Why Shame Doesn't Work

Decades of social psychological & public health research show us that individual blame does not promote prosocial, "responsible" behavior.

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Unlearning Shame.

Just Say No” Isn’t Enough

The first time I saw my mom order wine at a restaurant, I was five years old, and it made me unbearably distraught. As soon as the glass came to our table, I burst out crying: “Don’t do drugs, Mom!” I could not believe she would do something so wrong.

I was a 1990s kid, and deep into the teaching of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E. In the 1980s and ’90s, D.A.R.E. was catching on across the United States, teaching children that a life free of addiction was as simple as choosing to say no.[i]

D.A.R.E. classes typically took place in the middle of the school day and were led and facilitated by police officers. D.A.R.E officers taught children about the “street names” and effects of various substances, shared stories about what they’d seen those substances do to people (usually people they were about to arrest), and ran children through various skits to help them practice saying no to drugs.

When I look back on my own time in the program, I mostly recall hearing horrific stories of drug-addled people losing touch with reality and harming themselves or others. I also vividly recall one officer scoffing as he pondered why anybody would even want to try anything as disgusting as a cigarette. Smoking’s appeal seemed completely unfathomable to him—even as he lectured about how seductive and popular it was.

D.A.R.E. provided a straightforward and personal answer to addiction: Always make the right decisions. Resist the evil temptation. Set yourself apart from other people by deciding to do good. Thanks to D.A.R.E., I grew up viewing drug use as shameful, even evil. My parents didn’t keep any alcohol in the house, so whenever I saw an adult imbibing, I felt confused and terrified. When I learned my mom’s best friend Carol was a lifelong smoker, it disturbed me. How could my mom let me around someone who’d do something so wrong?

D.A.R.E. did not acknowledge how factors like poverty, trauma, chronic pain, or unemployment contribute to substance use, or the role pharmaceutical companies have played in getting people dependent upon barbituates and later, opioids. It did not mention how a robust support network helps addicted people find greater stability and regulate use. And aside from promoting incarceration, D.A.R.E. did not offer any societal solutions. It was an approach utterly rooted in individualistic, moralizing Systemic Shame: it viewed all social problems through the lens of personal decision-making, and blamed individuals for the consequences of their “choices.”

Toward an Informed Consent Model for All Drugs

My fellow ’90s kids mostly already know this, but D.A.R.E. infamously did not work.[ii] Research shows that at best, students who underwent the D.A.R.E. program were indistinguishable from same-aged peers who did not attend the program, in terms of their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior surrounding drugs.[iii] But since D.A.R.E. spread many inaccurate myths about drug use (for example, the claim that marijuana is a “gateway drug” that leads to using harder substances), it often left students less informed than they were before the program.[iv]

At its worst, D.A.R.E. appears to have actually made some students more likely to try drugs, because it gave many of us the impression drugs were impossibly alluring and popular.[v] D.A.R.E. preached that being a weak-willed drug user was common and that deciding to abstain from drugs would made you an outsider. It also presented abstinence as a black-and-white moral binary: Either you had the willpower to say no to everything, all of the time, or you’d given in, opening up the gateway to dependence, arrest, and violence.

D.A.R.E. also worsened social stigma for drug users: Former D.A.R.E. students are more likely to view addicts as weak and immoral and to see relapses as personal failures, when in reality they’re an incredibly common stage of the recovery process.[vi]

Additional data suggests that D.A.R.E. left many Black and brown students feeling alienated and stigmatized.[vii] D.A.R.E. classes were taught by police officers, after all, not professional educators or addiction experts—and many of those officers harbored inaccurate, racist views about who used drugs and why.[viii] I remember my school’s own D.A.R.E. officer talking in racially stereotypical ways about drug-addicted “crack moms” who had their babies taken away from them by the state.[ix] After that lecture, a biracial student in my grade was given the nickname “crack baby” by some classmates—it followed him around for years.

Data showed very early on that D.A.R.E. was ineffective. But throughout the 1990s, it remained the most popular anti-drug program in the United States, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding[x] and eventually being adopted in over fifty countries.[xi] Yet there isn’t a single published academic study showing it having any benefits.

It never really mattered to most school administrators or lawmakers that D.A.R.E was not evidence-based. In a world ruled by Systemic Shame, addressing the widespread social problem of addiction by pointing the finger at “addicts” made intuitive sense. It was more comfortable to target the specific people who used drugs than to discuss how society might prevent things like heart and liver disease, mass incarceration, early mortality, and the cycle of poverty.

