Remembered reading this and was reminded of it when briefly looking back on the events of the 20th Century in regards to Germany. It's a bit of a long one
The original article link: https://theamericansun.com/2020/01/01/the-feasts-of-shame/
Edit: The website the original link leads to is now defunct. The author had the courtesy to re-upload the article to their Substack https://theamericansun.substack.com/p/the-feasts-of-shame?utm_source=publication-search
"Humiliation with a big H denies the social world of normalized encounter. In fact, it humiliates by virtue of this denial. It tells the victims that all social norms are suspended in dealings with them because they are not human." – William Ian Miller, "Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence"
The air was jubilant in many of those summer months of '44, the tide was turning. The Germans, the dreaded Nazi war machine, was on the retreat as the Allies in the west pushed them back town-by-town out of the fields of France. The shame of humiliating defeat and the occupation by the Germans was finally coming to a close; now would be the time of celebration. People could breathe freely in the air again. They could speak freely again. Love freely again. Be free people again. And to celebrate this joyous occasion they would have a parade–a parade of half-naked shorn women, tear-wet cheeks stained red with shame and lipsticked swastikas, and packed into lorries to the happy jeers and hollers of a blood-frenzied crowd. Within these good people of free France beat the animal hearts of a mad populace that needed to wet their beaks with revenge, to strike another creature and pin it down with primal glee. To humiliate. To remind them, you are not human.
This is not just a piece about the past. This is about the past, present, and especially about the future. This is a work of control, of pain, and of destruction. The dark side of humanity is never an easy thing, and to even glimpse into the darkness is to invite all manners of recriminations upon your character. But this is not only the necessary thing to do, it's the right thing to do.
We have to talk about humiliation.
I. Rituals of Humiliation
"To submit to an insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy–all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being." – Oswald Spengler, "The Decline of the West"
The origins of this essay lie in a manic free association Twitter thread about a Modern Farmer article entitled "This Trick Might Actually Get Americans to Eat Bugs" by one Dan Nosowitz. The medium of Twitter doesn't lend itself well to collecting one's thoughts, much less doing research into the myriad topics that the thread shotgunned all at once. First, we must correct a term.
The term 'humiliation ritual' has its own particular meaning that's used by, for lack of a better term but this is meant neutrally, the conspiracy-minded. That is not the scope of this work. Further, the term 'ritual humiliation' also has another meaning, often overlapping with 'humiliation ritual' and frequently denotes certain types of hazing, but not always. One could argue that many of these things are distinctions without differences, but this will be about the phenomenon of 'public humiliation' and its social and political expressions.
The piece in Modern Farmer is very strange, and has an air of unreality in how it's written. The trick, as it were, in the piece was about how insect farming can work as a middleman in livestock feed. What is bizarre about it is its framing that this is an alternative in trying to break through the American resistance to eating bugs. The question that is begging to be answered here is "why is this something that's on your mind?" Entomophagy has been something that's been near and dear to the hearts of the propaganda class, with Vice magazine writing miserable pieces about being on an exclusive bug diet while concluding at the end:
One could devote an entire book to reading all of the articles that have been published in the last ten years trying to convince people of the delicious virtues of eating insects and digging deep into the who's who and why's why of how this is so important to them. If you read this a year after this has been published, no doubt there will be an egregious number of new pieces written about it. They certainly get upset if you begin to wonder why there's always new pieces about this, accusing the curious of cooking "up a conspiracy theory around the bug-eating trend", though the word trend probably merits a thousand quotation marks around it.
The indignant attitude when questioned plays out the same no matter what the issue is. "Why do you even care?" they ask when people question anything they do in the name of utopia, whether it's race-swaps of fictional and non-fictional characters or chemically castrating children for reasons that are unfathomable to the devil himself. The correct answer is always "I care because you care."
Without a shred of doubt, we know they care a lot about people eating insects. There is an article that is either written or re-posted every week about this. Just do an advanced search on CNN's Twitter for 'bug' and look at the frequency of these articles. A dance has begun to develop every time this happens, where they clearly know the reaction they're going to get as they get mobbed and ratio'd by Twitter users screaming at the top of their lungs "I WILL NOT EAT THE BUGS!", as though they're relishing in what they would view as the people's futile resistance to their plans. They probably are delighted.
The ostensible reasons for this is for ecological sustainability. This is bunk to anyone who isn't an idiot. Populations peak. Things don't go on forever, no matter what your stupid pop songs say, and that's without getting into the issues that your problem isn't ecological sustainability but industrial instability (which is what's going to wreck havoc on the former). Californians are already living in fear of having their power shut off on them. You already know the answer to the perennial question "are things getting better or are they getting worse". The 'cult of progress' has no magical spell that is going to spirit you up a simple and non-catabolic energy source. You're not going to mitigate human and food transport costs by cockroach farming. No, this isn't about sustainability. The one thing you must always remember living in liberal societies that are run by the rootless and the cosmopolitan is that everything becomes counter-intuitive, so you must think counter-intuitively.
You must think counter-intuitively because of the way liberalism functions. Every ideology, every belief, and every group seeks to dominate. This is called life. This is what Carl Schmitt noted when he looked at liberalism and capitalism, that being in this world you cannot escape friend-enemy distinctions and so liberalism being the utilitarian nothingness of flexibility and freedom, it must overcome inevitable conflict by subsuming everything that would oppose it and bring it to heel. Liberalism, just like any other thing, has a will to dominate but because liberalism in its ideology is meant to be free and flexible, it must then dominate everything that opposes it, especially when it becomes tied to economics. There can never be an end to the expanding market under liberal capitalism. Like the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, liberalism must become a suzerain, the ruler of rulers, upon the whole of earth for "only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth".
Liberal capitalism forced open the ports of Japan by black ships and shell guns, for the Japanese were intolerant of the tolerant. This is the true essence of Karl Popper's The Paradox of Tolerance. Popper's so-called paradox isn't an attempt to plug the hole in a mental child's understanding of tolerance but to make the case that anything that opposes the liberal order, but especially those who drive the liberal order, has to be rooted out and destroyed because those who stand for something are always more holistically powerful than the ones who stand for nothing but power itself. There is no vitalism in liberalism.
You must think counter-intuitively. When you see the dopamine-dispensing treats of technocapital you might think you see a world of freedom and choices, but this is merely the IV drip of product to keep you medicated to the will of others. Ask yourself, what autonomy do you truly have to be outside of this system? None. You are living in a false reality. Remember, like anything else, liberalism seeks to dominate and being the flexible nothingness it must then dominate everything. Conquerors do not invade territory to do nice things to it and especially for the people that reside there.
History bears this out.
Our history must be remembered by the light of its fires.
II. Occupied Americans
"Obviously this is a very idealised representation of war; we see a game of pure power, from which one would like to erase all trace of physical and moral suffering. Everything is done in order to pretend that humiliation is not part of the game." – Bertrand Bardie, "Humiliation in International Relations"
The chief selling point of liberalism has been that it's the most peaceful and prosperous system available to mankind, allowing the vast range of humanity to be part of a rising tide that lifts all boats, but there is nothing in this world that hasn't come with its price. Power and status do not abide by any notion of equality. So nothing in this world we live in will ever make sense to you unless you understand you live under an occupation and are thus subject to the rules of an occupation. If you do not start from there, you will fruitlessly search for multiple explanations and rationalizations for everything that the people with financial and media power–the power that matters far more than political power now–push the people to expect and accept, such as vegetarian burger schemes, bug protein, and drag kids.
For every argument that's made about ecological sustainability or making sure that "sexual minorities" are able to express who "they really are" early and often, the question has to be countered "then why are they so aggressive about it?" Why are they so eager to bring about PissEarth, 2025? All the reasons that are given are additional components to the project of total atomization of human society, but when you shed every additional layer to get to the core, the driving force of why, all you are left with is shame; the public humiliation of the conquered. It makes a vicious mockery of the conquered by denying them any bit of dignity. A bitter reminder for the vanquished of their new status in victory's triumph and delight for the victorious.
