Rootkit 10
Rootkit 10 states that 'In the good world, shame is what you feel when everyone thinks you did wrong, whether you did or not.' It is FALSE. It is the tenth statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 10
Quoted from Puzzle One.
What you feel, if you didn’t do wrong but people think you did, is frustration, anger or disgust. You feel shame only when you accept that everybody around you is right to think badly of you, because you agree with them that what you did was bad. In the good world, shame is the pain you feel when you know you have caused grief to others. In other words, people only feel shame if they accept the code that judges them, and in the survivarium, when they cause grief, they mourn for the grief they caused, because that is the right attitude to have towards it. Shame is very powerful: it’s what keeps people good. But for shame to work, everyone must agree on what is shameful.
This agreement is broken in hanyo town. What shames a hanyo? Losing. Being bested by another hanyo. Being seen as less worthy, less respectable, less smart, less strong, less right. For a hanyo, the only thing worse than being defeated by another hanyo is being defeated by a person. This is true even if the defeat is as small as the person failing to smile in just the way the hanyo expected. Furthermore, hanyo town operates on the guilt standard: every action, wrong or right, starts out hidden, so when wrong is done no one knows what the wrongdoer did except the wrongdoer and the victim. Guilt is secret shame, that is shame that is being prevented from performing its corrective function. When a society assumes that wrongdoing must result in guilt, not shame, then justice becomes a game where the justice-givers try to catch the guilty, and the guilty ‘win’ by staying hidden and avoiding shame (or lose by getting caught, and are then shamed for getting caught).
What shames a person in hanyo town? Well, getting chicken-hunted is way up there on the list: even though you’re the victim, you’re supposed to be destroyed by shame when hanyos or Bully Boys rape you, as if you were the wrongdoer. Where does this shame come from? It’s the shame the hanyo rapist ought to feel, which he has dumped on you as if it were mud he could walk away from. Cue all the nasty jokes and ostracism, the hunter’s boasting and ‘get over it’ trashtalks, the laughter and the snarls. The only reason hanyos get away with it is they’re all in cahoots to put the shame on you. Unfortunately, there are people who help them do this: hanyobait. Hanyobait lives by pleasing hanyos and destroying other people, because people will trust hanyobait where they won’t trust hanyos. You should avoid them. Don’t be friends with any person who thinks victims of chicken-hunting should be ashamed.
The hanyos have broken shame because they know how powerful it can be. Shame ought to be a force for good, not evil, and that’s how it is in the survivarium. The hanyos ought to feel shame for the grief they caused, but when you cry in the presence of a hanyo, he gets angry and accuses you of using ‘chick-tricks’ on him. Crying for you is winning, he screams, then he beats you some more so you scream rather than weep. Then he feels relieved: he has made you behave as badly as he did (you screamed and hurt his ears, so you’re the bad guy now) and he has made you feel not just like a victim, but also like a loser: that is, someone who has no choice but to be the victim whenever and however the hanyo decides, and he wants you to show him that you know it. Put on a good show for him and keep your thoughts to yourself: you don’t belong under his thumb.
When shame works for justice, it is the best and gentlest regulator of the moral universe. If you want to build a just society: you only have to do one simple thing: align shame and praise with justice and injustice. People thirst for approval, from everyone they meet but especially from loved ones. If the pat on the back you get from your broos is the same pat on the back the whole world wants to give you, you are in paradise. Our kids learn that when they cry tears of grief, they get a hug, but when they cry tears of shame, they only get their hug after they peel their sticky. So we do our utmost to help people who have done wrong to work off their shame and cleanse their record, and then we hug them and congratulate them and throw them a party.
Anyone can be shamed; for instance this morning I got a purple shamesticky because I was too absent-minded to acknowledge a greeting. With purple shamestickies, which are about communication without touch, you get a five-second sorry-window, in which if you apologise you can avoid the sticky, but I was staring into unisense while at breakfast so I let the window go. If it takes you more than five seconds to say sorry for faulty communicating, then either you have doubts about whether you did wrong, or you need to be gently reminded that you have a pending task. To peel the sticky, I have to seek that person out and say sorry by tomorrow, and I will do it sincerely because if I’ve hurt someone, even unknowingly, I want to know and put it right.
I am glad I was stickied, because without the sticky I might never have noticed that shy person who murmured a greeting, then wandered away disappointed. It was someone sitting nearby who saw this happen and quickly tagged the feed and stickied me, for which I thanked her and pushed her one thread of red karma. The next day me and my ‘victim’ had a lovely conversation.
Here’s another thing to note: shame doesn’t have to be big shame. Small shame is better, because you can work it off and forget about it. Everybody prefers small shame to big, so we deal with our stickies promptly and don’t let them pile up. Sometimes, of course, people get stuck in karmafug and have trouble peeling their stickies, but we have ways of helping them through the Redflag Response. More about Redflagging in Puzzle Three.