D.A.R.E. was largely inspired by the Scared Straight anti-crime education program of the 1970s, which also taught children it was their personal responsibility to resist crime and violence, and which data also revealed to be ineffective.[xii] Yet like D.A.R.E, Scared Straight held massive public appeal. A documentary on Scared Straight’s tactics won an Emmy and an Oscar[xiii] and continued to be shown in the classroom long after researchers found that children who went through Scared Straight were actually more likely to be arrested.[xiv]

The long-lasting appeal of D.A.R.E. and Scared Straight really shows just how compelling our culture finds shame to be—and how wildly counterproductive it is in either shifting individual behavior or preventing societal crises. Shame disempowers. It demotivates and isolates us. When applied to massive social issues like health epidemics or climate change, it fills us with dread. Yet we keep reaching for it.

Photo by Andres Siimon on Unsplash.

Shame Makes the Forbidden Seem More Alluring

At the same time as I was enrolled in D.A.R.E., my own dad was secretly smoking cigarettes behind dumpsters and in secluded parks all over town. Though he claimed to have quit when I was born, my dad secretly continued smoking for over sixteen years. Then one day when I was in tenth grade, I cut class to go smoke in the park with my friends. There he was, standing between the trees, a pack in his hands, a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face.

My dad’s entire outlook on life was ravaged by shame. He kept his cerebral palsy and seizure disorder hidden his entire life. Throughout my childhood, he told me I was lucky to not have inherited his “ugly” red hair and large nose. When he developed diabetes in middle age, he lied to our family and his doctor about his eating habits, bingeing on hidden stashes of sugary foods late in the night. When he slipped into diabetic coma and died when I was eighteen, no one found his body for days because he was so socially isolated.

“Your dad liked having secrets” is how my mom explains it. I think he felt compelled to revel in his shame. When he died, my family found piles of therapists’ business cards scattered all around his home, but as far as we can tell, he never called any of them. His shame kept him drawing a forceful line between the rest of the world and his lonesome, spiraling self, and that was what killed him.

In my early twenties, I’d do much the same thing, smoking in private, relishing both the thrill of getting away with something verboten, and languishing in shame over my lack of self-control. To this day I can’t explain why I did it, except that I hated myself, and I felt pulled, as if by some gravitational force, to do something risky and secretive.

Like my dad, I binge-ate, and I also excessively exercised. I always did it at night, long after everyone else had gone to bed. I hid my self-harm habits from other people. I hid the fact that I’d get online and meet strangers for anonymous sex, often in thrillingly risky scenarios. When my eating disorder got bad, I hid that I’d lost my period and explained away my sudden fainting spells as the effects of overwork (which, of course, I was also engaging in because of my shame). My immense self-loathing did nothing to stifle my self-destructive impulses. It only fed into them and ensured that I went about meeting my needs in the least healthy ways possible.

There is something compelling about shame. Locking certain activities behind the bars of the forbidden often makes them more attractive to us. And the intensity of shame makes it difficult for us to form reasoned decisions about how to get what we need—and so instead, we enact our desires in impulsive, uncontrolled ways that leave us feeling even worse.

As the licensed dietician Michele Allison writes on her blog The Fat Nutritionist, teaching people to completely abstain from supposedly “bad” foods only makes them more likely to binge, or experience sensations of “food addiction.”[xv] As a fat person who repeatedly has been shamed for how her body looks and how she eats, Allison is well acquainted with this phenomenon in her own life.

“I used to have a bit of a fixation on sweets,” Allison writes. “Since childhood, they had been a mildly forbidden food . . . I assumed that I was somewhat bad for liking them so much, and I believed that I could never really be in control with them.”[xvi]

Allison writes that when she began dieting as an adult in an attempt to lose weight, it only worsened her belief that certain foods were “bad.” The belief that sugar was evil and addictive became a self-fulfilling prophecy for her, imbuing it with a power it otherwise wouldn’t have possessed.

