Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

Everyone knows what it is to be tempted.  You are a member of some community, the members of which have some expectations of each other.  You might generally intend to satisfy these expectations, but through a failure of foresight, or some other sort of bad luck, feel an acute impulse to consume something that is not yours to take, or in some other way break commitments you would generally want to honor.

Guilt refers primarily to a violation of trust from the perspective of an epistemic community with a shared history, and only secondarily to the subjective attitude of the offender.

If, having violated trust, you intend to repair that trust by owning up to what you did and by making amends or accepting whatever penalty the community places on you, then you feel a pronormative sort of regret.  When making the sorts of precise distinctions needed to navigate contemporary civil conflict, we call this condition guilt.  We use the same word for the subjective feeling and for the objective fact, because someone feeling guilt is taking the perspective of a community member who expects norms to be followed, and intends to do so.

Guilty behavior tends to be self-limiting; it is experienced as a sort of tension that can only be discharged by correcting the record and restoring normative relations.

Shame refers to the intent to conceal, which implies a locally adversarial relation to norms.

If the penalties for coming clean seem like too much to bear, or for any other reason a resolution does not appear available, someone might intend to keep their guilt a secret.  Keeping two distinct stories straight - a public one and a private one - is cognitively expensive, so covert offenders will frequently substitute motivated forgetfulness.  If we intend not to recollect our guilt, we will also intend to deflect investigation that would reveal it.  When this is an exceptional state, towards some particular events in someone's life, we can call it shame.

At times in my life, I have maintained a work persona who was totally conscientious, in full control of and able to make arbitrary commitments about his time usage.  This persona was not aware of my inclination to stay up late looking at what it would consider low-value media on the internet, procrastinating from my endorsed work.  Maintaining this sort of separation creates a kind of tension, which is relaxed when I get away from other people and start procrastinating on the internet.  The persona is constructed intentionally not to be aware of the motivations that cause the procrastination, so that it can speak as though I did not have those motives.  If my day persona were asked to speak about why I did what I did at night, it would be unable to speak, and unable to investigate, because of the strength of the compartmentalization; I would experience that inhibition as an unexplained tension and difficulty thinking, rather than as a conscious intent to mislead or remain silent.

Because of the intent to conceal, shame is not self-limiting the way guilt is.  Partial discharge of the tension of shame is frequently used to form adversarial, coalitional bonds.  People frequently bond through "vulnerability," i.e. the mutual private revelation of information they feel ashamed about.

Shame generalizes to a coalitional strategy: depravity, the reciprocal intent to derail investigations into norm violations.

The cognitive processes responsible for the intention to conceal what we call shame are necessarily partitioned from the ones that handle our public, pronormative personas.  If someone senses enough optimization for moral concealment in their self and those around them, they might notice that these are two sides in a conflict, decide that concealment is the winning side, and choose to side with it.  In other words, they might act to interfere with the investigation of others' secrets, and expect to be reciprocally covered for.

Someone engaging in the depraved strategy would display less tension from fear and cognitive dissonance than someone who is merely locally ashamed.  Thus, from coalitional motives, they would preferentially cover for people displaying an uncomplicated, i.e. generalized intention to cooperate with concealment.  Since the intent to conceal isn't compatible with an explicit, accessible memory of the concealed events, such arrangements must be inexplicit; in the convergent case, members of the generalized coalition of depravity recognize each other not by their attendance at secret meetings, but by the following behavioral tells:

  • They believe that they are doing something bad.
  • They expect that they can call on allies to derail investigations of their bad behavior, on the fly, by instantaneous mutual recognition.
  • If pressed, they expect allies to join them in expressing open disapproval of such investigations.
  • They feel compelled to behave as an ally towards others displaying similar tells.

In practice, depraved coalitions frequently infiltrate and come to dominate privileged groups with some other more straightforward marker such as ancestry group, educational pedigree, or parents' socioeconomic class.  But if you look carefully, access to the group's privileges are actually regulated by depraved behavior. Members of this group who do not exhibit depraved behavior are marginalized, have access to far fewer privileges than you would have expected based on the overt signs of membership, and you will usually see the occasional person who does not have the overt group marker, but displays compatibly depraved behavior, accepted into the club.

Depravity derails normative investigations by scapegoating people who are not depraved.