Public humiliation is intrinsically linked to status. In history, people would be disfigured, branded, or tattooed to deny them their right to simply blend in with society. They would be marked, letting people know what they did to deny them the privacy of the self. Ruining their appearance in this way kept their status low and their autonomy violated. Mass media has only served to amplify that effect, transmitting a village shame into a national shame. People are all too eager to participate in these Little Brother acts, often the only taste of the power process they'll ever have in their lives.
When the Germans lost WWII, the French women who were sleeping with German soldiers and the SS or even just friendly with them had their heads forcibly shaved and were paraded down the street. Many of it done by previous collaborators themselves to curry favor with liberators (read: conquerors) and maintain their own fleeting sense of status. Hair, being an important thing for women, was tinged with seductive implications with longer hair usually a sign of femininity. Denying them this denied them being good women in their essence. These shorners had power over these women, and as we are often told rape is about power, not sex. The resentment of defeat against the Germans necessitated that the nation knew someone would have to pay for it and someone would need to suffer for it and that the hierarchy of status would be restored. The whole nation would know. Wendy Webster writing on this states:
The Ottoman Empire had a culture of boys, actual children, called köçek who crossdressed and danced in sexually provocative ways and were sexually available. These boys, who were kept as dancers until they grew beards, engaged in belly dances with suggestive expressions and steps described as "coquetteish" to the rapture of male audiences. The scenes described bring to mind the sights one might see at any contemporary gay pride parade or a public library.
Most accounts of pederasty in the Ottoman Empire appear to come from the people who went to see it for themselves, such as Byron with the dancing boys. In the case of the köçek, they were banned by the Ottomans in the 19th century due to the jealous fights that would break out over the attentions for these boys, though one wonders if the increasingly British Orientalist attraction to this phenomenon and their lurid accounts played a role. They were "recruited" around the age of six or seven. How a child can be "recruited" to be a dancing boy is a rhetorical mystery. There seems to be little historical record of how this came about, though it is clear that as Ottoman power and harem culture solidified that dance "recruitment" evolved into ethnic-oriented guilds. It likely developed alongside the devshirme system whereby one child from every 40 non-Muslim households was taken to serve in some bureaucratic or military function of the Ottoman Empire.
It is difficult to see this as anything more than a flex to let the conquered non-Muslim people know the conquerors could turn their boys into a dancing monkey, a girl, and a prostitute and there was nothing they could do about it. Other roles reserved for non-Muslim boys could include the role of the tellak, the washers in the bath houses who could also double up as sex workers for the "clients". Once the shock of the whole system wore off however, it was not uncommon for non-Muslim families to offer bribes so that their children would be picked to serve some function in the Ottoman system since it was the pathway to a better and more prestigious life, regardless of what it would entail. It was the ideology of the imperial state and the alternative was often being put-upon laborers, regardless if it meant giving over their own children as sexual playthings. There was no more shame; it had internalized itself. The temptation is strong to see parallels between that society and the one most of today.
Humiliation moves from public to national to global when we look at the culture today and what the powerful and privileged institutions and media outlets push to the average American. What other answer could there be? Does anyone actually believe that the average American is in charge of their own culture? They can try to lie if they want but their cynical way of speaking about the institutions of the country and their assumption of bad whites as poor and stupid betray them. Do people who supposedly share the same culture view each other as nearly alien or speak of the other side in dehumanizing terms the way the leftist whites and Jewish people view what they call the "Trumpenproles"? These are tribal differences viewed in a war lens.
Who dreams of sexually humiliating their political opponent the way that many of these Democrats do in their anti-Trump cartoons and memes? Who engages in sadomasochistic fantasies of their political opponents, an act tinged in performative violence, other than conquerors? Normal Americans value their right to bear arms and the American culture of having the right to do as you please, shoot guns, eat red meat, have big open spaces with big houses, and have a nice, normal family. The process of humiliation is key to this, whether people want to believe that or not. They often get it backwards because their brains are poisoned by complex ideology so they complicate this with explanations. They puzzle over why those with power want to destroy what normal Americans value when the answer is a simple one.
Because it's something you value.
They care because you care.
There's a famous >reddit
post where a white family posted their entire generational family in a large home. If you are part of the Normal American tribe, it's cute. Normal people like large families, or at the very least they are not deeply affected when they see one. If they see it, they likely won't register a single emotional thought about it.
These people instead saw an enemy tribe that needed to be conquered and humiliated.
Who speaks this way but conquerors? Nobody but a conqueror has glee when they tell someone they disagree with that their children and grandchildren are going to be brown. That's tribal warfare, and it's tribal warfare tinged in sexual violence. The Ancient Greeks had a word for the systemic sexual destruction of a tribe through its women: andrapodizing. This aspect of warfare has "historically been central to warfare and to the creating of enslaved or other subjugated persons in antiquity."
This was considered a natural law of conquest. Xenophon is quoted as writing:
And in his recollections of Socrates in his Memorabilia it is seen as just that an "unjust and hostile" city is enslaved. It is just to use deception to bring down an "unjust and hostile" city. It is just to do what one will to an "unjust and hostile city". Vae victis. Woe to the vanquished. Vae iniquis. Woe to the unjust. A fitting tribute to the conquering liberal and ethnic tribes who see what the vanquished value as forfeit to them.
They want your guns because you value them.
They want your kids to be transgender because you value them.
They want your families dying from drugs because you value them.
They want your kids sexually available to others to flex on you.
They want your daughters in pornography not for profit but so that they can be filmed as subjugated to a foreign tribe for the entire world to see. There is a social dynamic within pornography where white women are "punished" in their status by sex with black men. These are violently titled videos that proliferate pornographic websites in a genre that has not been profitable as even within the industry itself performers do not want to go near it. Broadcast that to the world, and the enemy world sees what they've always wanted to believe: a conquering tribe conquered themselves. That is what humiliation is.
Through media it becomes the ultimate simulation of this and is reified by making it a prestige ideology that the vanquished would become willing to give up their arms, bodies, and families for a place in the ruling ideology without a single shot fired. And for resisting parents, the supreme flex is when the children do it willingly to spite them.
Americans value red meat and living big and free.
So they are going to make you eat bugs and live in pods, and they're going to convince you that's what you want. You'll tell yourself you're saving the world, while they snicker knowing that they can get you believe and do anything they want. Humiliation controls in this way. They love it when you loudly proclaim "No, sir," you won't eat bugs. They're confident that your protests are helpless whines.
They don't want you disarmed, eating bugs, raising a brown grandchild in a pod space because your daughter died from drugs, and clapping for your drag queen son getting fucked in public because it's socially good. They just want to see that because they think it's a funny punishment. Cuckoos birds coming home to roost.
The twisted ways people have tried to control the dominance hierarchy and break the ones they hate or wish to control have a long history. This is nothing new.
III. Season of the Lib
"What does it indicate that our culture is not merely tolerant of expressions of pain, of tears, complaints, reproaches, gestures of rage or of humiliation, but approves of them and counts them among the nobler inescapables?" – Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Dawn"
Understanding humiliation begins with understanding how it works. Broken down there are four elements to humiliation:
The mechanisms of this need not be fully explored. Suffice to say, those who have studied the psychological effects of humiliation have it pinned to a human being's need for status when living in a society, but especially to the right to make a claim of status. It is one thing to be rejected, quite another to be told you never have the right to rise above where you were smacked down in the first place. Being denied this right damages identity and ability to function, inflicts conditions of hopelessness, worthlessness, and learned helplessness, and can perversely create the conditions of violence where having no path for restoration, the humiliated will pointlessly and murderously lash out.
