There is something almost embodied about the experience of shame - as when a child runs up proudly to its teacher announcing its latest feat, which of course has never before been accomplished anywhere in the history of little people. The bored teacher’s response is as swift as it is mindlessly brutal - it comes in the form of a dispiriting putdown of the child’s vital sense of discovery. Shamed in front of its peers, the emotion sinks in and the child’s body crumples: the shoulders collapse, the stomach drops, the eyes lose focus. That is the unforgettable experience of shame - a self collapsing inwards - an experience encoded in a body, which, from that moment onwards, will forever remember the score.

Yet shame by itself, Gilligan continues, is not a sufficient condition for the exercise of violence. In order to construct a comprehensive account of violence, one must consider additional factors. From a developmental perspective, for example, a person who has been charmed but has not yet developed the capacity for other feeling states - such as love, empathy, guilt or simply the fear of retribution - is more likely to project feelings of humiliation outwards. As for the social determinants of violence, a similar result can be expected when a person lacks other means of earning respect, such as formal education, occupational skills, financial options, or even some standing within the community. It is these social factors that prove decisive in highly unequal societies such as South Africa, for, without personal resources of any kind, one does not need to have been shamed as a child - whether the medium was physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. As described in the previous section, a society can be sufficiently shaming all by itself for the affected individual to act out in horrific ways.

It is of critical importance to recognise that for people who regard themselves as having no recourse to better their lives, the exercise of violence proves an intoxicating surrogate. Shame - despite its origins in the self - is an excruciatingly public emotion. To feel it is to feel oneself a reprobate. Overcompensation through personal achievement is not an option. When a person feels judged - hounded - by the jury that is public opinion, the only way to exorcise that feeling is to eliminate the jury altogether. In the mind of the perpetrator, transferring one’s own suffering onto another human being becomes a viable - almost noble - moral calculus, turning the master-slave dialectic on its head.

This individualisation of trauma is typical of medical model thinking, but its unfortunate consequence is that our society is disinclined to regard the victims of structural violence as being the victims of trauma. Accordingly, the empathy we ordinarily show survivors of (individual) traumas is withheld from those who are victims of social trauma. It is no wonder, then, that we think nothing of confining offenders with the most traumatic social histories to the most traumatising places on earth.

When we see failures as shameful, we try to hide them. We don’t study them closely to learn from them. Brown distinguishes between shame and guilt. Shame is a belief that “I am bad.” Guilt, in contrast, is a realization that “what I did is bad.” “I am bad because I didn’t do my homework” engenders feelings of shame. But if I see my actions as bad (guilt), it fosters accountability. It is thus better to feel guilty than ashamed; as Brown tells us, “Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders... [while] guilt [is] inversely correlated with those things.