Though fear-mongering about the dangers of sugar is common in mainstream media,[xvii] its health risks have largely been overstated,[xviii] and there is no empirical evidence that such a thing as “sugar addiction” really exists. In fact, a review article in the European Journal of Nutrition found that the only people at risk of bingeing uncontrollably on sugar are those who have been actively limiting their sugar intake.[xix]

This is consistent with a great deal of eating disorder research showing that people are most likely to “lose control” and binge on food when they have been restricting calories severely.[xx] The leading predictor of bingeing is deprivation, not addiction. The more we reprimand ourselves for wanting sugar, or cake, or french fries, the less in control we feel around those food products and the more desperate our hunger becomes — and the less able we are to enjoy meeting our needs when we finally do.

On her blog, Allison describes how she stopped having addictive-seeming cravings when she stopped acting as though sugar was evil. Rather than taking a “just say no” D.A.R.E.-type approach to eating, she gave herself permission to enjoy whatever she wanted, and started listening nonjudgmentally to her body’s cravings and hunger cues. With time, sweets lost much of their allure.

“I feel quite happy now with sweets,” Allison writes.[xxi] “I will occasionally eat too much in one sitting and feel a little bit off afterward, and I accept that . . . I don’t get caught up in the shame-spiral of judging myself. I usually end up feeling less hungry afterward for the next few meals or the next day, or I start craving a completely different type of food that seems to address the feeling of imbalance.”

In Allison’s work with clients, she promotes what she calls “eating normally.” Eating normally has a lot in common with the method eating disorder recovery experts call “intuitive eating.” Both approaches involve a person learning to trust their body to signal what it needs, and not judging any desires they might feel or “mistakes” they might make. According to intuitive eating and eating normally, there are no forbidden foods and there’s no reason to try to argue with hunger–because of this, there’s far less risk of the negative health effects of dieting or compulsive, disordered habits.

Systemic Shame teaches that our health is under our control—and when we make “bad” decisions, the consequences are our fault. When we take a supposed “risk” with our health, we’re likely to feel ashamed and immoral. Even the fact that indulgent desserts are commonly marketed as “sinful” or even “better than sex” reveals diet culture’s close relationship to Puritanical morality and its fears around sexuality and other bodily impulses.

But the more you broadcast an action is compelling and bad, the harder it is for people to make judicious decisions around it. This is part of why dieting typically causes far more people to gain weight than to lose it.[xxii] Forbidden foods tend to be a major trigger of emotional upheaval and compulsive eating habits for those with eating disorders as well.[xxiii] Associating a food with shame only distorts our relationship to it.

The same is true of other behaviors associated with shame in our culture, like unprotected sex. While typically these behaviors are completely morally neutral on their own, our fear of “losing control” and enjoying them too much becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shame only makes it more challenging to communicate honestly about what we are going through and which needs we are trying to fulfill.

Image by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition of Uganda, courtesy of Unsplash.

Shame Halts Preventative Care

A great deal of research shows that when people feel shame, they become less likely to take care of themselves. Shame reduces self-efficacy, a person’s trust in their ability to get things done.[xxvi] Shame-ridden people have less energy and motivation to advocate for their own well-being—and less trust that doing so would have any benefit in the long run.

It’s yet another absurd paradox of Systemic Shame: By holding people morally responsible for the tough situations that they’re in, we actually make them less able to partake in behaviors that prevent harm, like scheduling doctor’s appointments, exercising, seeking a “trip sitter” when using drugs, or wearing a condom.

Shame also leads people to think they don’t deserve to treat their bodies with kindness and consideration. When diabetes patients feel shame about their disease or eating habits, they stop monitoring their blood sugar as closely[xxvii] and show less interest in attending educational programs about managing the condition.[xxviii] When people with drug addictions are ashamed of themselves, they’re less likely to carry medications that might save them from an overdose.[xxix]

Depressed people who experience a high degree of mental health stigma have a far lower likelihood of speaking to anyone about their symptoms, and a far higher risk of instead committing suicide, for the same reasons.[xxx] It’s hard to imagine how shaming people for engaging in “unhealthy” or “bad” behaviors might ever be beneficial when we look at how consistently it blocks help-seeking and proactive, preventative care.

It’s no coincidence the very same Ohio public school system that pushed me through D.A.R.E. as a child also pressured me to sign a virginity pledge when I was sixteen. A college-aged Christian performing arts troupe came to my school and extolled the virtues of abstinence and the evils of sex. Performers passed around a red Solo cup, asking every boy in the room to spit into it.