Humiliation is a powerful tool.
"Humiliation is clearly about power; that is, in a general sense power over others." Humiliation says to its target "you are less than you imagine yourself to be". Humiliation can make them believe it. The dynamics of humiliation are the most powerful expressions of power and control, and among the most destructive. Where conventional punishments fail or are insufficient, humiliation and shame return as deterrent and control. From the dynamics of two to the border stones of an empire, humiliation is the paperclips and chewing gum that holds together the mechanisms of control in civilization. The final flex is the public execution, which was a show of humiliation upon the body and the answer from the sovereign to the challenge that crime posed to his rule. It became clear as societies developed that power was integral for the maintenance of society and the ability to hold and imprison was paramount to that political legitimacy.
The birth of the prison developed out of that and punishment favored them more and more due to the unintended consequences of public executions' spectacles–public humiliations backfire when the populace does not fear or respect the sovereign's power. Reliance on the prison led to two separate currents that formed in understanding them–their use as deterrence and their use as rehabilitation. The latter was fueled by the spirit of Christian piety, especially by Quakers whose tenets focused so heavily on a direct relationship with God that the conditions for prisoners to experience personal revelation commanded their reform. The problem of crime and its necessary punishments drove countries like England to send their prisoners across the Earth as punishment, but what do you do when you have nowhere left to send these bodies and reform largely fails?
It was for this reason that Jeremy Bentham, the godfather of liberal society's reflexive utilitarianism, created the idea of prison as the panopticon and constant surveillance as its reform, deterrence, and punishment. The panopticon was a prison whereby within its structure the warden would be able to see what all of the prisoners were doing at all times without the need to do the rounds. It was, in essence, a reality TV show as punishment upon the privacy and souls of prisoners under the auspices of keeping them safe and secure.
This wasn't a mere thought experiment for Bentham, the architect of modernity. He desperately wanted it to be deployed and believed its logical efficiencies made it a million dollar concept. Those who had met him after the failure of his Panopticon scheme noted his bitterness that it was not taken up as the money-printing scheme he believed it to be. Bentham, being the good liberal he was, had also taken the concept to its logical conclusions and believed it could also be used for factories, schools, and hospitals.
While Bentham's scheme lied fallow, piece-meal notions of Bentham's ideas would influence prisons in liberal countries like Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The closest attempt made at a true panopticon before the 21st century was Presidio Modelo, built by the Cuban Liberal Gerardo Machado. Fidel and Raul Castro experienced life in the panopticon, which had utterly collapsed in access to necessities and quality of life, and kept it open six years after taking power before shuttering it for good.
The Panopticon was ultimately an experiment. Michel Foucault notes this in Discipline and Punish:
Bentham has had his revenge. Now society has become the experimental prison with all of its atomized and orphaned children. Just as liberalism, by its very nature must tear down every border and wall for lack of a friend-enemy distinction, so must it make society into a Panopticon. Orwell, being a true English son, understood this when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel of surveillance and humiliations inflicted by a sovereign. Orwell got many things right, but missed many things in his blind side–though given what the novel focuses on this may have been unavoidable. What was missing from Orwell's work was where liberalism has the same impulses as the surveillance and totalitarianism he warned against, though inverted in its implementation.
Liberalism requires a flexible internationalism that outsources its most terrible costs but more importantly that while humiliation may sometimes be kept private under classic totalitarianism–all they ask is that you break to them–under liberalism it must be made public. The reasoning is quite simple. As liberalism denies the existence of out-groups, it is forced to turn inward and to seek the enemy within, to find and root out those that it perceives as a threat to the expansive franchise: the Paradox of Tolerance. And to find these enemies, one must always be watching and waiting. When liberalism doesn't lead to the peace and prosperity it promises then the enemy must exist within and must be observed. What Vaclav Havel called the post-totalitarian ideology–the way the ideology of Soviet bureaucracy becomes reified by individuals who help perpetuate the system–becomes the cultural norm under liberalism. This kind of surveillance is bad enough in any kind of complex society, but when it becomes a technological system it leads to extreme levels of what Kaczynski called "oversocialization"–an intense sensitivity to society's liberal morality that every person is conditioned with and a desire to inflict severe penalties on anyone who violates those rules.
Such a system is self-enforcing and beneficial to those in power. The impossible rules are by design.
The existence of these impossible rules are seen in the nonchalant way the New York Times writes of "cancel culture" among the youth, with casual references to social justice classes and seminars as simply being quite natural. Perhaps it should be accepted as such given that Americans willingly hand over their children for instruction as easily as they were taught the Catechism in their youth. Where they learned of a higher salvation however, their children are brought to a lower damnation. Shunning transgressors who violated the code of conduct was seen as enough in shame societies, but these are performative times and they require a performance. A Dionysian spectacle where the modern maenads redeem themselves by tearing apart and destroying the unclean to please a woke god. In the panopticon of liberal society, for want of being able to engage the power process, each person is fit with the torturer's tools to expose every aspect of a person's life and interfere with it on every level as what the torturer tells his victims is "that all social norms are suspended in dealings with them because they are not human". A chance to be seen putting someone in their place, to publicly shame them, to see their claim to status and deny it; it is more than enough of a reward, even if it's at the behest of power.
It's the kind of reward most prisoners content themselves with.
IV. Fear and Self-Loathing in America
"What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new 'humanity' which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy." – DH Lawrence, "Studies in Classic American Literature"
Harvard was established to train Puritan clergy and it never stopped.
Humiliations runs deep in the American soul. America is not a land that one thinks of when they think of cultural cringe or the self-loathing that other nations, especially Anglo, have been all too eager to revel in. The Puritans occupy the American imagination, as they should for that American soul cannot be understood without understanding the Puritans, one of history's great purity spiralers. Never has the purity spiral ascended so high and fallen so low than in their history.
The origins of the Puritans–briefly. They were England's premier turbo-Protestants of the 16th century and into the 17th century. They sought a pure church, removed from the corrupt trappings that had been imposed by man upon the (Roman Catholic) Church over the centuries, as they saw it. Though they grew in power in England, their most discontent would leave for the New England colonies and found the New World's first university, Harvard University; explicitly to train the clergy. Meanwhile those who stayed behind would eventually claim the head of King Charles I and a Commonwealth under Cromwell. That failed, and with the restoration of the monarchy the capotains (sans those stylish buckles unfortunately–a myth!) thought it best to ghost for America as to avoid those incoming awkward conversations with their new king, Charles II, the son of the man they executed. His brother James II/VII got the boot (for crimes and Catholicism) and the Glorious Revolution would kick-start the coming age of English liberalism. Puritanism petered out in England, but would define America for centuries to come.
Their industrious presence and misunderstood ways in America have served as an eternal mirror of the American soul. Their very name has become a byword for sexual prude, a great irony given that one in six Puritan women in New England who filed for divorce did so on grounds on impotency or that their sexual morality trials are rife with accusations of bestiality, cuckolding, and homosexuality. The more the modern American man has thought he has achieved escape velocity from the nation's Puritan anchor, the more it becomes clear he is pinned beneath it and dreaming from the depths. Puritanism decried Mary worship for worshiping her as Virgin. Puritanism relied on humbling and humiliating the heretic. Puritanism needed equality to establish the equal worthlessness of all in their depravity before God. Puritanism was performative wokeness in its restriction to the "visible saints". Puritanism was the original call-out culture and encouraged all to spy upon all. Dehumanize yourself and face to Harvard.
The distance between then and now is short. Too, too short. When the Puritans are thought of they conjure images of barbaric punishments, social shunning, and scarlet letters of public humiliation. Yet on their punishments, Louis Taylor Merrill found that in the long view the Puritans were not unique in the punishments they doled out. What set them apart appeared to be the public spectacle of it with the myriad trials, accusations, and testimonies. So prevalent was this that it was very common for the tables to be turned on one another within the same trial as everyone accused the other of wrong-doing, and with the total depravity of man such a given each would be litigated. Each would need to do the work of their humiliation. Each would snitch and spy on each other in order to create a more perfect union with the congregation and with God. The truest perception of the Puritan was as the cop.
