On Accountability, Reckoning with Indifference and Using Shame as a Tactic

Or: how vegans could have told you a lot of people wouldn’t care about the coronavirus but that can’t stop us

Marla Rose
6 min readJul 22, 2020
Credit: Carol M. Highsmith/rawpixel

I listened to Brené Brown’s excellent podcast last week, Unlocking Us. I highly recommend the whole podcast but this episode in particular really resonated with me as an activist. The episode was on shame — a specialty of hers as a researcher — and how futile it is to try to motivate people toward positive results through the use of it. The long and short of it is the reactive, less rational part of the brain locks in when a person feels shame, overriding the “thinking” part of the brain that can analyze, sift and sort, and empathize.

The human shame response is so intertwined to our survival as a species, it registers physiologically as if our very safety were under threat, with these moments activating a self-centered, visceral reaction, rather than the more reasoned and compassionate response required for honest accountability. It makes sense that we would have such an overwrought reaction to shame at times: as a social species that thrived best interdependently, when we feel that we might be at risk of being expelled from the safety and security of a social structure, we react in the most primitive of ways to…

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