Jon Ronson and Brene Brown: A Conversation at INBOUND 2015, Full Version

Key Takeaways

maybe I maybe this is a bad idea to start this on a downer but I just read this morning that that a fourth person from the Ashley Madison hack has committed suicide this was a Baptist Minister I think in Mississippi killed himself so there's now four suicides as a result of Ashley Madison and and it just reminded me of a thought I had when I was writing my shaming book which is that one real Paradox about public shaming is that we blly do to other people routinely the thing that we are most afraid would be done to us how did you come to to shame through the opposite through wanting to understand connection and so I started interviewing people I'm a qualitative researcher about connection and when you interview when you talk to people about connection they talk about the opposite of connection which is disconnection and shame feeling like they're not worthy of connection do you remember like the first time you you noticed that well the first time I ever heard really heard the word and thought it meant something was I was working in residential treatment in the Texas Hill Country and we had had a really difficult time there had been a child who tried to run away and another who had committed self harm and so they gathered up all of the staff and said you know we know we know know you're anxious we know that everyone's kind of on high alert but we're seeing different behaviors from the staff than we're used to seeing and we want to remind you that you cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors and so I think he kept talking but after he said that I was just totally not present I was like what do you mean you can't shame people into changing their that's how the world Works um and so I met with him and he was a clinician and he just said lasting meaningful shame change is never a product of Shame and I think so when I started my PhD that was such a counterintuitive crazy idea to me that you can't change people since I brought up my my book about public shaming and one incredibly annoying byproduct of the book coming out is that people who enjoyed shaming other people who felt it was the right thing to do felt it was social justice and so on and and and sure you know social justice is important let's put that to one side for a second but but the people who kind of felt that punishing people for a poorly worded joke for instance was the right thing to do instead of listening to what I had to say some people then decided to try and shame me and shame the book people have lost the ability to distinguish between I think serious and unserious transgressions but I say to people all the time look if if you're serious about making the world a better place piling shame onto shame like some kind of dodgy Builder covering cracks is not it just it does not work work what works is breaking the cycle with with compassion and and empathy and people only people seem to only want to hear that theoretically you know they don't really want to hear it they like the sound of it they do but they also want to go on and carry on doing exactly what they were doing before so have you found that yeah I mean I I'm really fascinated by the intersection of our work actually um I've been thinking about this a lot especially because I reread your book for the interview man people are in so much pain and we're so much we're we're we're better at inflicting pain on people than we are at feeling our own pain there's a cruelty to shaming that people don't understand that it strips the humanity away not of only of the people that you're shaming but of the people who are doing the shaming yeah like interviewing thousands of people about their experiences of Shame what I can tell you is when I sit across from people and they say yes here's how I was shamed growing up or here's how I've experienced shame in my job that pain is nothing compared to the pain that people feel when they realize what shame is and how it works and what they've done to their own children or their Partners or their employees or their students um when shame and humiliation become kind of Blood Sport what it brings up for me is how many people are in just so much pain that they actually derive pleasure from seeing someone else hurt it's a pandemic as yeah as as somebody sent to me the other day in fact for you know social media Prides itself on hating tabloids and reality TV yet social media acts time and again like tabloids and reality TV oh my God yeah um labeling people reducing people to the worst thing that they ever did and you're right all of these awful things that everybody can agree is terrible we then routinely go back and do on social media and you're right the the pain and the ubiquitous pain is is really evident social media very quickly became a very very unhappy place and if you leave it for a little while or if like me you're sort of forced off it for a little while because of the uh Fury of the push back when you go back you think to yourself God why is everybody so unhappy and why can't anybody say that none of this is going to fix any problem you know it's interesting too because I have a community that's really largely social media my tribe is very social media based and they're just big-hearted great generous people and there is zero tolerance for cruelty and I don't know if it's because like my Mantra is cruelty is cheap easy and chicken like I just think it's just not brave to be cruel and be anonymously cruel is especially chicken to me um so I think my community the thing I love about it is they won't tolerate meanness but they don't go Angry villager either okay so this is the criticism that I get a lot um and I think it's a misplaced criticism and I'll explain why but I'd like to ask you what you think about this so people will say okay this is all well and good but look at us privileged white people um social media is gives a voice to the voiceless it's the only voice that marginalized people have and so when you criticize people using their voice on social media you're basically saying you can't give a voice you know you're basically saying no marginalized person you're not allowed to have a voice um maybe before I tell you why I don't think that's a valid criticism can can I ask your view on that well to be honest with you because the people I see being the cruestv on Twitter it is privileged folks um and so I think Twitter and Facebook and you know social media in general as an activist tool is absolutely um gives voice to the voiceless but more importantly which I think is a bigger part of the of the conversation about activism is it gives ears to the earless I mean I think it's not about I mean I think the voiceless have voices I think it's about privilege and not hearing people's real stories and people's real pain so I'm all about using social media for activism I just think it's not effective because what happens with shame we have a very limic response to shame we don't have a thoughtful response to shame shame is fight flight um and so if you really want to change someone if you if there's a corporation who's you know doing wrong you know bad things guilt and guilt is a much better thing hold their values up against their behavior and show the cognitive dissonance there yeah not shame yeah because if you say you're just you're a horrible person um no one can hear that yeah and in fact it's worse than you're a horrible person it's like I I I see phrases like who is this garbage I see that phrase over and over again um I was talking to Jad from Radio Lab and he said he's got like a kid about six years old or something and he said when he goes on social media sometimes he thinks it's like the kind of Developmental stage of language where people are trying to use like they're they're testing the waters by using like the worst language just like a six-year-old kid will do they're using like the worst language they can possibly think of and it's almost like and I say in my book it's like toddlers crawling towards a gun um I I read I remember that line Yeah It's haunting yeah and I I think the other I mean I agree with you with what you said about social media I think over and over again you're seeing not actual social justice but you're seeing a kind of cathartic alternative to social justice you know somebody tried to tell a silly joke that's you that comes out bad you know ruining that person is not social justice it's just perpetrating another terrible act in the world but it feels great but it feels great to people temporarily but I don't think it feels good after time I mean I think I think people are desperate I think people you know I was thinking about what do some of the things the the the stories you write what do they share in common like what and I think it is that we are all so sick and tired of being afraid all the time and being found out that when someone does something wrong wrong and we can just pull all of that energy of we're hiding we're afraid we don't feel like we're enough all the scarcity and just unleash it on someone that it feels great um but it creates the very environment that we're afraid to live in yeah exactly we're doing to other people the thing we are most afraid would be done to us creating a kind of surveillance Society where kind of war is there's like a war declared on human nature I don't want to be around people who don't make mistakes who don't misspeak who don't you know I mean like yeah the pressure the press and for the for for the young yeah yeah yeah I mean you know I said somebody the other day it's like I I just simply don't understand why the young have decided to create such a stressful world for themselves maybe they're just not thinking it through don't you think we would have done it though yeah I I I guess you know often not always some people are just dicks but and I don't like to sort of say that because it's because it's it sounds sort and and I've never really said that out loud before but actually some people just enjoy being mean but I think for a lot of people it comes some people are just dicks that's true yeah yeah I I I think for a lot of people it comes from a good place you know so from a compassionate place you know there's a there's a terrible irony that it's often it's the desire to be compassionate that's leading people to commit these profoundly uncompassionate acts like destroying somebody for nothing I don't believe that do you not think other people have actually said that they think I'm being kind of too I don't believe that yeah even yeah I guess people know we know the difference between a serious transgression and an unserious transgression right I don't think people have control over their emotional beings when they respond that way I think emotion is driving cognition and behavior and people are being super irresponsible and I don't buy for a minute that you think attacking someone and wishing that they were assaulted or killed or hurt because they've done something irresponsible or stupid or even dangerous I don't there is no way that would ever fit into my definition of compassion you see honest that's rage right you see honestly the reason why I say that sometimes in public is because I'm so I'm so like I don't want to shame the shamers no I don't want to shame the shamers either yeah so maybe I'm I'm I'm saying that because I'm trying to to come from a from like generous place this place yeah no I mean I think there's this thing I live by um that I I believe people are doing the best they can um even the people who made the mistakes the people who shame the out of people who make the mistakes I believe everyone's doing the best they can so my question becomes what boundaries need to be in place for me to be in my integrity and be generous toward my with my assumptions toward people and so I just can't participate in it or see it yeah so if somebody you know if someone writes something really ugly on my Facebook page which happens within it used to within seconds my community would just annihilate that person I mean like I so what did you think about that oh I said come on take a deep breath people that's not who we are I'm deleting this comment because it's my Facebook page if you want to have the stuff on your Facebook page go for it but there is no there is no excuse for hurtful Behavior period yeah and I don't care I don't care what people do here's the thing if you really want to do something meaningful it can't involve hate and rage so if it's hateful or if it's full of Rage it's not helpful and in the world today you're either making the world a better place or you're making the world a worst place in my opinion I don't think there's a lot of neutral Behavior so you're either making the world a better place are you're contributing to the pain in the world and and when you sit back and do nothing that silence is also a contribution I'll quote Neil per here from Rush what is it the quote from when you choose not to decide you still have made a choice I think like a good Rush lyric to bring home the point um but I mean really and so I think for evil to succeed it takes good people to do nothing to do nothing by the way when I was writing my book I I um lots of people as you can imagine said oh you've got to read bne Brown and I I deliberately didn't because I didn't I wanted to kind of come to my own yeah conclusions I wanted to kind of have my own adventure I knew you'd been on a similar thought path before me and so I didn't want you know I didn't yeah that makes sense yeah so but then afterwards I I did read your work and a couple of individual lines that I came up with were almost identical to lines that you came up with and the one in particular I was so pleased when you when I saw that you'd written this too because it seemed so simple but it took me you know a couple of years to get there was the the cure for shame is is empathy yeah and I really noticed that people don't realize like when 10,000 people are telling a single person that they're disgusting and they need to get out and they're not good enough to be in society like like what happened with Justin Saka it's profoundly traumatizing it's way more traumatizing than the Sheamus like to think it is and it mangles up your mental health and then if one person comes along like I did with Justine Sako and say I think you were really poorly treated I think you you're you're a victim here you're not the perpetrator it's it's really healing you know oh yeah I mean yeah I mean it took me years to get to that place too but I mean I always say if you put shame in a Petri dish it needs three things to grow exponentially secrecy silence and judgment if you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and you dous it with empathy you've created a hostile environment for Shame Shame absolutely can't survive empathy and it can't survive being spoken so if you share your shame with someone it's very hard so if I call you and say God John here's what happened at work today and you respond empathically and I know I'm not alone it's very hard for shame to hang on you know I'm I'm a fifth generation Texan so I can't imagine upbringing more different than probably in an intellectual left from the UK right right but where I come from what we would say is no ma no matter how smart you are wealthy you are prestigious you are that's never an excuse for Bad Bad Manners and the people who rage the loudest and blame the most usually have usually lack the courage it takes to truly hold people accountable because accountability is a vulnerable process accountability is writing sacko a letter saying here's what this meant for me as she was the Tweet person yeah the HIV posit you know here's what it is for me as an HIV positive person or here's what this meant for I'm raising African-American children today and this is what this tweetment for me it's hard and it takes time and effort and it's not emotional it's thoughtful and so to me there is some level of arrogance In This Very rarified space of debate that most of us who are just waking up and packing lunches and driving carpool do not have time for yeah it is self-indulgent and unnecessary and I think it hurts the world