Merrill writes ominously in 1945, the once and future Year Zero of American consciousness:
All examinations of the Puritan punishment linger on the instruments of humiliation and torture such as the ducking stool, spectacles of the imagination for centuries to come. The ducking stool has no record of being used in Puritan New England, much like the majority of instruments of medieval torture that were never real. These are perpetual fantasies the American indulges in of no longer being a buffoonish monster. The American puffs up in pride at being able to point to a cartoon caricature and feel complete confidence that they are nothing as obscene and backwards as that. The petty tyranny of the truth is that at the end of this fun-house hallway is the scariest mirror of all: the plane mirror of the American soul, where light does not spread.
To know that one will always be a Puritan is the humiliation of the American soul.
Humiliation, it must be said, has a particular meaning in the context of Puritanism. Humiliation here is processional humility. Those who converted to Puritanism all had to undergo this process. You had to understand your depravity. You had to understand that nothing you could do could ever rid you or forgive you from the stain of sin so that you would realize that salvation was God's mercy and Christ was the way before you ever stood a chance of being restored. The process was religiously traumatic, and meant to be. From the Puritan perspective, the Catholic Church had enslaved humanity to notions that they could buy their way out with indulgences and receive salvation through membership and token works. Thus to be humiliated and broken meant to open your heart to introspection and healing, to be wounded so terribly that you'd finally see that only God could restore you at His mercy.
You may have already felt a shiver go up your spine with the question, "and what do you become in this humiliation once God is dead and we have buried Him?"
Nearly everyone gets the Puritans wrong. Humiliation belonged to God, and what public shaming and punishments were done was no more or less than the norm of the time. Strict, but corrective. Some transgressions requiring a permanent correction. What made the Puritans different was the necessity of the public confession and to be witnessed. To close your eyes to the sins of others, to keep secrets and confessions safe as long as you repented and sinned no more, was not a charity but a sinful privilege itself. Humiliate yourself before God, and confess! Confession was the key to this humiliation, and every manner was taken to get that confession, but where there was no confession and there was no witness, they would be set free. "Always, confession opened the way to reconciliation and restoration."
Such that it was that John Buxton Marsden, English historian of the Puritans, wrote that it was only the Puritans who could have subjected King Charles I, the regicided runner-up in the English Civil Wars, to the terms of the failed Treaty of Newport. From The History of the Later Puritans he writes:
The treaty's failures, among the rest of the national clamor, ultimately gave way to Charles receiving the silver medal around his neck on the headman's block. It must be noted, of course, that when Charles was executed, the block was situated in a way that he was forced to lie down versus kneeling, a very deliberate humiliation upon the king. The purpose, after all, in a public execution is to flex political power and for those that consider themselves the lowliest before God to grasp at power and force their political opponents even lower than that must have felt righteous indeed. The meek shall inherit the earth, but beware their political ambitions.
Eleven years of Puritan rule in the Commonwealth ensued. What followed was bedlam with the re-admission of Jews to England after a 350 year timeout, an attempted takeover by an apocalyptic sect who wanted to call themselves sanhedrin and accelerate the return of Christ, and the division of the country into military districts. To speak nothing of the Irish. The experiment was aborted. Monarchy was restored.
The great irony of history is that less than thirty years after the Puritans left, their labor would finally come to fruition. The Glorious Revolution kicked out the final Catholic monarch and brought with it The Bill of Rights in 1689. What stands out about it is it outlawed "cruel and unusual punishment", the first time this phrase would be used in English. This phrase was never properly defined from the start, and it's been a puzzle for legal scholars and historians as to what it actually means. The barbarity of punishments? Their proportionality to crime? Both? Excessive fines and penalties would seem to offer the clue, and if that's the case then that notion has long left America as it subjects suspected heretics against liberalism to an outsourced pillory of plaintiff cases to break their bank account and force a confession in such a humiliating public display. 1689 was a very good year for any English who wanted their dignity restored.
The Salem Witch trials would begin three years later in Puritan America.
Of the Salem Witch Trials, there is not much to be said. The incident invites the opportunists, the hucksters, and the agenda-setters of the world to try and get a bit of attention, turn a quick buck, or make into a Holocaust the murders of 25 Christians from mass hysteria. It was fear and loathing in the New World frontier, the anxious proximity of a red apocalypse of natives that could explode at any moment (the frighteningly violent King Philip's War had only ended 14 years prior) and wicked land ambitions in an unraveling community that destroyed those lives in the traumatic hysteria of the American wilderness. Reverend Parris, the fourth minister the fractious and quarrelsome Salem Village had in less than two decades, sowed the seeds of what was to come through his inability to quell the rising tensions with his publicly disciplinary method of resolving disputes. The trials would involve screaming accusatory questions, coerced confessions, and searching bodies for the Devil's mark. Is this not what they knew best in the Puritan colony, however? Everyone was guilty and confession was good for the soul. Why shouldn't it have ended like this? People are fired for making okay signs like cheeky Puritans. The distance from then and now collapses upon itself.
Such was their infamy that Nathaniel Hawthorne, descendant of the Judge Hathorne who presided over the Salem Witch Trials and its humiliations changed his name to put a great distance between him and his forebears, but he was haunted by him with every written word. The Scarlet Letter, a title that makes high school students now groan, being the first truly and uniquely American novel must then be a novel about public humiliation. DH Lawrence called it "one of the greatest allegories in all literature". Despite the distance he placed, Hawthorne was ambivalent toward his Puritanism. He could not embrace it, but he would not command himself to hate it like Faulkner's Quentin Compson from the humiliated South. It ran through his American bones. Its essence was his American blood-nature and his American soul. How can anyone truly hate themselves and what they are unless they themselves are humiliated? No man can hate himself without total surrender. Self-loathing is the impoverished fiefdom of broken kings and queens.
Auspiciously, The Scarlet Letter had been published just that spring in 1850 when Hawthorne met Herman Melville, who would go on to pen the greatest American novel about what America once was and whose ghosts linger on to haunt her corpse's orphaned children. Biblical and poetic, Moby-Dick chronicles the tragic end of America as a ship full of colored savages being led by insane messianic Quakers on doomed quests to take revenge and destroy the white specter "of our deepest blood-nature". Melville sensed the tragic and humiliating character that lay beneath the surface of America, which it would inflict on everything it conquered, but especially its rebel brother in the South from whom America's only aristocracy would be destroyed for the equality of the coerced confession. It was in that sensitivity to what they were that Melville saw and found his Calvinist brother in Hawthorne with the blackness and a touch of Puritanic gloom. Moby-Dick too, that Great American Novel, is a tale of humiliation stretched out divinely like twisted scripture as Ahab leads a microcosm of all the world in a forsaken crusade not for the inflicted wound–but because the whale bore witness to it.
We are not yet done with Harvard. Oh Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. Your students, your shipwreck survivors of the Pequod, know who you are. You may have forgotten that Puritan past, thought you had become the most serene commonwealth of pure research, but Ahab's crew know what you are and they will lash you back to the prow of this broken ship to serve as figurehead as they resume the chase for the white whale. And that is your humiliation. And that is your wheel to be broken on, and may your eyes find God on the upturn. And may you ask for forgiveness for the perverse and sinful experiments you inflicted on an America you despised in its purity, like Claggart who lies entombed in your very library as a grim reminder of your "natural depravity" and perverse rule over the American soul.
"Tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate America?"
"We don't hate it," we said quickly, at once, immediately: "We don't hate it," we said. We don't hate it we thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; We don't. We don't! We don't hate it! We don't hate it!
