We’re told never to judge a book by its cover. And yet, I do it often, and did so again with this book after I picked it half-hazard from a book sale.
The attractive book jacket of The Shame Machine (2022) summarizes its pitch succinctly: “Shame is a powerful and sometimes useful tool: when we publicly shame corrupt politicians, abusive celebrities, or predatory corporations, we reinforce values of fairness and justice. But as Cathy O’Neil argues…shaming has taken a new and dangerous turn.” The unfolding thesis is that shame has become a lucrative business strategy—a technique perfected by grifters, demagogues, and opportunists alike to exploit the psychologically vulnerable.
The author Cathy O’Neil herself is not a scholar of sociology or moral philosophy; her training is in mathematics, with a PhD from Harvard. Her interest in shame is less academic than personal. A lifelong struggle with weight made her an unwilling expert in its mechanisms. She began noticing its patterns everywhere: hold up an impossible standard, shame those who fall short, and sell the illusion of a cure. Every part of the scheme is fortified by curated data, airbrushed imagery, and false promises.
O’Neil’s examples of social shaming range from the banal to the grotesque: dishonest health claims, mob justice on social media, racial caricatures, incel forums cultivating misery, and even Lysol ads hawking genital disinfectants. In every case, shame sells. And it often harms. These are all examples of “punching down,” preying on the already desperate and worsening their situation unscrupulously.
This “punching down” form of shame is disastrous on another front beyond its exploitative potential. As O’Neil rightly observes, it’s all too easy to enter a self-destructive cycle of shame. Some seek relief through the very systems that exploit them. Think of the addict who numbs his psychological pain with more extreme drugs, or the consumer who buys yet another product from the next charismatic guru.
Still, another response is to lash out. Resentment festers and that resentment craves validation. This is the mechanism by which shame often drives the formation of dangerous fringe groups (one of O’Neil’s case studies is the “manosphere”). A teenager dabbling in misogynistic pseudoscience or fringe ideologies might begin half-ironically, but the sense of belonging and the affirmation of shared grievance gradually reinforce the posture until it hardens into identity. In this way, the cycle of shame does not merely victimize individuals; it risks metastasizing into collective bitterness and, in extreme cases, violence.
Punching Up
A key insight of the book is that shame is nearly inexhaustible. Human beings often find themselves driven by the intangible needs of esteem, belonging, and status more than by material ones. In this predicament, a person never feels thin enough, or worthy enough, or high-status enough—or even, in certain subcultures, miserable enough—no matter what objective markers might suggest otherwise.
The fact that shame is boundless is precisely what makes shame so commercially and politically valuable. A fast-food chain can only sell you so many burgers; a beauty influencer can mine your insecurities indefinitely. It is this very quality that makes shame so easy to exploit, and if nothing else, the book offers a persuasive warning of just how deep that exploitation can run.
The power of shame also lies in its ability to turn mere facts into moral or psychological verdicts. This is true of all sentiments. By sentiment, I do not mean an ethereal mood (as when one says they are “feeling sentimental”) but the sense the older philosophers used: the emotional register through which we apprehend reality. If, for example, I fail my team at a critical play, the objective fact is that I have fallen short—but it is the sentiment of guilt that impresses the weight of that failure upon me personally.
In the same way, sentiments like shame do not merely accompany our judgments; they are the medium through which we feel judgments at all. And as with any sentiment, it can often outpace the objective reality. This is precisely why a simple fact—“I am overweight”—can so easily harden into a verdict: “I feel worthless because I am overweight.”
Her reverberating conclusion is that the moral imperative is not to discard shame (could that even be done?) but to harness or direct toward positive goals. It can, in some cases, be a vital and legitimate tool for checking the powerful and protecting the vulnerable. Movements like #MeToo’s public takedown of Harvey Weinstein, the non-violent moral force of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and even COVID-era mask shaming (she relates a brief episode of her barefaced husband being stared down on the street) are cited as legitimate examples of “punching up.” In these cases, shame becomes a tool for democratic accountability and sometimes the only weapon available to the disenfranchised.
But if shame is boundless, it raises the question: what limits, if any, restrain its use even when “punching up”?
“Be Nice”
O’Neil proposes compassion as a central criterion, suggesting that empathy for the weak while reserving moral judgment for those in power could naturally direct our base passions for the good of the helpless. Empathy is shame aimed in the right direction. The peculiar gift of empathy is it’s ability to feel the sentiments of someone else without directly undergoing the circumstances oneself—as when one shares in another’s embarrassment, grief, joy, or anger. It presupposes a certain imaginative capacity to place oneself in another person’s shoes. Yet even this remarkable human faculty carries its perils. Empathy, in awakening second-hand sentiments, stirs emotions which are themselves easily manipulated if not curtailed.