The performers made everyone look into the cup at the bubbly, cloudy morass of saliva inside. This is what being a promiscuous woman does to you, they said. And gay sex? Anal was a repulsive, violent act that could never lead to love. As the actors spoke to us, their faces screwed up with disgust. Many of my straight classmates laughed and jeered. When one of my friends attempted to pass out educational resources on safer sex and queer sexuality in protest, the principal forced him to stop.

Those abstinence-only educators must have believed they were waging a righteous war on teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and “sin” by shaming us for our sexualities. But because they trained us to fear our desires, many of us couldn’t plan to have sex safely by carrying condoms or taking birth control. We couldn’t explore our bodies and identities to figure out who we were and what we liked.

Instead, many of us had impulsive, shame-fueled fumblings with people who didn’t respect us. We hooked up with adults we met at our jobs or had anonymous sex in closets and around campfires with people we’d met on the internet. Some of my peers got pregnant very young or found themselves in marriages with older men who mistreated them. But no matter what harm came to any of us, Systemic Shame preached that it was just punishment for our “bad behavior.

A great deal of research affirms these experiences. Religious, shame-based approaches to sex education have been repeatedly shown to be counterproductive; they make teens less likely to practice safe sex, on average[xxxi] because they create a black-and-white binary between virtuous abstinence and risky, “sinful” sex. When queer people feel ashamed of their identities, they find it too threatening to have open conversations about sexually transmitted infections and preventative measures such as condoms and PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis, which helps prevent HIV infection).

A study on the sexual health habits and attitudes of Black queer men conducted by Jerilyn Radcliffe and colleagues found that the more HIV stigma men experienced, the more likely they were to impulsively have condom- and PrEP-free sex while intoxicated or high.[xxxii] After suppressing their desires out of sheer self-hatred, these queer men needed the release of substances to allow them to “lose control” and enjoy the activities they longed for.

When PrEP was first rolled out in Canada in the early 2010s, researchers found that many gay men were ashamed to use it, and felt they had to hide that they were taking the drug from others.[xxxiii] Instead of empowering us to look after our well-being, shame jams up our decision-making process and fills us with inner turmoil over basic acts of preventative care.

Image by Small Giant Dev on Unsplash.

Shame Freezes Us

In cognitive and social psychology, we sometimes discuss emotions in terms of which are approach-based and which are avoidance-based.[xxxiv]

Approach-based emotions (like hope, love, curiosity, and even anger and mild sadness) encourage you to move toward others and to engage with reality in an active way. When you experience approach-based emotions, your pupils dilate, your sense of smell improves, and time seems to slow down. All of this makes it easier to do things like fight off an enemy, reach out for a hug, or locate resources.

In contrast, avoidance-based emotions (such as disgust, apathy, and despair) close the body off and move us to separate from other people.[xxxviii] Our pupils shrink and our energy levels plummet. Oxytocin drops.[xxxix] Aggression lowers. So does our sense of connectedness and belonging. The drive to reach out for help—and the belief that doing so will do any good—all but disappears.

There are a variety of theories as to why avoidance-based emotions function this way, but one of the leading ones is that they help preserve energy and provide protection when a situation looks hopeless.[xl] If you feel you’re past the point where crying out for aid or trying to ward off an attacker will do any good, your body may slip into a withdrawing, low-energy state in order to help you hide and survive until conditions improve.[xli]

One really harrowing example of how avoidance-motivated emotions function can be found in the Still Face experiment by the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick. In the Still Face experiment, a parent is instructed to stare blankly and emotionlessly at their infant child, and remain totally unresponsive for several minutes, no matter what their child does to get their attention.

At first, infants in the Still Face experiment make all kinds of approach-motivated gestures to get a rise out of their nonreactive parents. They point to objects in the room to try to draw their parent’s attention toward it. They laugh and smile and reach out for comfort. When these efforts fail, many infants flail around, cry, and show distress—anger and sadness both being more desperate approach-motivated emotions than happiness is.

Finally, as their parent continues to stare blankly at them, not reacting, infants in the Still Face experiment eventually become listless and emotionally “blank” themselves. After all attempts at approach fail, babies slip into avoidance mode and give up. Watching a young child’s desperate desire to connect give way to apathetic dejection is crushing to witness.[xliii] It’s a feeling of hopeless detachment that shame-sufferers know all too well.