The original article link: https://theamericansun.com/2020/01/01/the-feasts-of-shame/
Edit: The website the original link leads to is now defunct. The author had the courtesy to re-upload the article to their Substack https://theamericansun.substack.com/p/the-feasts-of-shame?utm_source=publication-search
"Humiliation with a big H denies the social world of normalized encounter. In fact, it humiliates by virtue of this denial. It tells the victims that all social norms are suspended in dealings with them because they are not human." – William Ian Miller, "Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence"
The air was jubilant in many of those summer months of '44, the tide was turning. The Germans, the dreaded Nazi war machine, was on the retreat as the Allies in the west pushed them back town-by-town out of the fields of France. The shame of humiliating defeat and the occupation by the Germans was finally coming to a close; now would be the time of celebration. People could breathe freely in the air again. They could speak freely again. Love freely again. Be free people again. And to celebrate this joyous occasion they would have a parade–a parade of half-naked shorn women, tear-wet cheeks stained red with shame and lipsticked swastikas, and packed into lorries to the happy jeers and hollers of a blood-frenzied crowd. Within these good people of free France beat the animal hearts of a mad populace that needed to wet their beaks with revenge, to strike another creature and pin it down with primal glee. To humiliate. To remind them, you are not human.
This is not just a piece about the past. This is about the past, present, and especially about the future. This is a work of control, of pain, and of destruction. The dark side of humanity is never an easy thing, and to even glimpse into the darkness is to invite all manners of recriminations upon your character. But this is not only the necessary thing to do, it's the right thing to do.
We have to talk about humiliation.
I. Rituals of Humiliation
"To submit to an insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy–all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being." – Oswald Spengler, "The Decline of the West"
The origins of this essay lie in a manic free association Twitter thread about a Modern Farmer article entitled "This Trick Might Actually Get Americans to Eat Bugs" by one Dan Nosowitz. The medium of Twitter doesn't lend itself well to collecting one's thoughts, much less doing research into the myriad topics that the thread shotgunned all at once. First, we must correct a term.
The term 'humiliation ritual' has its own particular meaning that's used by, for lack of a better term but this is meant neutrally, the conspiracy-minded. That is not the scope of this work. Further, the term 'ritual humiliation' also has another meaning, often overlapping with 'humiliation ritual' and frequently denotes certain types of hazing, but not always. One could argue that many of these things are distinctions without differences, but this will be about the phenomenon of 'public humiliation' and its social and political expressions.
The piece in Modern Farmer is very strange, and has an air of unreality in how it's written. The trick, as it were, in the piece was about how insect farming can work as a middleman in livestock feed. What is bizarre about it is its framing that this is an alternative in trying to break through the American resistance to eating bugs. The question that is begging to be answered here is "why is this something that's on your mind?" Entomophagy has been something that's been near and dear to the hearts of the propaganda class, with Vice magazine writing miserable pieces about being on an exclusive bug diet while concluding at the end:
One could devote an entire book to reading all of the articles that have been published in the last ten years trying to convince people of the delicious virtues of eating insects and digging deep into the who's who and why's why of how this is so important to them. If you read this a year after this has been published, no doubt there will be an egregious number of new pieces written about it. They certainly get upset if you begin to wonder why there's always new pieces about this, accusing the curious of cooking "up a conspiracy theory around the bug-eating trend", though the word trend probably merits a thousand quotation marks around it.
The indignant attitude when questioned plays out the same no matter what the issue is. "Why do you even care?" they ask when people question anything they do in the name of utopia, whether it's race-swaps of fictional and non-fictional characters or chemically castrating children for reasons that are unfathomable to the devil himself. The correct answer is always "I care because you care."
Without a shred of doubt, we know they care a lot about people eating insects. There is an article that is either written or re-posted every week about this. Just do an advanced search on CNN's Twitter for 'bug' and look at the frequency of these articles. A dance has begun to develop every time this happens, where they clearly know the reaction they're going to get as they get mobbed and ratio'd by Twitter users screaming at the top of their lungs "I WILL NOT EAT THE BUGS!", as though they're relishing in what they would view as the people's futile resistance to their plans. They probably are delighted.
The ostensible reasons for this is for ecological sustainability. This is bunk to anyone who isn't an idiot. Populations peak. Things don't go on forever, no matter what your stupid pop songs say, and that's without getting into the issues that your problem isn't ecological sustainability but industrial instability (which is what's going to wreck havoc on the former). Californians are already living in fear of having their power shut off on them. You already know the answer to the perennial question "are things getting better or are they getting worse". The 'cult of progress' has no magical spell that is going to spirit you up a simple and non-catabolic energy source. You're not going to mitigate human and food transport costs by cockroach farming. No, this isn't about sustainability. The one thing you must always remember living in liberal societies that are run by the rootless and the cosmopolitan is that everything becomes counter-intuitive, so you must think counter-intuitively.
You must think counter-intuitively because of the way liberalism functions. Every ideology, every belief, and every group seeks to dominate. This is called life. This is what Carl Schmitt noted when he looked at liberalism and capitalism, that being in this world you cannot escape friend-enemy distinctions and so liberalism being the utilitarian nothingness of flexibility and freedom, it must overcome inevitable conflict by subsuming everything that would oppose it and bring it to heel. Liberalism, just like any other thing, has a will to dominate but because liberalism in its ideology is meant to be free and flexible, it must then dominate everything that opposes it, especially when it becomes tied to economics. There can never be an end to the expanding market under liberal capitalism. Like the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, liberalism must become a suzerain, the ruler of rulers, upon the whole of earth for "only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth".
Liberal capitalism forced open the ports of Japan by black ships and shell guns, for the Japanese were intolerant of the tolerant. This is the true essence of Karl Popper's The Paradox of Tolerance. Popper's so-called paradox isn't an attempt to plug the hole in a mental child's understanding of tolerance but to make the case that anything that opposes the liberal order, but especially those who drive the liberal order, has to be rooted out and destroyed because those who stand for something are always more holistically powerful than the ones who stand for nothing but power itself. There is no vitalism in liberalism.
You must think counter-intuitively. When you see the dopamine-dispensing treats of technocapital you might think you see a world of freedom and choices, but this is merely the IV drip of product to keep you medicated to the will of others. Ask yourself, what autonomy do you truly have to be outside of this system? None. You are living in a false reality. Remember, like anything else, liberalism seeks to dominate and being the flexible nothingness it must then dominate everything. Conquerors do not invade territory to do nice things to it and especially for the people that reside there.
History bears this out.
Our history must be remembered by the light of its fires.
II. Occupied Americans
"Obviously this is a very idealised representation of war; we see a game of pure power, from which one would like to erase all trace of physical and moral suffering. Everything is done in order to pretend that humiliation is not part of the game." – Bertrand Bardie, "Humiliation in International Relations"
The chief selling point of liberalism has been that it's the most peaceful and prosperous system available to mankind, allowing the vast range of humanity to be part of a rising tide that lifts all boats, but there is nothing in this world that hasn't come with its price. Power and status do not abide by any notion of equality. So nothing in this world we live in will ever make sense to you unless you understand you live under an occupation and are thus subject to the rules of an occupation. If you do not start from there, you will fruitlessly search for multiple explanations and rationalizations for everything that the people with financial and media power–the power that matters far more than political power now–push the people to expect and accept, such as vegetarian burger schemes, bug protein, and drag kids.
For every argument that's made about ecological sustainability or making sure that "sexual minorities" are able to express who "they really are" early and often, the question has to be countered "then why are they so aggressive about it?" Why are they so eager to bring about PissEarth, 2025? All the reasons that are given are additional components to the project of total atomization of human society, but when you shed every additional layer to get to the core, the driving force of why, all you are left with is shame; the public humiliation of the conquered. It makes a vicious mockery of the conquered by denying them any bit of dignity. A bitter reminder for the vanquished of their new status in victory's triumph and delight for the victorious.