To her credit, O’Neil acknowledges this risk. “Before you hear me say ‘just empathize,’ I should note that empathy is hardly a cure-all.”1Cathy O’Neil, The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation (New York: Crown, 2022), 213. She recognizes that the sentiments of empathy wandering alone tends toward favoritism, easily degenerating into in-group loyalty and out-group contempt.
But instead of building a framework to govern the sentiments awakened by empathy, she proposes only to enlarge it—to train our habits until its reach is widened. “Consider a personal policy of due process.” She suggests. “This can translate to giving people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible… treat them the way you’d want others to treat you when you screw up, and respect their dignity as human beings.”2O’Neil, The Shame Machine, 213. Empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation may be the end goals, but they require practice to make our moral imagination more sensitive. Or as she summarizes: “It sounds simple when you say it: Be nice.”3O’Neil, The Shame Machine, 126.
The Common Good
I would hope that her core premise—that shame is a potent force and easily exploitable—could command bipartisan agreement. A book on this subject could tilt left or right depending on which anecdotes it selects and its corresponding solutions. O’Neil is clearly situated on the left, but those on the right can easily compile their own examples of shame gone wrong. What matters most is the premises themselves, not the prescription offered. Consider, for example, some of her policy suggestions near the end:
There are shame-free solutions to almost all of our social problems. For example, affordable public housing would raise the quality of life for millions, by putting a roof over their heads. That’s a no-brainer. Decriminalizing of drugs would keep many people out of the criminal justice system and free them from bearing the stigma of incarceration for the rest of their lives. Ending stop-and-frisk and eliminating drug tests before a person can enter a shelter would help restore dignity.4O’Neil, The Shame Machine, 206.
The thing to observe is not in the policies themselves (many of which may or may not deserve serious consideration) but the way they are derived. Here it’s the subtle language, like calling certain policy preferences “no-brainers,” that signals she does not seriously entertain the other side as offering legitimate, practical objections. Must one give the benefit of doubt to even these people?
Perhaps, however, fixating on this subtle political signaling misses the forest for the trees. The larger point O’Neil makes is that shame—like any sentiment—is inexhaustible and prone to abuse. It is precisely for this reason that I question a manner of justice based solely on pity, even when tempered by manners and cultivated feelings. Passions, as Plato and other classical thinkers cautioned, are inherently volatile, ebbing and flowing with cultural trends. Sentiments alone cannot sustain the enduring norms of justice.
“All is permitted”
An unlikely modern voice to this conversation is Hannah Arendt, best known for coining the now vernacular phrase “the banality of evil.” In her psychological study of the Third Reich, she argued that loneliness was a crucial precondition for tyranny: a culture of isolated, unmoored individuals, severed from meaning and community, becomes dangerously susceptible to the allure of a charismatic despot. Where O’Neil warns of corrupt advertisers, Arendt sees the same danger weaponized in the political sphere. So far, they would find much to agree upon.
Yet Arendt’s political reflections take an unexpected turn when traced alongside the trajectory of The Shame Machine. In her too-often overlooked work On Revolution, Arendt draws a striking contrast between the moral foundations of the American and French revolutions. The American founders, for all their flaws and contradictions, rooted their cause in serious and sustained debates about principled politics. The French Revolution, by contrast, increasingly came to rest on sentiment—especially the public display of pity and compassion—as the machine of political legitimacy.
Robespierre and his allies found in pity an inexhaustible moral imperative. There was, after all, no shortage of human misery in pre-revolutionary France, and no shortage of hypocrisy to expose. “To Robespierre,” Arendt writes, “it was obvious that the one force which could and must unite the different classes of society into one nation was the compassion of those who did not suffer with those who were malheureux [unfortunate].”5Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, Inc. 1963), 74.
But here lies the peril: compassion is naturally suited to the concrete, not the abstract —to individual persons, not to categories or collectives. When elevated into public policy, compassion tends to become pity—a sentiment that, in order to sustain itself, requires a steady supply of victims. In such a system, the existence of the unfortunate necessarily implies an oppressor. Pity when wielded as law can glorify or even fabricate its own villains in order to present itself as the righteous defender.
When criterion of pity (or solutions which look like pity) are applied not only in matters of private charity but even in the realm of public justice the question subtly shifts from “How should the plight of this homeless individual move me?” to “How am I to be affected by the homeless population, as a mass?” Suddenly, we find the original sentiments magnified exponentially. And it is in the process of answering this latter question which risk running infinitely in a circle: deploying empathy and shame in the name of “the common good,” while defining the common good as any attempt to absolve our unquenchable pity.