If there is enough shared intent to investigate a crime, this coalition will preferentially direct prosecutorial attention towards someone who is ashamed but not depraved, who might even flip back to being guilty and take responsibility for their crimes. They will try to attribute as much crime as possible to this person, in order to prevent or postpone further investigation. We call this sacrificial substitute a scapegoat.

Bad incentives can push people into shame and depravity, but ashamed and depraved people do not respond well to good incentives.

Straightforwardly, the more badly misaligned a community's incentives are, the more people are forced into the kinds of double binds that convert guilt to shame. Unfortunately, while correcting incentives can slow or halt the conversion process, it does not seem to be sufficient to reverse it. This is because the avoidance aspect of shame and depravity interferes with the evaluation of incentives; ashamed or depraved people have a simplified, conflict metaphysics.

I know of three promising, complementary methods that might reverse the process.

The first is to intervene within the conflict, by applying short-term violence against concealment. This might work because unlike long-run incentives, short-term violence can reverse the perceived winning side. With people who are only partly converted, this can force the pronormative aspect of their consciousness to the surface, in a context where it might otherwise remain submerged. This does not in itself create a permanent improvement in alignment, but it does give pronormative consciousness a lot more information to work with, and might help jumpstart the process of incentive evaluation that can help someone recognize that they face good incentives, not bad ones.

The second is to put someone in a situation where their material environment imposes nonsocial performance constraints, which cannot be navigated or appeased through mental avoidance. This would provide lots of data invalidating their conflict metaphysics, and correspondingly validating hypotheses that help them avoid pain.

The third is chemical, somatic, and brain therapies such as MDMA, rTMS stimulation of the medial prefrontal cortex, and alignment-focused movement practices such as yoga and tai chi.

Related:

The Inner Ring

The Engineer and the Diplomat

Against unreasonably high standards

On Commitments to Anti-Normativity

Preference Inversion

Language, Power, and the Categorical Imperative

12 thoughts on “Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  1. Paul

    Very interesting essay. Something I'm left wondering is where exactly the _feeling_ of shame fits into this framework. One thought is, coordination among purposely-separated parts of ourself is generally difficult. When it is necessary, maybe shame the feeling helps with this coordination. Like a signal to our parts: "yes, something shady is going on here, please just try to roll with it." And maybe it works in a very similar way interpersonally: if in a group conversation my friend brings up something potentially embarrassing to me, my blushing would be saying: "please work with me here in keeping this secret".

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  3. Abram Demski

    I am compelled by the argument that shame has to do with hiding things, because it fits with the important cultural narrative of Adam & Eve donning clothing in response to shame.

    That same story leads me to reject some of your other conclusions. Unless you want to say that everyone except nudists are depraved. This follows from your framework, if we count clothing-wearing as a response to shame about the body. But calling this depraved seems wrong, because the situation is so explicit.

    Simply put, my thesis is that some behaviors which your framework would call depraved are actually pro-social in the context of many prominent cultures. Clothing might be a somewhat problematic example, since there is practical utility to clothing, although I would emphasize that there is actual shame involved in nakedness in many contexts. A different example, though:

    Jessica Taylor's [parable of the gullible king](https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/15/why-artificial-optimism/) suggests that optimism bias is a kind of distributed conspiracy to hide information, much like your description of depravity. This is perceived as pro-social in many cultural contexts.

    I guess the main point is that the depraved (if we insist on using this term) often have no interest in hiding their depravity. Conservative cultures which favor clothing that covers a lot of skin will openly admit that it hides their nakedness. (That's pretty hard to be secretive about!) They'll further talk about it as a way to avoid lust and such. (If it's an excuse, what is it an excuse for? I'm not sure.) Positive-thinking cultures will openly admit that they like to look on the bright side, openly talk about how telling someone bad news is harmful to that person because it makes them sad, etc.

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    1. Tim Freeman

      If you are going to ponder whether non-nudists are depraved, you should be explicit about which social norm is being violated. It is confusing to talk about depravity in a context where the social norm is unspecified.

      On the face of it, "you should wear clothes in public" is a plausible social norm, so the non-nudists are not necessarily depraved. If the social norm is "we are all perfectly healthy and beautiful", then I suppose they are. Or maybe you had some third option in mind.