Public humiliation is intrinsically linked to status. In history, people would be disfigured, branded, or tattooed to deny them their right to simply blend in with society. They would be marked, letting people know what they did to deny them the privacy of the self. Ruining their appearance in this way kept their status low and their autonomy violated. Mass media has only served to amplify that effect, transmitting a village shame into a national shame. People are all too eager to participate in these Little Brother acts, often the only taste of the power process they'll ever have in their lives.
When the Germans lost WWII, the French women who were sleeping with German soldiers and the SS or even just friendly with them had their heads forcibly shaved and were paraded down the street. Many of it done by previous collaborators themselves to curry favor with liberators (read: conquerors) and maintain their own fleeting sense of status. Hair, being an important thing for women, was tinged with seductive implications with longer hair usually a sign of femininity. Denying them this denied them being good women in their essence. These shorners had power over these women, and as we are often told rape is about power, not sex. The resentment of defeat against the Germans necessitated that the nation knew someone would have to pay for it and someone would need to suffer for it and that the hierarchy of status would be restored. The whole nation would know. Wendy Webster writing on this states:
The Ottoman Empire had a culture of boys, actual children, called köçek who crossdressed and danced in sexually provocative ways and were sexually available. These boys, who were kept as dancers until they grew beards, engaged in belly dances with suggestive expressions and steps described as "coquetteish" to the rapture of male audiences. The scenes described bring to mind the sights one might see at any contemporary gay pride parade or a public library.
Most accounts of pederasty in the Ottoman Empire appear to come from the people who went to see it for themselves, such as Byron with the dancing boys. In the case of the köçek, they were banned by the Ottomans in the 19th century due to the jealous fights that would break out over the attentions for these boys, though one wonders if the increasingly British Orientalist attraction to this phenomenon and their lurid accounts played a role. They were "recruited" around the age of six or seven. How a child can be "recruited" to be a dancing boy is a rhetorical mystery. There seems to be little historical record of how this came about, though it is clear that as Ottoman power and harem culture solidified that dance "recruitment" evolved into ethnic-oriented guilds. It likely developed alongside the devshirme system whereby one child from every 40 non-Muslim households was taken to serve in some bureaucratic or military function of the Ottoman Empire.
It is difficult to see this as anything more than a flex to let the conquered non-Muslim people know the conquerors could turn their boys into a dancing monkey, a girl, and a prostitute and there was nothing they could do about it. Other roles reserved for non-Muslim boys could include the role of the tellak, the washers in the bath houses who could also double up as sex workers for the "clients". Once the shock of the whole system wore off however, it was not uncommon for non-Muslim families to offer bribes so that their children would be picked to serve some function in the Ottoman system since it was the pathway to a better and more prestigious life, regardless of what it would entail. It was the ideology of the imperial state and the alternative was often being put-upon laborers, regardless if it meant giving over their own children as sexual playthings. There was no more shame; it had internalized itself. The temptation is strong to see parallels between that society and the one most of today.
Humiliation moves from public to national to global when we look at the culture today and what the powerful and privileged institutions and media outlets push to the average American. What other answer could there be? Does anyone actually believe that the average American is in charge of their own culture? They can try to lie if they want but their cynical way of speaking about the institutions of the country and their assumption of bad whites as poor and stupid betray them. Do people who supposedly share the same culture view each other as nearly alien or speak of the other side in dehumanizing terms the way the leftist whites and Jewish people view what they call the "Trumpenproles"? These are tribal differences viewed in a war lens.
Who dreams of sexually humiliating their political opponent the way that many of these Democrats do in their anti-Trump cartoons and memes? Who engages in sadomasochistic fantasies of their political opponents, an act tinged in performative violence, other than conquerors? Normal Americans value their right to bear arms and the American culture of having the right to do as you please, shoot guns, eat red meat, have big open spaces with big houses, and have a nice, normal family. The process of humiliation is key to this, whether people want to believe that or not. They often get it backwards because their brains are poisoned by complex ideology so they complicate this with explanations. They puzzle over why those with power want to destroy what normal Americans value when the answer is a simple one.
Because it's something you value.
They care because you care.
There's a famous >reddit
post where a white family posted their entire generational family in a large home. If you are part of the Normal American tribe, it's cute. Normal people like large families, or at the very least they are not deeply affected when they see one. If they see it, they likely won't register a single emotional thought about it.These people instead saw an enemy tribe that needed to be conquered and humiliated.
Who speaks this way but conquerors? Nobody but a conqueror has glee when they tell someone they disagree with that their children and grandchildren are going to be brown. That's tribal warfare, and it's tribal warfare tinged in sexual violence. The Ancient Greeks had a word for the systemic sexual destruction of a tribe through its women: andrapodizing. This aspect of warfare has "historically been central to warfare and to the creating of enslaved or other subjugated persons in antiquity."
This was considered a natural law of conquest. Xenophon is quoted as writing:
And in his recollections of Socrates in his Memorabilia it is seen as just that an "unjust and hostile" city is enslaved. It is just to use deception to bring down an "unjust and hostile" city. It is just to do what one will to an "unjust and hostile city". Vae victis. Woe to the vanquished. Vae iniquis. Woe to the unjust. A fitting tribute to the conquering liberal and ethnic tribes who see what the vanquished value as forfeit to them.
They want your guns because you value them.
They want your kids to be transgender because you value them.
They want your families dying from drugs because you value them.
They want your kids sexually available to others to flex on you.
They want your daughters in pornography not for profit but so that they can be filmed as subjugated to a foreign tribe for the entire world to see. There is a social dynamic within pornography where white women are "punished" in their status by sex with black men. These are violently titled videos that proliferate pornographic websites in a genre that has not been profitable as even within the industry itself performers do not want to go near it. Broadcast that to the world, and the enemy world sees what they've always wanted to believe: a conquering tribe conquered themselves. That is what humiliation is.
Through media it becomes the ultimate simulation of this and is reified by making it a prestige ideology that the vanquished would become willing to give up their arms, bodies, and families for a place in the ruling ideology without a single shot fired. And for resisting parents, the supreme flex is when the children do it willingly to spite them.
Americans value red meat and living big and free.
So they are going to make you eat bugs and live in pods, and they're going to convince you that's what you want. You'll tell yourself you're saving the world, while they snicker knowing that they can get you believe and do anything they want. Humiliation controls in this way. They love it when you loudly proclaim "No, sir," you won't eat bugs. They're confident that your protests are helpless whines.
They don't want you disarmed, eating bugs, raising a brown grandchild in a pod space because your daughter died from drugs, and clapping for your drag queen son getting fucked in public because it's socially good. They just want to see that because they think it's a funny punishment. Cuckoos birds coming home to roost.
The twisted ways people have tried to control the dominance hierarchy and break the ones they hate or wish to control have a long history. This is nothing new.
III. Season of the Lib
"What does it indicate that our culture is not merely tolerant of expressions of pain, of tears, complaints, reproaches, gestures of rage or of humiliation, but approves of them and counts them among the nobler inescapables?" – Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Dawn"
Understanding humiliation begins with understanding how it works. Broken down there are four elements to humiliation:
- An individual makes a status claim
- The status claim publicly fails
- The humiliated is rejected by those with status
- Finally, the humiliated's right to even claim status is rejected
The mechanisms of this need not be fully explored. Suffice to say, those who have studied the psychological effects of humiliation have it pinned to a human being's need for status when living in a society, but especially to the right to make a claim of status. It is one thing to be rejected, quite another to be told you never have the right to rise above where you were smacked down in the first place. Being denied this right damages identity and ability to function, inflicts conditions of hopelessness, worthlessness, and learned helplessness, and can perversely create the conditions of violence where having no path for restoration, the humiliated will pointlessly and murderously lash out.