Arendt argued the Reign of Terror was not mere accident of excess but the inevitable outcome of unchecked moral sentiment. “The evil of Robespierre’s virtues,” she surmises, “was that it did not accept any limitations.”6Arendt, On Revolution, 86. As a result, “the lawlessness of the ‘all is permitted’ sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”7Arendt, On Revolution, 87. Robespierre’s virtue, measured against human suffering, ironically made impartial justice impossible. For what would one not do “for the people”?
While it is seemingly noble to shame the powerful, it must be realized that the definition of “the powerful” is notoriously pliable —especially when determined by sentiment alone. Such a standard is a moving target, ever prone to expansion or, worse, a “mere pretext for the lust of power.”8Arendt, On Revolution, 84. From whose vantage point do we determine up from down? As Robespierre’s Terror revealed, when the guillotine of mob justice starts to fall, the line between “punching up” and “punching down” can reverse with terrifying speed. It is for this reason that Arendt warns so gravely: “Pity, taken as the spring of virtue, has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself.”9Arendt, On Revolution, 85.
Pity vs. Compassion
The central observation of The Shame Machine is so obvious it scarcely warrants dispute: bad actors behave badly, corporations deceive for profit, and grifters grift. Many should be called out; some brought to account. The author’s instincts are undoubtedly sincere, springing from genuine concern for those who suffer and despair.
I do not wish to deny the necessity of empathy in human relationships. To discard it would be to discard imagination itself, for it is a faculty of perception—a way of apprehending the world through the experiences of others. What matters is that every sentiment it evokes is rightly ordered to the truth, and that our responses correspond to reality in a fitting manner. But we should also remember no single sentiment, even the “friendlier” ones, can serve as an absolute guide. Strong feelings are not evil, but when left to their own devices they can mislead us and warp our understanding of what is true.
We know this intuitively. To see life through sentiment alone is to narrow the world to the dimensions of our own feelings. Consider the truly angry man. It’s as if his whole perception of reality is bent toward a single purpose: the discovery of offence. He will find it even where none exists. Some suppose that a gentler impulse such as pity is safer, but it is not. Left to itself, even this nobler passion can drive a man to take the law into his own hands, retreat into tribalism, or inflict harm “for the people.”
It is with this in mind that we see a in the book a subtle tendency to perceive even the most malevolent outbursts of human behavior as the inevitable fruit of wounded pride or neglected psychological needs—needs which await the proper therapeutic cure. It offers a range of compelling anecdotes but tends to level them into a single explanatory framework: “Don’t shame your chubby daughter and don’t go overboard with your neo-Nazi son either.”10O’Neil, The Shame Machine, 213. Such throwaway advice sounds humane at first, until one remembers that it reflects the ongoing process of reducing reality to the narrow logic of therapy.
The result is an overreliance on a one-size-fits-all solution: empathy (though tempered by civility) as universal cure for the maladies of human society, despite the author’s own caveats. It is of course good sense, as well as good manners, to hold one’s tongue in the locker room, to extend charity to the homeless man on the corner, and to refrain from mocking those whose afflictions are not of their choosing. But when this impulse extends beyond matters of private manners into the realm of social justice, it is no less prone to overreach. It risks, in the end, reproducing the very dynamics it seeks to undo: setting impossible standards, shaming those who fall short, and selling the illusion of a solution.
Judging a Book by its Cover
The book is too brief—or perhaps too presumptuous—to interrogate the limits of this vision or to offer a clearer account of the common good it invokes. It proceeds as if the reader naturally shares the author’s assumptions and presents certain proposals as “no-brainers,” aptly said considering they seem to have sprung fully formed from the author’s heart alone.
The logic takes us precisely where the Jacobins began: “The magic of compassion,” for these moral crusaders, “was that it opened the heart of the sufferer to the sufferings of others, whereby it established and confirmed the ‘natural’ bond between men which only the rich had lost. Where passion, the capacity for suffering, and compassion, the capacity for suffering with others, ended, vice began.”11Arendt, On Revolution, 76. But in this, the project becomes trying to direct the powers of boundless sentiment with yet another boundless sentiment. And as History teaches us, time and again, movements born of passion—even for the unfortunate (however those are defined)—can swiftly transform into machines of coercion, or worse.
It must be emphasized that I presuppose no ill will on the part of the author. Yet there is a danger in pity, when elevated to the status of a moral criterion. It tends to reduce others to the condition of perpetual patients, helpless creatures to be tended, managed, and improved, always “for their own good.” The author, however well-meaning, treats this boundless impulse toward moral micro-management, the inclination to stereotype the motives of dissenters, and the eagerness to assume the role of caretaker and equalizer of the masses far too lightly.
