Shame, guilt, and violence

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by James Gilligan

All this occurs against the background of life among the ghetto poor, who suffer the absence of jobs that pay a living wage, and the stigma of racial discrimination. Anderson adds that "in a society where so much economic inequality exists, for the severely alienated and desperate a gun can become like a bank card--an equalizer" in the contest for respect, and for the material status symbols that are among the main bases of respect (119).

Nor is it only behavioral scientists and academicians who have reached these conclusions. The same findings have been reported by law-enforcement officers who have investigated the motives of murderers and other violent criminals. John Douglas was a "profiler" with the FBI whose career was devoted to studying the personalities and attempting to discern the motives of the most violent and dangerous criminals in the United States. What he concluded was that any ultimate violent act "is the result of a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy," and that these men attempt to diminish their low self-esteem by blaming others for their own real or imagined shortcomings, which were often caused, he discovered, by the way they were treated by overly authoritarian fathers (Douglas and Okshaker, 1999).

That shame is the central motive for collective as well as individual violence can also be documented throughout history, culminating in the twentieth century when Hitler was elected to power on the campaign promise to wipe out the "shame of Versailles"; and in the twenty-first century, when Osama bin Laden (2001), in his first public statement after the terror attacks of September 11, explained the meaning or motive of that act of terrorism: "What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace [contempt]."

Since then, more evidence of the same motives for terrorism has been documented. Dr. Eyad Sarraj (2002), a psychiatrist and founder of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights, has given a similar interpretation of the psychopathological motives of the Palestinian suicide bombers:

   What propels ... Palestinian men, and now women [to
   blow] themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses ... is a
   long history of humiliation and a desire for revenge that
   every Arab harbors. Since the establishment of Israel in
   1948 and the resultant uprooting of Palestinians, a deep-seated
   feeling of shame has taken root in the Arab psyche.
   Shame is the most painful emotion in the Arab culture, producing
   the feeling that one is unworthy to live. The honorable
   Arab is the one who refuses to suffer shame and dies in
   dignity.

I have always felt that if any social-scientific theory were correct, it could be illustrated and exemplified by a story in any given day's newspapers. With that in mind, let me quote from a recent article by Thomas Friedman (2003) in which he analyzed a speech by Malaysia's departing prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to a conclave of Muslim leaders: