Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Nobody must ever see those test pictures, I’d been thinking all week. Never.

—

Now, as I lay in my hotel room, I understood the truth of it. My terror of humiliation had closed a door. Great adventures that might have unfolded involving me dressed as a woman would never now unfold. I’d been constrained by the terror. It had blown me off course. Which, actually, meant that I was just like the vast majority of people. I knew this from studying the work of David Buss, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

One day in the early 2000s Buss was at a cocktail party when the wife of a friend began flirting with another man in front of everyone: “She was a striking woman,” Buss later wrote. “She looked at her husband derisively and made a derogatory remark about the way he looked, then turned right back to her flirtatious conversation.”

Buss’s friend stomped outside, where Buss found him fuming, saying he felt humiliated and wanted to kill his wife: “I had no doubt that he would do it. In fact, he was so wild with rage, such a transformed man, he seemed capable of killing any living thing within an arm’s reach. I became frightened for my own life.”

Buss’s friend didn’t kill his wife. He calmed down. But the incident shook Buss up. Which was why he decided to carry out an experiment. He asked five thousand people a question: Had they ever fantasized about killing someone?

“Nothing,” as Buss later wrote in his book The Murderer Next Door , “prepared me for the outpouring of murderous thoughts.”

It turned out from his survey that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women had experienced “at least one vivid fantasy of killing someone.” There was the man who imagined “hiring an explosives specialist” to blow his boss up in his car, the woman who wanted to “break every bone” in her partner’s body, “starting with his fingers and toes, then slowly making my way to larger ones.” There was a bludgeoning with a baseball bat, a strangling followed by a beheading, a stabbing during sex. Some people were set on fire. One man was exposed to killer bees.

“Murderers are waiting,” Buss’s book bleakly concludes. “They are watching. They are all around us.”

Buss’s findings deeply distressed him. But I saw them as good news. Surely fantasizing about killing someone and then not doing it is a way we teach ourselves to be moral. So Buss’s conclusions seemed silly to me. But there was something different about his study that I found extraordinary. It was something that — as Buss’s research assistant Joshua Duntley e-mailed me—“we did not code for specifically.” It was the part where Buss asked them what had stimulated their murderous thoughts.

There was the boy who daydreamed about kidnapping his schoolmate, “breaking both his legs so he couldn’t run, beating him until his insides were a bloody pulp, then I’d tie him to a table and drip acid onto his forehead.” What had the schoolmate done to him? “He ‘accidentally’ dropped his books on my head and all his friends had a good laugh.” There was the office worker who imagined “tampering with my boss’s car brakes so he’d have a braking failure on the motorway.” Why? “He had given me the impression that I was a real loser. He would mock me in front of other people. I felt humiliated.”

And on it went. Almost none of the murderous fantasies were dreamed up in response to actual danger — stalker ex-boyfriends, etc. They were all about the horror of humiliation. Brad Blanton was right. Shame internalized can lead to agony. It can lead to Jonah Lehrer. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

And so there in my room I decided that on day two of Brad’s course I would go for it. I would let the shame out. I would be Max Mosley. I would be radically honest.

• • •

On day two of Brad’s course, Brad asked me in front of the group if I’d like to take the Hot Seat, given that I’d been so quiet on day one.

I cleared my throat. Everyone was smiling expectantly at me as if I were the start of a good television program.

I hesitated.

“Actually, I won’t,” I said.

The expectant smiles turned quizzical.

“The truth is,” I explained, “I don’t think my problems are as bad as everyone else’s problems in the room. Plus, I don’t like conflict.”

I clarified that I wasn’t against conflict in a weird way: I quite enjoy watching other people being in conflict. If I notice two people yelling at each other on the street, I would often stop at a distance and have a look. But it just wasn’t my thing to participate in conflict.

“So I don’t want people to think I’m anti — Hot Seat,” I concluded. “They’ve been my favorite parts of the course so far. I find the lectures in between them quite boring but the Hot Seats are great.”

“So you want there to be a Hot Seat but you don’t want to be the one to get in it?” said Brad’s friend Thelma.

“Yes,” I said.

“I say do a Hot Seat right now, go ahead and get in it,” Thelma said.

“No, no,” I said again. “I’m honestly more comfortable watching other people do it.”

“CHICKEN SHIT!” Thelma yelled. “I call CHICKEN SHIT! If you get a chance to jump on Jon, do.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. “But seriously, I’ve got nothing that’s so pressing for me to be in the Hot Seat. I don’t want an awkward silence and I don’t want to dredge something up. I’d be faking it. I just think other people here have got more issues than I do.”

“BULLSHIT!” yelled Thelma.

“YOU’RE AN ARROGANT CONDESCENDING BASTARD!” said Brad.

“I don’t think I said anything condescending,” I said, surprised.

“‘You people need it and I don’t,’” said Brad, impersonating me.

“I actually really resent you for saying that,” said Jack, the veterinarian with the sex addiction. “It was FUCKING condescending. I also resent that you’re sitting there fiddling with that fucking phone constantly, which I find extremely distracting. I RESENT YOU FOR HOLDING THE PHONE!”

“Can I say something about the phone…?” I said.

“We don’t give a fuck what your reason is,” said Brad. “We’re going to resent you whether you explain it or not.”

“That’s not how conversations work,” I said.

“Jon, do you have a resentment you want to share about anyone in this room?” said Melissa, hopefully.

I paused. “No,” I said.

“I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT YOU’RE A BULLSHIT ARTIST AND EVERYTHING YOU’RE SAYING IS BULLSHIT,” yelled Brad.

“RIGHT,” I screeched. “I resent YOU”—I glared at Jack—“for saying I’m condescending. I’m NOT condescending. I was basing my opinion that your problems are worse than mine ENTIRELY on the things you’ve all SAID IN THIS ROOM. And I resent YOU”—I looked at Thelma—“for acting like Brad’s stooge, like his gang member. There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people. You swamped me with a tidal wave of Brad’s ideology.”

“THAT’S A STORY YOU’VE MADE UP ABOUT ME!” shouted Thelma. “Yeah? He wants to tell me, ‘FUCKING BACK OFF,’ but he’s afraid of the conflict! So his mind kicks in!”

“I resent you for repeatedly yelling ‘Chicken shit’ and ‘Bullshit’ at me because…” I said.

“Not ‘because,’” said Thelma. “That’s interpretive.”

I stared openmouthed at Thelma. She was COACHING me? In fact — it dawned on me — none of the yelling was a break from their therapeutic milieu. It was Radical Honesty. It works wonders for some of Brad’s clients. But it wasn’t working wonders for me. I was beginning to feel intensely rageful.