Humiliation is a powerful tool.
"Humiliation is clearly about power; that is, in a general sense power over others." Humiliation says to its target "you are less than you imagine yourself to be". Humiliation can make them believe it. The dynamics of humiliation are the most powerful expressions of power and control, and among the most destructive. Where conventional punishments fail or are insufficient, humiliation and shame return as deterrent and control. From the dynamics of two to the border stones of an empire, humiliation is the paperclips and chewing gum that holds together the mechanisms of control in civilization. The final flex is the public execution, which was a show of humiliation upon the body and the answer from the sovereign to the challenge that crime posed to his rule. It became clear as societies developed that power was integral for the maintenance of society and the ability to hold and imprison was paramount to that political legitimacy.
The birth of the prison developed out of that and punishment favored them more and more due to the unintended consequences of public executions' spectacles–public humiliations backfire when the populace does not fear or respect the sovereign's power. Reliance on the prison led to two separate currents that formed in understanding them–their use as deterrence and their use as rehabilitation. The latter was fueled by the spirit of Christian piety, especially by Quakers whose tenets focused so heavily on a direct relationship with God that the conditions for prisoners to experience personal revelation commanded their reform. The problem of crime and its necessary punishments drove countries like England to send their prisoners across the Earth as punishment, but what do you do when you have nowhere left to send these bodies and reform largely fails?
It was for this reason that Jeremy Bentham, the godfather of liberal society's reflexive utilitarianism, created the idea of prison as the panopticon and constant surveillance as its reform, deterrence, and punishment. The panopticon was a prison whereby within its structure the warden would be able to see what all of the prisoners were doing at all times without the need to do the rounds. It was, in essence, a reality TV show as punishment upon the privacy and souls of prisoners under the auspices of keeping them safe and secure.
This wasn't a mere thought experiment for Bentham, the architect of modernity. He desperately wanted it to be deployed and believed its logical efficiencies made it a million dollar concept. Those who had met him after the failure of his Panopticon scheme noted his bitterness that it was not taken up as the money-printing scheme he believed it to be. Bentham, being the good liberal he was, had also taken the concept to its logical conclusions and believed it could also be used for factories, schools, and hospitals.
While Bentham's scheme lied fallow, piece-meal notions of Bentham's ideas would influence prisons in liberal countries like Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The closest attempt made at a true panopticon before the 21st century was Presidio Modelo, built by the Cuban Liberal Gerardo Machado. Fidel and Raul Castro experienced life in the panopticon, which had utterly collapsed in access to necessities and quality of life, and kept it open six years after taking power before shuttering it for good.
The Panopticon was ultimately an experiment. Michel Foucault notes this in Discipline and Punish:
Bentham has had his revenge. Now society has become the experimental prison with all of its atomized and orphaned children. Just as liberalism, by its very nature must tear down every border and wall for lack of a friend-enemy distinction, so must it make society into a Panopticon. Orwell, being a true English son, understood this when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel of surveillance and humiliations inflicted by a sovereign. Orwell got many things right, but missed many things in his blind side–though given what the novel focuses on this may have been unavoidable. What was missing from Orwell's work was where liberalism has the same impulses as the surveillance and totalitarianism he warned against, though inverted in its implementation.
Liberalism requires a flexible internationalism that outsources its most terrible costs but more importantly that while humiliation may sometimes be kept private under classic totalitarianism–all they ask is that you break to them–under liberalism it must be made public. The reasoning is quite simple. As liberalism denies the existence of out-groups, it is forced to turn inward and to seek the enemy within, to find and root out those that it perceives as a threat to the expansive franchise: the Paradox of Tolerance. And to find these enemies, one must always be watching and waiting. When liberalism doesn't lead to the peace and prosperity it promises then the enemy must exist within and must be observed. What Vaclav Havel called the post-totalitarian ideology–the way the ideology of Soviet bureaucracy becomes reified by individuals who help perpetuate the system–becomes the cultural norm under liberalism. This kind of surveillance is bad enough in any kind of complex society, but when it becomes a technological system it leads to extreme levels of what Kaczynski called "oversocialization"–an intense sensitivity to society's liberal morality that every person is conditioned with and a desire to inflict severe penalties on anyone who violates those rules.
Such a system is self-enforcing and beneficial to those in power. The impossible rules are by design.
The existence of these impossible rules are seen in the nonchalant way the New York Times writes of "cancel culture" among the youth, with casual references to social justice classes and seminars as simply being quite natural. Perhaps it should be accepted as such given that Americans willingly hand over their children for instruction as easily as they were taught the Catechism in their youth. Where they learned of a higher salvation however, their children are brought to a lower damnation. Shunning transgressors who violated the code of conduct was seen as enough in shame societies, but these are performative times and they require a performance. A Dionysian spectacle where the modern maenads redeem themselves by tearing apart and destroying the unclean to please a woke god. In the panopticon of liberal society, for want of being able to engage the power process, each person is fit with the torturer's tools to expose every aspect of a person's life and interfere with it on every level as what the torturer tells his victims is "that all social norms are suspended in dealings with them because they are not human". A chance to be seen putting someone in their place, to publicly shame them, to see their claim to status and deny it; it is more than enough of a reward, even if it's at the behest of power.
It's the kind of reward most prisoners content themselves with.
IV. Fear and Self-Loathing in America
"What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new 'humanity' which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy." – DH Lawrence, "Studies in Classic American Literature"
Harvard was established to train Puritan clergy and it never stopped.
Humiliations runs deep in the American soul. America is not a land that one thinks of when they think of cultural cringe or the self-loathing that other nations, especially Anglo, have been all too eager to revel in. The Puritans occupy the American imagination, as they should for that American soul cannot be understood without understanding the Puritans, one of history's great purity spiralers. Never has the purity spiral ascended so high and fallen so low than in their history.
The origins of the Puritans–briefly. They were England's premier turbo-Protestants of the 16th century and into the 17th century. They sought a pure church, removed from the corrupt trappings that had been imposed by man upon the (Roman Catholic) Church over the centuries, as they saw it. Though they grew in power in England, their most discontent would leave for the New England colonies and found the New World's first university, Harvard University; explicitly to train the clergy. Meanwhile those who stayed behind would eventually claim the head of King Charles I and a Commonwealth under Cromwell. That failed, and with the restoration of the monarchy the capotains (sans those stylish buckles unfortunately–a myth!) thought it best to ghost for America as to avoid those incoming awkward conversations with their new king, Charles II, the son of the man they executed. His brother James II/VII got the boot (for crimes and Catholicism) and the Glorious Revolution would kick-start the coming age of English liberalism. Puritanism petered out in England, but would define America for centuries to come.
Their industrious presence and misunderstood ways in America have served as an eternal mirror of the American soul. Their very name has become a byword for sexual prude, a great irony given that one in six Puritan women in New England who filed for divorce did so on grounds on impotency or that their sexual morality trials are rife with accusations of bestiality, cuckolding, and homosexuality. The more the modern American man has thought he has achieved escape velocity from the nation's Puritan anchor, the more it becomes clear he is pinned beneath it and dreaming from the depths. Puritanism decried Mary worship for worshiping her as Virgin. Puritanism relied on humbling and humiliating the heretic. Puritanism needed equality to establish the equal worthlessness of all in their depravity before God. Puritanism was performative wokeness in its restriction to the "visible saints". Puritanism was the original call-out culture and encouraged all to spy upon all. Dehumanize yourself and face to Harvard.
The distance between then and now is short. Too, too short. When the Puritans are thought of they conjure images of barbaric punishments, social shunning, and scarlet letters of public humiliation. Yet on their punishments, Louis Taylor Merrill found that in the long view the Puritans were not unique in the punishments they doled out. What set them apart appeared to be the public spectacle of it with the myriad trials, accusations, and testimonies. So prevalent was this that it was very common for the tables to be turned on one another within the same trial as everyone accused the other of wrong-doing, and with the total depravity of man such a given each would be litigated. Each would need to do the work of their humiliation. Each would snitch and spy on each other in order to create a more perfect union with the congregation and with God. The truest perception of the Puritan was as the cop.
