would not go well, but I also agree with dag - the old media is being replaced by the new media, and without any form of accountability they are not going to be any better than the old media (Tucker Carlson excepted of course).

But shame is a very useful tool for social cohesion - it promotes following the law without involving the law, it strengthens group identity and harmony, it encourages empathy by allowing for a wider range of expressed emotions and most importantly it fosters accountability - so if you are going to say it's unproductive you need a good reason. Just adding it alongside revenge skips right past the reasoning.

Can you explain how shame encourages empathy and a wider range of emotions?

So I think of the love is God cult, the "everyone be nice, love is everything" mindset as pretty much working like the way we used to think an antidepressant worked. We all have a range of emotions going from high to low, but the cult of niceness restricts the height and depth to a comfortable middle range. This is not noticeably different to how it always was for a lot of people, and indeed they mostly only notice that they aren't sinking to the depths they had previously, but they also can't reach the heights they used to.