Before Repudiation there Must be Shame

Yesterday I suggested that repudiation amounts to saying “I screwed up, and I am committed to undoing the mess I made.” I then argued that it takes an act of will to repudiate and concluded that we, as a people, were too comfortable to muster such will. I realize, however, that there is another equally important element in repudiation. That paraphrase cannot be uttered (at least in a meaningful way) without a sense of shame. We find ourselves in such an enormous mess because those who put us there are so convinced of the rightness of their acts that they cannot conceive of a sense of shame about them. Of course there is nothing new about such oblivion to shame. It can be traced back at least as far as Nietzsche and was mastered by both Hitler and Stalin. Now it is in our own backyard; and those of us who were brought up to “do the right thing” really have no way of dealing with it.