At its heart, the moral vision confuses compassion with pity—a shallow imitation that seeks to soothe the heart rather than to address the reality before it. It concerns itself not with actual people, known and seen, but with the vague abstractions of classes, categories, and statistics. True compassion, by contrast, is shown face to face, to the person who stands before us. And what is sorely needed in society is more compassion, not less. And what we also need is clear perception of what is real, a standard of good capable of ordering and directing feelings rather than being ruled by them.
In the end, a book like this, plucked from the shelf for the appeal of its jacket, reminds us of a lesson we are always in danger of forgetting: that in politics as in life, one should be slow to judge a book by its cover, for what lies within is often far more complex than it seems. And perhaps that is the book’s most enduring lesson.
Toxic Empathy?
A book like this leaves us in an awkward position. It has become fashionable as of late to speak of “toxic empathy,” as though cultivating a moral imagination were itself a malady of our age. That, however, is not my intention. Even empathy manipulated by fiction is neither right nor wrong. It becomes twisted when moral crusaders attempt to bend reality by manipulating our feelings; yet the same faculty allows us to be moved by stirring dramas and great works of art. But still, we are often cautioned that empathy must be fenced about with rules and frameworks, lest our actions prove unjust, ineffectual, or maybe serve the ends of those we count as enemies. There is, of course, some truth in this.
But let us be honest: such debates are the luxury of those with time to contemplate. The truly starving man cannot wait for a council to determine whether his hunger is legitimate. It is also the grace of empathy that compels us to act swiftly when injustice demands an immediate response.
I do not offer this reflection to inflame further argument. Yet a question remains: why is this helpful? To pursue an answer, I turn again to where Hannah Arendt leads us. In On Revolution, she invited us to consider the moral criterion of pity, exemplified by the French Revolution. Later in the work, she draws us to a profound conclusion by invoking one of the best-known passages in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works: The Grand Inquisitor.
The Grand Inquisitor
This haunting parable, nestled within The Brothers Karamazov, carries the logic of pity to its furthest extreme. Its story concerns Christ returning to Seville, Spain, amid the Spanish Inquisition. He is seen healing the sick and gathering a devoted crowd. Yet the Church, embodied by the aged Grand Inquisitor, swiftly arrests Him. In a dim cell, the Inquisitor delivers a devastating, eloquent indictment of Christ’s mission—one of literature’s most piercing critiques of Christianity. The charge is simple: Christ failed humanity.
The Inquisitor recalls the moment of Christ’s first advent, when He was tempted in the wilderness by Satan. Three times He was offered gifts to meet the needs of human life: bread to satisfy the starving, miracles to silence doubt, and dominion to rule all nations in peace. He rejected them all. Instead, Christ forwent these comforts to bestow upon humanity the gift of freedom—a gift the Inquisitor considers far too heavy for their frail condition.
The Inquisitor insists that by withholding relief, by refusing to meet their immediate needs, Christ has shown a cruel indifference; he has left humanity to struggle under burdens he alone had the power to lift. How could Christ be so blind—or so unconcerned—as not to see this? Christ’s refusal to meet the immediate, tangible needs of His followers renders Him, in the Inquisitor’s eyes, cruel, negligent, even blameworthy. “Feed them first, and then teach them to be good!” cries the Inquisitor, “For if anyone has ever deserved our stake, it is you. Tomorrow I shall burn you.”
Yet throughout the long interrogation, Christ sits in silence, for no words, no reasoning, could meet the weight of such piercing logic.
It is only at the very end that Christ responds. But his response is not with words or argument, but with action. As the tale recounts, Jesus silently rises, approaches the aged Inquisitor, and gently kisses him. This tender act is His entire answer. Startled and shaken, the Inquisitor falters, then dismisses Him: “Go and do not come again … do not come at all … never, never!”
“What do you want me to do for you?”
This tale stands before us to reveal a startling difference: the Inquisitor cares for “humanity,” Christ cares for the one. Pity versus compassion. We also see the remarkable quality of divine love, one that can embrace the entire world yet simultaneously cherish each person in their unique singularity. Christ’s love is not for an abstract “humanity” but for this beggar, this sinner, even this Inquisitor—each seen and known as if they were the only person in the world.
Christ does not encounter us as a faceless mass; he sees you and me. It is His compassion, disarming and intimate, which pauses for the blind and the broken who cry with pain, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” To them He comes, stoops down, and asks, simply and earnestly, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Luke 18:40-41)
To you and me, he says the same. “What do you want me to do for you?” What will our answer be? Do we know how to respond to such divine compassion?
“I ended my first book with the words ‘no answer.’ I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?” -C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