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    2. Benquo Post author

      An important effect of nudity taboos is to transform a natural and not necessarily antisocial interest in others' bodies into something transgressive and naughty. The stories of Noah and Gyges seem to corroborate this in myth. However, I don't think that all cultures with a nudity taboo are equally depraved - in relatively lawful cultures with relatively explicit and well-defined norms against nudity, it may not escalate past shame.

      The analogy between conservative and positive thinking cultures fails in an interesting way; if conservatives mandated clothing because a lack of clothing nonspecifically made people feel bad, that would be more like depravity than mandating clothing because a lack of clothing exposes private parts of the human body. Likewise, explicitly aristocratic norms that you can legitimately use violence to suppress adverse judgments about you by social lessers or - through duels - even by equals, are less depraved than "positive thinking" is, because it's more like an explicitly predatory norm, and less like a shared nonspecific secret.

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    3. Benquo Post author

      A plainer response:

      Nudists are - ideally, at least - neither ashamed nor depraved about their nakedness.

      People who cover their bodies in response to social pressure (not just to protect or adorn themselves or carry things more easily or disguise themselves when hunting or warring) are either oppressed or ashamed. If they experience the requirement to wear clothes as an external constraint, they are oppressed; if they internalize the imperative to wear clothes and would feel bad about exposure directly (rather than the expected censure or punishment), they are ashamed.

      Ashamed people who choose to wear revealing, "risqué" garments likely to draw censure, in order to signal their naughtiness - and those attracted to such signals as signals of naughtiness (rather than to the bodies thus revealed) - are depraved.

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  4. Eli

    Great, clear, essay. Thank you.

    I would love a full example: some situation which involves people in each of these categories.

    Let me try to generate one based on your recent post on FTX.

    There's the whole finance industry, which (by hypothesis) is doing a bunch of illegal or immoral stuff, on a regular basis. For instance, making leveraged investments with moral hazard,

    Everyone, or almost everyone involved is guilty in the sense of violating the trust and some of the norms of broader American society.

    Some subset of these people _feel_ guilty, in the second sense. They might go home and tell their partner that they feel conflicted about what they're doing, or at least feel bad about it, at least sometimes. They don't, however, go to the FSEC, to report violations of the written law (laws which are tacitly known to be ignored).

    And some (large) subset of those, are not only guilty, but ashamed. They're hiding what they're doing from themselves and/or from others. They rationalize to themselves why some illegal behavior is fine, and crucially, present as if they're not engaging in the behavior.

    [I think you think that second part is crucial? If they admit to taking highly leveraged investments or to breaking some written laws, they're NOT in a state of shame as you're using it here?

    Or are you referring to someone who openly admits to doing something illegal but rationalizes to themselves and others why it's actually fine?]

    And then some (large) subset of that ashamed group is depraved. They actively support the illegal behavior.

    - If someone new to the industry asks, innocently "hey, wait, isn't it illegal to [whatever]", everyone gives him a glare to "get with the program"; this is just how things work around here.
    - And if the FSEC comes calling, one person will doctor the books to cover for someone else. Or at least say that they never saw any fraud.
    - And if a programmer (as a random non-finance profession) is accusing a finance person of doing regular fraud, a bystander finance person might get triggered and socially attack the programmer for being rude, or denying the illegal activity (even though the bystander knows full well how regularly it occurs), or by claiming that while those activities actually do happen, they don't count as fraud.

    Which of these are you thinking of, if any? Many of these seem markedly different from the others, by my accounting. In particular, there's a big difference between saying "yeah, we made [that transaction], but I don't think it counts as illegal / immoral" vs. "no [that transaction] never happened."

    And then there's an SBF, who gets caught doing the kind of thing that, by hypothesis, is very common in finance. But everyone makes a big deal about how terrible and unacceptable what he did was.

    How good an example is this?

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    1. Benquo Post author

      I would say that as long as someone feels the compulsion to try to coherently rationalize to themselves what they did, they're somewhere on the spectrum between shame and depravity, not fully depraved. In depraved cases the internal narrative loses coherence and is more like bluster or a conviction that they're winners. Another way of saying this: Where norm violations increase the tension created by cognitive dissonance, you're ashamed; where they discharge tension, you're depraved.

