Śmierć wstydu

Abstract

Shame and guilt together with pride create a control system – a deference-emotion system – serving to protect social relations. The reasons for shame are to a large extent learned, specific to a given culture and can be regarded as a memetic phenomenon. The causes of shame can often be reduced to deviations from the culturally accepted norm or loss of intimacy. Thus, the loss of shame – the social death of shame – can have undesirable consequences for the functioning of individuals and society. The neurobiological background of shame is based on the theory of mind as a psychic function proper to man and perhaps a few species of animals. It is expanded by intentionality, understood as the ability to multi-level, recurrent (chain) modelling of the state of mind of subsequent individuals. The basis of these functions are the areas of the large cognitive circuit of the brain including the prefrontal cortex, the cingulum, some areas of the parietal, occipital and temporal cortex and the insula and amygdala. The shame and related guilt reveal themselves in the different activities of these structures. The reasons for the death of shame in modern society can be seen in four hypothetical areas of social relations, provisionally described as: 1) ease and cheapness of nonsense; 2) demystification of elite behavioural patterns; 3) devaluation of education and culture; 4) erroneus addressing the message and long maturation of critical wisdom. Examples are commonly observed and discussed phenomena, such as: much greater propagation of false and harmful information but affecting emotion; revealing in social communication the truth about the cultural patterns of the elite in connection with the resignation from intimacy; lowering the standards of requirements in education due to its easy and mass availability; presentation in works of art, mainly in cinema pictures, forms, contents and problems to which some of the recipients have not been matured, which results in changes in sensitivity and ethical attitudes.