Shame is weird.

It has little to do with who we are as people, and everything to do with the roles we are called on to play.

If we accept a role and bungle it — even if it is forced upon us — we will feel due shame for playing it poorly, however little we personally identify with that role. If we are forced to dance, and we dance badly, we are made to look ridiculous. This is true even if we are not dancers and care nothing about dance. And that ridiculousness clings long after the dancing ends.

But shame does not necessarily harm dignity. We can maintain dignity even in humiliation.

Personal dignity doesn’t immunize us against the pain of shame. And even if we bear shame with dignity, it can damage us socially, in the outer layers of our social persona, even extending beyond the role we bungled.

If we choose, shame can drive us to new depths of dignity. If our dignity is no deeper than our persona, shame destroys us.

Another strategy for overcoming shame is pride, which is not the same as dignity. Pride treats the contempt of others as unimportant, if not nonexistent. Pride does not attempt to reestablish lost respect, but instead meets contempt with contempt. Pride tries to kill shame. But pride is expensive.

I care what people think. But I have clarified to myself what matters more and matters less, and so I exercise my own judgment, even while listening to and caring about the judgment of others.

I can recover from any humiliation, but in the meantime I cannot avoid feeling whatever shame I feel. I cannot avoid it and I refuse to try.

Did I learn this from Nietzsche?

The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

It should be beneath our dignity to stay in humiliating conditions.

Maybe shame and dignity are the mysterious levers society uses to pushes us away from where we do not belong to where we do belong, even (or especially) if we have to make that place for ourselves.