Society, Shame, and Savagery

The metallic weight of a gun sits black, heavy, and half hidden in the hands of a sallow and unhappy teenager. He waits, tapping his foot a little while he watchesthe last of the students file into the classroom, their easy laughter echoing in the almost empty hallway. The voices in his head are echoing too, as he hears his tormenters again and again, calling him names, laughing in his face, pointing out his flaws and weaknesses; shaming him until he can’t even bear to glance at his reflection in the window, or hear his name, the ragged pain of humiliation tearing from him his humanity, his soul. Shunned and disgraced, the torn shreds of his compassion falling away, he turns to all he has left, the heavy gun, and the broken screams of his classmates. Violence has always been the lurking horror haunting the light of civilization, the terrifying example of mankind’s corruption. The modern world has placed all efforts into reducing, and even eliminating violence, yet the ‘crime and punishment’ approach of the criminal justice system, especially in the United States, does little to negate the harrowing effects that violence has on our society. Yet it is society itself that has produced this depravity, and perhaps it is within society that the central issue resides. In order to diminish violence in the United States, we must find the predominant cause of it, which I believe is shame, something caused by the culture of today. Therefore, I think that the only way to reduce violence is to reduce the effect of shaming societal issues. Only once these social problems are fixed can we begin to eradicate the violence within our nation.

Violence, and tendency to violence, while certainly multi-determined, has a central root in shame. In the...

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... consider other origins of violence. McMahan asserts that it is easy access to guns that has made our country into “the homicide capitol of the developed world” (McMahan, 38), and uses this declaration to insist that gun use should be the focus of preventing violence. However, this is a logical fallacy, as McMahan has failed to even mention other causes of violence, such as shame.

The teenager sits outside the classroom, watching the last of his classmates file into the door. Yet imagine if the voices that torment him were cleared from his mind, and the pain in his soul was alleviated because he was never humiliated or degraded by society. Perhaps he could look up from his position in the hallway, glance into the window, and look at his reflection square in the eye, and walk into the class, shame, humiliation, and societal pressures never turning him to violence.