Merrill writes ominously in 1945, the once and future Year Zero of American consciousness:
All examinations of the Puritan punishment linger on the instruments of humiliation and torture such as the ducking stool, spectacles of the imagination for centuries to come. The ducking stool has no record of being used in Puritan New England, much like the majority of instruments of medieval torture that were never real. These are perpetual fantasies the American indulges in of no longer being a buffoonish monster. The American puffs up in pride at being able to point to a cartoon caricature and feel complete confidence that they are nothing as obscene and backwards as that. The petty tyranny of the truth is that at the end of this fun-house hallway is the scariest mirror of all: the plane mirror of the American soul, where light does not spread.
To know that one will always be a Puritan is the humiliation of the American soul.
Humiliation, it must be said, has a particular meaning in the context of Puritanism. Humiliation here is processional humility. Those who converted to Puritanism all had to undergo this process. You had to understand your depravity. You had to understand that nothing you could do could ever rid you or forgive you from the stain of sin so that you would realize that salvation was God's mercy and Christ was the way before you ever stood a chance of being restored. The process was religiously traumatic, and meant to be. From the Puritan perspective, the Catholic Church had enslaved humanity to notions that they could buy their way out with indulgences and receive salvation through membership and token works. Thus to be humiliated and broken meant to open your heart to introspection and healing, to be wounded so terribly that you'd finally see that only God could restore you at His mercy.
You may have already felt a shiver go up your spine with the question, "and what do you become in this humiliation once God is dead and we have buried Him?"
Nearly everyone gets the Puritans wrong. Humiliation belonged to God, and what public shaming and punishments were done was no more or less than the norm of the time. Strict, but corrective. Some transgressions requiring a permanent correction. What made the Puritans different was the necessity of the public confession and to be witnessed. To close your eyes to the sins of others, to keep secrets and confessions safe as long as you repented and sinned no more, was not a charity but a sinful privilege itself. Humiliate yourself before God, and confess! Confession was the key to this humiliation, and every manner was taken to get that confession, but where there was no confession and there was no witness, they would be set free. "Always, confession opened the way to reconciliation and restoration."
Such that it was that John Buxton Marsden, English historian of the Puritans, wrote that it was only the Puritans who could have subjected King Charles I, the regicided runner-up in the English Civil Wars, to the terms of the failed Treaty of Newport. From The History of the Later Puritans he writes:
The treaty's failures, among the rest of the national clamor, ultimately gave way to Charles receiving the silver medal around his neck on the headman's block. It must be noted, of course, that when Charles was executed, the block was situated in a way that he was forced to lie down versus kneeling, a very deliberate humiliation upon the king. The purpose, after all, in a public execution is to flex political power and for those that consider themselves the lowliest before God to grasp at power and force their political opponents even lower than that must have felt righteous indeed. The meek shall inherit the earth, but beware their political ambitions.
Eleven years of Puritan rule in the Commonwealth ensued. What followed was bedlam with the re-admission of Jews to England after a 350 year timeout, an attempted takeover by an apocalyptic sect who wanted to call themselves sanhedrin and accelerate the return of Christ, and the division of the country into military districts. To speak nothing of the Irish. The experiment was aborted. Monarchy was restored.
The great irony of history is that less than thirty years after the Puritans left, their labor would finally come to fruition. The Glorious Revolution kicked out the final Catholic monarch and brought with it The Bill of Rights in 1689. What stands out about it is it outlawed "cruel and unusual punishment", the first time this phrase would be used in English. This phrase was never properly defined from the start, and it's been a puzzle for legal scholars and historians as to what it actually means. The barbarity of punishments? Their proportionality to crime? Both? Excessive fines and penalties would seem to offer the clue, and if that's the case then that notion has long left America as it subjects suspected heretics against liberalism to an outsourced pillory of plaintiff cases to break their bank account and force a confession in such a humiliating public display. 1689 was a very good year for any English who wanted their dignity restored.
The Salem Witch trials would begin three years later in Puritan America.
Of the Salem Witch Trials, there is not much to be said. The incident invites the opportunists, the hucksters, and the agenda-setters of the world to try and get a bit of attention, turn a quick buck, or make into a Holocaust the murders of 25 Christians from mass hysteria. It was fear and loathing in the New World frontier, the anxious proximity of a red apocalypse of natives that could explode at any moment (the frighteningly violent King Philip's War had only ended 14 years prior) and wicked land ambitions in an unraveling community that destroyed those lives in the traumatic hysteria of the American wilderness. Reverend Parris, the fourth minister the fractious and quarrelsome Salem Village had in less than two decades, sowed the seeds of what was to come through his inability to quell the rising tensions with his publicly disciplinary method of resolving disputes. The trials would involve screaming accusatory questions, coerced confessions, and searching bodies for the Devil's mark. Is this not what they knew best in the Puritan colony, however? Everyone was guilty and confession was good for the soul. Why shouldn't it have ended like this? People are fired for making okay signs like cheeky Puritans. The distance from then and now collapses upon itself.
Such was their infamy that Nathaniel Hawthorne, descendant of the Judge Hathorne who presided over the Salem Witch Trials and its humiliations changed his name to put a great distance between him and his forebears, but he was haunted by him with every written word. The Scarlet Letter, a title that makes high school students now groan, being the first truly and uniquely American novel must then be a novel about public humiliation. DH Lawrence called it "one of the greatest allegories in all literature". Despite the distance he placed, Hawthorne was ambivalent toward his Puritanism. He could not embrace it, but he would not command himself to hate it like Faulkner's Quentin Compson from the humiliated South. It ran through his American bones. Its essence was his American blood-nature and his American soul. How can anyone truly hate themselves and what they are unless they themselves are humiliated? No man can hate himself without total surrender. Self-loathing is the impoverished fiefdom of broken kings and queens.
Auspiciously, The Scarlet Letter had been published just that spring in 1850 when Hawthorne met Herman Melville, who would go on to pen the greatest American novel about what America once was and whose ghosts linger on to haunt her corpse's orphaned children. Biblical and poetic, Moby-Dick chronicles the tragic end of America as a ship full of colored savages being led by insane messianic Quakers on doomed quests to take revenge and destroy the white specter "of our deepest blood-nature". Melville sensed the tragic and humiliating character that lay beneath the surface of America, which it would inflict on everything it conquered, but especially its rebel brother in the South from whom America's only aristocracy would be destroyed for the equality of the coerced confession. It was in that sensitivity to what they were that Melville saw and found his Calvinist brother in Hawthorne with the blackness and a touch of Puritanic gloom. Moby-Dick too, that Great American Novel, is a tale of humiliation stretched out divinely like twisted scripture as Ahab leads a microcosm of all the world in a forsaken crusade not for the inflicted wound–but because the whale bore witness to it.
We are not yet done with Harvard. Oh Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. Your students, your shipwreck survivors of the Pequod, know who you are. You may have forgotten that Puritan past, thought you had become the most serene commonwealth of pure research, but Ahab's crew know what you are and they will lash you back to the prow of this broken ship to serve as figurehead as they resume the chase for the white whale. And that is your humiliation. And that is your wheel to be broken on, and may your eyes find God on the upturn. And may you ask for forgiveness for the perverse and sinful experiments you inflicted on an America you despised in its purity, like Claggart who lies entombed in your very library as a grim reminder of your "natural depravity" and perverse rule over the American soul.
"Tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate America?"
"We don't hate it," we said quickly, at once, immediately: "We don't hate it," we said. We don't hate it we thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; We don't. We don't! We don't hate it! We don't hate it!
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