      Finance bros whoring and doing illegal drugs together - and to a lesser extent drinking, going to strip clubs, and committing misdemeanors - are cultivating depravity. This seems to go along with a sense of inner-ring exclusivity - the people "in the know" have access to the secret info that transgressions are the way of the world, which lets them outmaneuver outsiders who aren't expecting coordinated unashamed transgression, but causes the hiding behavior to persist.

      There has to be some sort of quorum-sensing procedure underlying the transition, which can create paradoxical effects of disclosure - to people closer to the guilt end of the spectrum, getting called out can lead to repentance, but to people on the brink of depravity, it can catalyze a transition to brazen norm-violation with more perceived freedom of action.

      - If someone new to the industry asks, innocently "hey, wait, isn't it illegal to [whatever]", everyone gives him a glare to "get with the program"; this is just how things work around here.

      Depends on the context. Sometimes they'll quietly identify that person as an outsider who doesn't get a piece of the action. This may be why my close friends who've worked in finance & don't have impostor syndrome tend to get lower bonuses than they expected based on their performance. Other times they'll roll their eyes and someone might quietly explain how getting along here means going along with how things are done. Moral Mazes gives some examples of this kind of genteel acculturation to superiors subtly hinting at the story subordinates are expected to back up.

      - And if the FSEC comes calling, one person will doctor the books to cover for someone else. Or at least say that they never saw any fraud.

      Sometimes, depending on how close they feel to the other person, and how much the adverse attention feels predatory (so it's okay to throw nonallies under the bus) vs pronormative (so their class interests are threatened).

      - And if a programmer (as a random non-finance profession) is accusing a finance person of doing regular fraud, a bystander finance person might get triggered and socially attack the programmer for being rude, or denying the illegal activity (even though the bystander knows full well how regularly it occurs), or by claiming that while those activities actually do happen, they don't count as fraud.

      Yep - some combination of those, and as I mentioned immediately above, it depends on the perceived power dynamics involved, and the extent to which the accuser is seen as calling for scapegoating (in which case you only stick up for close allies, or deflect blame to outsiders) vs justice (in which case you stand by your class).

      Which of these are you thinking of, if any? Many of these seem markedly different from the others, by my accounting. In particular, there's a big difference between saying "yeah, we made [that transaction], but I don't think it counts as illegal / immoral" vs. "no [that transaction] never happened."

      Depravity can lead to deindexing incriminating memories. In principle this can lead to depraved criminals being blindsided by revelations of incriminating data it didn't occur to them to cover up, if the prosecution is sufficiently disciplined and there are enough non-depraved people around.

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  5. Eli

    > They believe that they are doing something bad.

    Can we qualify this? It seems like some people could be in a situation where all of the other bullet points hold, except for this one. And I think you would not call that depravity?

    Any group that is engaging in behavior that they thing is correct, but some other powerful group in society opposes is likely to...

    - expect that they can call on allies to derail investigations of their bad behavior, on the fly, by instantaneous mutual recognition.
    - expect allies to join them in expressing open disapproval of such investigations.
    - feel compelled to behave as an ally towards others displaying similar tells.

    To take a stark example a group of Germans is hiding Jews and keeping them safe, members of the group might be expected to distract or derail Nazi investigators, searching one of their houses.

    And, an example more germane to our world: Republicans oppose Democrats and vis versa. They know themselves to be in social conflict, and get in whatever digs they can at each other.

    And if a Republican does something that _looks bad_ (Trump has documents in his private residence, or whatever), Republican talking heads will take stances that downplay or excuse their compatriot. And if there's an investigation, empowered Republicans will interfere with the investigation, or derail it or influence it to come out the way that is most politically convenient. And vis versa for the Democrats.

    This still happens even if the Republicans don't think that what their representative did was wrong. They could think that it was totally justified, or not care one way or another, and still be concerned with making their opponents look bad, and making their own members look good, because that helps win tribal/political fights.

    The collation is founded around crime. It's founded around anything else. And the accusation of crime is just another political battlefield.

    I assume you agree that this is a real dynamic, and you're trying to point at a different one? Is that right?

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    1. Benquo Post author

      The examples you gave are all ones where there's preexisting common knowledge among the conspirators, so they don't need to rely on tells.

      Reply

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