Shame is a powerful avoidance-based emotion. People experiencing shame pull away, physically and emotionally.[xliv] They also become more passive and adopt more submissive postures.[xlv] They bow inward, protect their necks with their hands, and can’t marshal up the courage to look anyone in the face. Because their oxytocin levels drop, ashamed people may feel more overwhelmed and have a harder time focusing and processing new information. Some research suggests that when people experience shame, they are also less attuned to their bodies and emotions, and more prone to repressing how they truly feel.[xlvi]

Early in human history, looking visibly ashamed might have reduced conflict—think of a dog tucking its tail between its legs and slinking off after a fight. But when people no longer live communally and interdependently, shame doesn’t work quite so well.

Withdrawing from other people becomes isolating, not pacifying. The emotions researcher June Tangney has repeatedly found that shame renders people less likely to make amends with those they’ve wronged, and more prone to deny their past actions, or try to escape.[xlvii] This brings us to the next reason that shame does not lead to meaningful change: It encourages us to detach, and it tears supportive communities apart.

Shame Isolates Us

In early 2020, the philosophy and culture YouTuber Natalie Wynn released the viral video essay “Shame,” in which she came out as a lesbian.

In the video, Wynn describes how she spent years forcing herself to date men. She wasn’t attracted to them, but having a conventionally hot straight man on her arm proved to everyone around her that she was a desirable woman. Conversely, thinking of herself as a lesbian made Wynn feel predatory and disgusting. For years the prospect of coming out struck her as unthinkable.

Wynn says she was experiencing something called “compulsory heterosexuality,” or “comphet.”[xlviii] Many lesbian women describe going through comphet, forcing themselves to develop crushes on fictional men or unavailable older male figures while privately fantasizing about female friends and acquaintances. Comphet sufferers push themselves to have “straight” sex they don’t actually desire, hiding their sexual identities from everyone, and denying pleasure to themselves.[xlix]

In Wynn’s case, the shame of comphet was further complicated by the fact she’s a transgender woman, an identity she also felt immense shame about.[lii]

“There’s two problems that kind of multiply together,” Wynn says. “One, I’m ashamed of being trans. Two, I’m ashamed of being a lesbian. And whatever one times two is, I’m really ashamed of being a trans lesbian. Ew . . . It does make me feel like a monster sometimes. Like a mutant that has no place in society.”[liii]

Trans women have been villainized in the media for decades. Typically, when trans women are shown on screen, they are not even correctly identified as women, but rather labeled as delusional or dishonest “men” masquerading as women for their own benefit.

An early cinematic example of this is Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, who wears his mother’s clothing and adopts her personality before embarking on murderous rampages. Perhaps the most infamous example of such transmisogyny (hatred of trans women) on screen is the character of Jame Gumb in the film Silence of the Lambs.[liv] Though Gumb identifies as transgender and has sought out gender-reassignment surgery, the writing and dialogue of the film only paints Gumb as a depraved “man.” Gumb kidnaps and murders young women in the film, in order to craft a wearable woman suit out of their skin.

The character basically represents every negative media stereotype of trans women all rolled into one: She’s not really a woman, she’s delusional, she’s dangerous and violent, and her close relationships with other women aren’t genuine, they’re just a twisted attempt to steal what supposedly “real” women have.

Once you become aware of tropes like these, you’ll find them everywhere. A murderous trans woman who “tricks” straight men is the main villain of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The villain orchestrating everything behind the scenes in Mr. Robot is a nefarious trans woman who’s desperate to shake off her old male persona. The television shows Friends, Two and a Half Men, Law & Order: SVU, Family Guy, Futurama, and even, bafflingly, Cake Boss all feature a shocking “reveal” that a trans woman is “actually a man” setting out to deceive people.[lv]

Decades of media demonization has taken a significant toll on trans women. They experience depression, substance use, self-harm, eating disorders, and social anxiety at elevated rates.[lvi] Trans women (especially Black and brown ones) also experience extremely high rates of sexual assault, battery, abuse, and even murder. Society’s systemic, pervasive hatred of trans women infects how other people view them and treat them—and it erodes how trans women perceive and feel about themselves.

In her videos, Natalie Wynn says she regularly reads forums run by transphobes such as 4chan and Kiwifarms, where users relentlessly tear down the appearance, mannerisms, and identities of trans people (particularly trans women) and fantasize about enacting violence against them.

