There is a notion of two mainstream cultures: Guilt culture and Shame culture.
The main point of a guilt culture is that everyone has personal responsibility for what (s)he commits or omits in terms of good and bad. There is space to discuss what is good and what is bad in a personal situation. For instance: You have hunger and no money even for a little bread. Is it allowed to steal a little bread? Or you have to beg, which can be humiliating by lacking of a community, to wich you belong? Normally means stealing that you steal the living of another, but in this situation? The Ramadan with Iftar shows another, social solution.
The mainframe are the Ten commandments the Jews got in their history. The solution is that you recognize your wrongdoing. You can be forgiven. It is a part of the development of one’s conscience besides personal awareness about good and bad.
After determination and recognition that something you committed or omitted, was bad, the solution is an appropriate punishment and after the fulfilment of the punishment, you can resume your life as before. You get a new chance because you have been forgiven. You feel relief. The wrongdoing is past.
In a shame culture, you have responsibility for the community to which you belong: your family and your tribe because together you live and survive. You need each other. By itself, it doesn't lead to shame by wrongdoing, but the complication is the importance of the reputation of the community you belong to. This is a male problem.
It is a female way of dealing with your failure by comforting you when you commit a mistake. But a man blames you for the mistake as if you have to be perfect. This is nonsense. No one is perfect. But by blaming you, he can rule over you.
A further problem is male punishment by exclusion. Therefore you have to silence the mistake to avoid a lifelong punishment for you and your community. This is cruel and kills the soul of the one who made a mistake. Exclusion is a violent reaction to what is human, namely to make mistakes.
The refusal by men to accept mistakes reveals a male problem. This is not only the issue of mistakes in general but moreover a specific kind of problems. It is about sex. There are men, who blame women to be attractive. By blaming a woman to be attractive, he says actually that this woman is attractive for himself. This is his problem.
It leads to the derailment of the behaviour of men. This kind of men punishes women for being attractive. They don’t respect women. They commit sexual assault on women and girls, which is for them not safe and secure outside the home.
They can only go out when they are guided by a male member of the family. This is humiliating for women and girls. They have the right to protect themselves, but this can be dangerous. Using a weapon could mean that the assailant catches the weapon and uses it against you.
The killing of Sarah Everard in London by probably a police officer shows that this is a worldwide problem.
But will men ever blame their mothers to be attractive? Or would they sexually assault their mother?
The impact is big. They treat women as a scapegoat because they can’t control their own feelings and emotions about their own shortcomings or bad experiences.
And if they try to control their feelings and emotions in a spastic way, they fail to show tenderness. Tenderness fertilizes relations. Tenderness shows the other respect and shows that you treat the other as a subject, not as an object, not as a punching ball.
In this way, I specify what a shame culture means. It tries to enforce you to act according to the rules of the group and to hide your shortcomings without being aware of why the rules are important. When you are aware of the reason for the rules, you can adapt the rules, when the situation changes. Rules have to make reasonable sense.
A guilt culture disconnect individuals from the group. One is responsible for any wrongdoing, but you can restore the relationship with the group by following a procedure determined by the group.
But the relation between the individual and the group is not clear. My point is that everyone has the right to develop her or his talents in the service of the society to which someone belongs. Rights and plights are combined.
In the present situation in the West, you see two problems: on one side some people catch power and exercise it for their own profit. They act without morality and damage other people. On the other side, a number of people don’t get the chance to develop their talents and don’t get the chance to contribute to society.
These people are treated with mistrust from the perception that they only try to take profit from society, precisely what a group of rich people is doing. But actually, they take profit by manipulation to get unlimited money, stealing it from the poor. A strong example is that the working class of Amazon are enforced to use a bottle for a pee. Some employees need food from the food bank to meet the ends. The owner of Amazon is the richest man in the world. When he dies, will he be happy with this status?
Power needs to be challenged for the benefit of everybody in order to function as a social being, wherever you live, living a decent life.
