[motohagiography]

Does a humiliated person bear any responsibility for their feeling? I ask because while I sympathize with her examples, I can also think of many unsympathetic examples of humiliations, and the person's response to it, and I'd wonder whether humiliations are the result of power shifts. Many people I know are sympathetic to violent responses to humiliation, and even in the article, the interviews with convicted muderers showed their decision to kill someone was often over a related issue of respect.

Being witty or funny gives you the power to shame, and often it's unintentional, to where we might consider the target of a well aimed observation to be fragile for being offended. And yet, we wouldn't blame someone or hold them morally culpable in a disadvantaged relationship for turning the tables, even with a pair of scissors in the back. I don't have answers, but I'd wonder if there is a more general idea of where the responsibility for humiliations and their consequences lie.

[warent]

Communication is a two-way road. We need to be tactful and mindful of how we're communicating and empathizing with people. Simultaneously we need to work on ourselves so that we don't spontaneously react when we're triggered. When conflict arises, often times more than one person is at fault.

[motohagiography]

Indeed, the empathy piece I'm often suspicious of because the personalization of an interaction causes at least as many problems as it solves. We can't fake empathy, we can't empathize with everyone, and it's presumptive to expect others to treat us as a peer, so I err on the side of civility over empathy. The conventions of civility are designed specifically to avoid humiliating people unintentionally, where empathizing can get into personal business where humiliation and its conseqeunces become inevitable.

[karaterobot]

This is a good question.

I imagine there is at least a 2x2 matrix of humiliation: on one axis, there's intention (did A intend to humiliate B, or was it inadvertent?). On the other axis, there's public versus private: is the person humiliated in a way that other people will know and remember?

There may be more axes, but those are the big ones, to me.

It seems like it's fairly uncontroversial to say that someone who inadvertently inflicts a private humiliation known only to the humiliated deserves the least amount of blame, while someone who intentionally humiliates someone in public deserves the most.

For example, an inadvertent, private humiliation might be that you and I are talking privately, and you make a joke about my alma mater, which I care a lot about. You didn't mean it personally: you didn't even know I went there, let alone that I was sensitive about it. No one else hears you say this, and two minutes later you've forgotten about it. On the other hand, I take it to heart, and carry a grudge for years.

Most people would say you're not really at fault at all. You could have been more circumspect, but I'm the one who needs to lighten up.

On the other hand, if you and your partner are at the beach, and I come up to you and kick sand in your face, and everybody around you laughs, that's a public humiliation, and I'm 100% responsible for it.

These feel like different situations, and the distinctions between them just aren't captured by the single word 'humiliation'. Perhaps these more precise words exist in English, and we just don't use them very well, but it feels like if we did then this confusion wouldn't even arise.

It's like having 50 different words for snow, because snow is such a large part of your culture. Our vocabulary for talking about humiliation is limited. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to live in a culture that has 50 different words for humiliation!

[sorokod]

I'd say about half of the responsibility.

Humiliation us about the percived damage inflicted on the self constructed self image. One is responsible for one's perceptions and constructs.

[drewcoo]

I would say all of the responsibility even if they're not the cause.

Unless we want some kind of thought police making sure we don't think the wrong things or - worse - cause bad thinking in others.

[matheusmoreira]

> I'd wonder whether humiliations are the result of power shifts.

Advantages, privilege, power imbalances... All of these are at the core of humiliation. It's all about the violation of a person's sense of self. You believe you have worth but someone else comes along and strips you of it.

> the interviews with convicted muderers showed their decision to kill someone was often over a related issue of respect.

This is universal in human nature. When one person humiliates another, consequences are likely. Even in civilized society, there are consequences. They just tend to be more formal and indirect. They come in the form of simple exclusion from a group, not being elevated for a prestigious position, trials at a court of law, things like that. In less civilized circles, people are held accountable for their words and actions immediately, directly and violently. For certain kinds of people, a man getting his respect is more important than his life.

Humiliation causes violence. In so many cases, physical violence was not going to happen until the victim said or did something that humiliated the perpetrator. Challenging a man with a gun by saying he doesn't have the balls to shoot it will provoke an attack. It humiliates him, makes him less of a man and leaves him no option but to shoot. It's really easy to end up making this sort of challenge while under a stressful situation. There are no shortage of cases where a violent person starts to leave the area but the victim just has to get that last insult in, they just need to have the last word, teach them a lesson and put them back in their place. "Yeah, crawl back to the shithole you came out of." Is it any wonder the situation escalates to violence?

> And yet, we wouldn't blame someone or hold them morally culpable in a disadvantaged relationship for turning the tables, even with a pair of scissors in the back.

It's interesting to observe who is and isn't blamed. For example, incels also fit this description and they are certainly unsympathetic to the vast majority of people despite the constant humiliation they endure.