Wynn internalizes these hurtful observations and applies them to the other trans women around her. She judges trans women for their body shapes, their faces, voices, and how they dress. Internally, she can’t stop critiquing their mannerisms, interests, and how hard they appear to be trying (or not trying) to “pass” as respectable, feminine cisgender women.

Wynn doesn’t like that she’s doing this, and she’s clear in her videos she doesn’t think these reactions are right. But she can’t seem to stop herself from dwelling on negative thoughts about her own community. Wynn’s personal Systemic Shame has radiated outward, creating damaging interpersonal shame that attacks the very women who understand her suffering most. Instead of finding community among other trans women and working together to heal their shared trauma and push for greater acceptance in society, Wynn finds herself spiraling downward into further withdrawal. In more recent videos, she’s open about finding it incredibly difficult to date or make friends with people in the trans community in her city.

I relate to Wynn’s conflicted feelings and loneliness so much it hurts. Before I transitioned into a male identity, I felt myself pulled toward queer masculinity, yet repelled by my own interest.

When I first met a swishy, effeminate gay man in real life, at an Italian restaurant in Cleveland when I was a young child, the world around him seemed to suddenly light up. I could not take my eyes off his perfectly gelled hair and delicate, soft-wristed gestures. I had long admired gay characters in film (Harvey Fierstein’s character in Mrs. Doubtfire and Jeremy Irons’s Scar in The Lion King were early favorites), but until that moment in the restaurant, I hadn’t been sure if gay men were “real.” The fact that gay men actually existed filled me with hope, though I didn’t yet realize I could also be one.

I often found myself identifying with gay, feminine male characters in movies and video games. In my teens and early twenties, I routinely developed crushes on gay men. I knew in my heart that I was one of them them—but social conditioning told me there was no way I could be both gay and trans. That was doubly immoral, and doubly freakish.

For decades I insisted to myself that I was just a confused straight girl, a pathetic “fag hag” who mistook her friendships with gay men for love. To steel myself against rejection, I lashed out at the gay male friends whom I secretly adored. When I started meeting other trans men, I found my brain rattling through a long list of their supposed flaws—always qualities I considered wrong and unacceptably “womanly” in myself. I also would compulsively check hate sites like Kiwifarms, poring over the ruthlessly vile things members of that forum had to say about trans people in the public eye, including myself and other people I knew in real life.[lvii]

Systemic Shame can cut us off from our own communities, languishing in self-hatred while lashing out and punishing anyone who reminds us of ourselves. Unfortunately, the impact of Systemic Shame can cut still deeper than this. Beyond eroding our self-concept and fraying the bonds we share with others, Systemic Shame can also destroy our outlook toward the world and to humanity as a whole, filling us with such immense existential dread that we find imagining a better future impossible.

Image by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Shame and Dread in a Greenwashed World

In her book Is Shame Necessary?, the environmental studies professor Jennifer Jacquet describes being haunted as a child by photos of dolphins choking to death in tuna-fishing nets.

“I needed to do something,” she writes. “At nine years old, I had already learned what the 1980s taught as the new rite of passage: to alleviate my guilt as a consumer. I insisted that our family stopped buying canned tuna, and I wasn’t alone.”[lviii]

Faced with a torrent of public criticism, companies like Heinz began marketing “dolphin-safe” tuna around this time. Decades later, in March 2021, National Geographic reported that the three largest tuna companies in the world were facing a class-action lawsuit for having misleadingly labeled their products as dolphin-safe for years.[lix]

This was just the latest instance of corporations utilizing greenwashing, presenting a product as environmentally sound to appeal to consumers’ Systemic Shame, and to obscure blame regarding their own acts of destruction.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, greenwashing took hold of the consumer economy. Products were increasingly marketed with terms like organic, sustainable, recyclable, and ethically sourced.[lx] In most cases, these terms were unregulated falsehoods, or vague technicalities.

The triangular recycling symbol, for example, appears on thousands of products that we currently lack the technology to recycle in any sustainable way.[lxi] But from a marketing perspective, all the label really needed to do was offer consumers a brief respite from shame.

And for decades, that tactic worked beautifully. Many conscientious consumers are desperate to find some small step to take (or some small purchase to make) that can offload the immense shame they feel for consuming too many items, burning off too many fossil fuels, and having an active hand in what often feels like the end of the world.

