Shame is an unpleasant sensation in our body triggered by moments of social rejection or isolation that naturally pressures us to conclude that something must be wrong with us in comparison to other people. So by merely feeling shame, the idea of hierarchy gets implanted in our mind. And these feelings of “lesser than” and “better than” gradually get enacted in the very structure of our society. Ideas of worthiness, status, superiority and inferiority get encoded into our culture and play into all kinds of social issues like classism, capitalism, sexism, racism, homophobia, nationalism, etc.
This suggests that while hierarchy is natural and normal, it has also increasingly become an impediment to our well-being. Like shame, hierarchy probably made a lot more sense in our hunter-gatherer past. We presumably arranged ourselves much like other social animals, like chimps and wolves, with a successive series of dominant “alphas” at the top who led the group. This obviously helped us survive hundreds of thousands of years ago, promoting clear leadership and physical fitness in our gene pool. But now it is adding unnecessary oppression to our modern society that no longer relies on brute force to survive. The world has changed, but as usual, our instincts have not caught up.
So we have an opportunity to re-interpret the way shame makes us feel so that we don’t get caught enacting these fictional hierarchies over and over again. Once we understand that the felt sense of inferiority that shame creates in us is actually an illusion, we can just feel it and let it pass, without believing it or acting on it. We can embrace an ideology that says all humans are of equal value, instead. This doesn’t change the fact that there are still very real and tangible inequalities in our society, like poverty and prejudice, but I think it’s a powerful psychological step towards addressing those issues.
But, with this new ideology of equality comes the challenge of looking at the people we think are “below” us on the fictional hierarchy of human value, and psychologically raising them up to our level. This includes the people we judge, the people we disagree with, the people on the “wrong” side of the political spectrum. The people we think are bad, or evil, or morally repugnant. What if all those people have just as much “value” as we do? What if they are completely equal to us? How would that change the way we treat them?