Like Jacquet, many of us were aspiring environmentalists in childhood, reminding our parents to turn off the spigot while they brushed their teeth and demanding we buy rainforest-friendly chocolate. Yet after repeated instances of greenwashing, we learn that no matter how many soda rings we cut up or how much water we conserve, it never winds up being enough. It’s no surprise that even highly committed environmentalists feel increasingly hopeless and demotivated in recent years.[lxii]

Systemic Shame hinders the fight for climate justice (and against many other global issues, such as global pandemics and natural disasters) in two key ways:

1.  It fills individuals with despair over our own inability to make a difference,[lxiii] and

2.  It causes us to believe it’s too late to save the world.

The former manifests in us obsessing over our individual habits, and setting out desperately to “cancel out” acts of ecological destruction by purchasing the right things. The latter is more of a collective, global manifestation of shame. It is echoed in claims that “human beings are the real virus” or that we deserve to die out.

Systemic Shame teaches us that our suffering is our fault. But when it is applied to an issue as existentially threatening as climate change, it takes a downright apocalyptic turn.

In 2004, the oil company British Petroleum (BP) introduce the term “carbon footprint” to the public and created and promoted a personal carbon footprint calculator. The company did so in order to distract from the role they played in rising carbon dioxide levels and disasters such as oil spills.[lxiv]

And it worked. Today, we are offered carbon-tracking applications that help individual people calculate how much damage their daily commute or online shopping habit is doing to the environment.[lxv] Sixty-five percent of consumers express a desire to shop sustainably—though only about 26 percent say they’ve been able to do so.[lxvi] Our best intentions, it turns out, don’t matter nearly as much as the elaborate network of obligations and economic incentives that surround and entrap us.

As Rebecca Solnit recently wrote in The Guardian, “Some of what I could tout as personal virtue is only possible because of collective action . . . I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels.”[lxxii] In a city without bike lanes, sustainable electricity, or a robust recycling system, most people can’t decide to do the “right” thing even if they want to.

Even if every person who could afford to do so suddenly decided to go vegan tomorrow, we would still live in a world where the beef industry is subsidized to the tune of nearly forty billion dollars per year,[lxxiii] and where the supply chain for fresh produce is incredibly wasteful and ecologically destructive.[lxxiv] If I always sorted and recycled my garbage for the rest of my life, that would not alter the fact that the vast majority of recycled items ultimately end up in a landfill (after undergoing extra rounds of shipping and sorting, consuming even more fuel).[lxxv]

Systemic initiatives like the Green New Deal (which aims to reduce US carbon emissions annually, reaching zero net emissions by 2050) are quite popular among the American public, but politically, they have proven incredibly difficult to move forward[lxxvi]—because they would come at a severe cost to corporations.

For many years, Systemic Shame has sold us a vision of environmental salvation rooted in individual behavior. Only you can prevent forest fires. Reduce, reuse, recycle. And all that vision has left us with is persistent fears about the future of our planet, combined with maddening powerlessness.

It very well may be that the powerlessness Systemic Shame creates in us is entirely by design. As the political theorist Mark Fisher wrote in his book Capitalist Realism, forever growth of the economy is impossible, and so believing that the world is on the verge of collapse can actually seem easier than imaging an end to exploitation and capitalism.[lxxvii]

Fisher and other theorists such as David Graeber and Frederic Jameson have argued that believing the world is ending can actually help take the pressure off corporations and governments that refuse to change. There’s no point in cutting back on emissions, ending child slavery in sweatshops, or imagining new ways of living if we’re all about to die anyway and we think we deserve it.

But humanity doesn’t have to consign itself to the ash heap like this, no matter how ashamed, terrified, and doomed we often feel. If we wish to address problems like climate change, public health crises, economic injustices, and white supremacy effectively, we need to find ways to forgive ourselves, restore our faith in other people, and build communities that fight for structural change.

Despite the relentless cultural training that says shame is the answer, life does not have to be like this. The opposite of blaming individuals for systemic problems is recognizing that all people are harmed by a wide network of structural forces beyond their control, and that rather than judging people for their human foibles, we need to radically accept others as they presently are, embrace our imperfect, humble selves, and unite with one another to fight for the structural change we all need. This is a multilayered, dynamic approach to personal and community healing that I like to call “expansive recognition,” and it’s explore thoroughly in the latter half of my book.

Unlearning Shame is now available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats, wherever you get your books.

You can view the full reference list for this piece here.