Shaming is a big no-no in today’s world, the late liberalism of 2025. The rule of the day is Just Let People Enjoy Things. Don’t judge. Only consent matters, and so long as no one did a heckin’ violence, everything is allowed. When someone tells you their lived experience, you must listen and believe. Bullying is totally unacceptable, and everyone should be accepted and loved exactly how they are. The most important value in the world is your own personal self-expression, unbound by boorish moral norms.

Even on the right, where you would expect practices of shaming to persist, things keep moving steadily in this direction. Right-wingers cannot agree that people should be shamed for abusing drugs, for being promiscuous, for practicing homosexuality, for having abortions—for much of anything really. Some of us still think those things are shameful, sure, but in the age of MAGA that viewpoint is far from unanimous. As long as you like Trump and don’t like libtards it’s generally anything goes aside from that.

Don’t get me wrong, there is value in not liking libtards, but why is the bar so low? Even us deplorable right-wingers, myself included, have internalized a certain degree of live-and-let-live attitude. I don’t tend to truly judge people for their flaws and failures in life—usually it’s more an attitude of resignation, a thought to myself of “well, that’s unfortunate.” We all have certain narratives and stereotypes planted firmly in our psyches as to why things should be this way; perhaps the most well-worn is the tale of the evil conservative parents who mistreat their non-conforming child.

I’m not here to deny that there is any truth in that tale. Because we are human beings, we are flawed and fallen and all of us capable of evil. That means we are capable of pointless cruelty, and given the opportunity, we will often enact pointless cruelty. There is no denying that such unnecessary suffering occurs in any society, and that any sort of prevailing moral norms which lead to social shaming will create opportunities for it to occur.

I do want to present a counter-argument, though. On an individual level, it is easy to understand why everyone would buy into this laissez-faire liberalism. After all, if you go around judging other people for their flaws, well what happens when they figure out that you’re flawed too? Sure, maybe Jimmy drinks too much, but perhaps I’m over here jerking it to hentai five times a day. If I call Jimmy a drunk, he can retaliate by labeling me, quite accurately, as a gooner. Easier for both of us to live and let live.

Of course, it would be better for both of us if we stopped drinking and gooning, and better for society as a whole if there were a prevailing standard against drunks and gooners. Social shaming is the stick we could use to achieve that noble end, or at least it’s one of the sticks. Liberalism protests this by pointing out, correctly, that some people really are victims of circumstance, and they will be caught up as collateral damage if we were to truly unleash this stick upon society’s degenerates.

In the case of alcohol and other forms of drug abuse, this manifests as the narrative that substance use is a “disease” rather than a moral defect, painting the abuser as essentially a victim of nature in the same way as a person stricken by cancer. Since we know that substance abuse runs in families, and can deduce that certain people have something like a genetic predisposition towards it, this narrative is at least half-true. What do we do, then? To shame, or not to shame?

This is where I would like to introduce the concept of moral hazard. Narrowly defined, this refers to behavior in which “an economic actor has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk.” Perhaps the most famous example of this is behavior observed in the US housing market in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, in which tons of junk mortgages were sold under the implicit guarantee that the federal government would back them up, which indeed proved to be the case when the shit hit the fan and then everyone got bailed out.

It's a pretty simple concept really, something I learned about in undergrad, but it stuck with me because it occurred to me how thoroughly this basic idea translates into so many social dynamics everywhere in life. When it comes to people’s lifestyle choices, moral hazard is absolutely in play, and traditionally social shaming would be the “full costs of that risk” part of the definition given above. If you made bad lifestyle decisions, society would impose a corresponding cost upon you, just like prices being used as signals in the marketplace. In this way people are dissuaded from engaging in all manner of social free-riding.

However, those costs have to be imposed in a fairly indiscriminate fashion in order to function at all. Under our modern liberal worldview, this is unfair and wrong, because people who genuinely can’t help themselves will end up being judged the same as those who can. This sucks, but there is no good solution to it—there is no reliable way to apply social standards selectively, in such a way as to only hit people who truly “deserve” them while sparing those who are truly helpless. I mean, you can try, and probably get it right in certain cases, but generally it doesn’t work.

That is because people spin their own narratives about themselves—who they are, how their mind works, why they do the things they do. We can make educated guesses about other people based on their behavior but when push comes to shove the minds of others are a black box. No one truly knows what is going on in there besides the individual and God. Perhaps more importantly, in order to even make decent guesses at the truth of someone’s self-narrative, you have to know them very intimately. You might be able to make some accurate deductions about family members or very close friends, but that’s it.

For everyone else, all you really have to go on is what they tell you. What they tell you may be dishonest without even being a lie—it is obvious that people will construct narratives that are self-serving, and that they will generally self-deceive themselves into believing that the narratives are true. No one else can truly reach into their mind and detect when this is going on or to what extent.

Let me illustrate with a brief example from my own life. I used to drink alcohol. For quite some years, I drank alcohol. No one would have called me an alcoholic, but occasionally the alcohol caused me trouble. Without going into too many details, one day it caused me enough trouble that I decided to quit. I no longer drink alcohol.

Why am I telling you this? To illustrate the malleability of one’s self-narrative. At no point in my life, or during my journey with alcohol, did I ever say to anyone that I had a “disease,” or that I couldn’t help it, or that I had to drink because of X Y and Z. Maybe I would have pulled that crap when I was younger, if push came to shove, but by the time I decided to quit I knew better. I did not have a disease. I was not helpless. Drinking was a choice. I drank alcohol because I liked it. There was not any other reason, so when I decided that it was time to quit, that was the end of it; and if I pick up a drink again, it will be my fault, plain and simple.

I didn’t have to see things this way, though. I could have gone with the “disease” narrative. I could have decided that I was just sick, that I couldn’t help it, that I needed alcohol because of reasons. I could have gone through the routine of getting sober for a while when I really had to due to some sort of consequences, before inevitably relapsing, because of course I was going to relapse, after all it’s a sickness that I was born with. I can’t help it, so you can’t judge me for it.

Which one of these is the truth? I have told you which one is the truth, and I believe it is the truth, but it’s also the case that it is the truth because I decided that it is. That’s how our brains work. If I went with the “disease” angle, unless you knew me very well personally, you wouldn’t have any real way of judging the sincerity or truth of that self-narrative. Oftentimes, even if you do know someone very well personally, you may not be able to fully ascertain such a thing.

This brings me back to social shaming and moral hazard. This dynamic is the reason why social shaming has to be relatively broad and indiscriminate. Once you open the door for people to get exceptions based on their personal circumstances, all of a sudden you’ll find that everyone’s self-narrative magically begins conforming to those exceptions. In the example of irresponsible mortgage lending leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, it was the federal government which incentivized such behavior through its implicit guarantee that everyone would be bailed out if things went south.

When it comes to lifestyle choices and self-conceptions, it is lax, non-judgmental cultural norms which play a similar role. In a culture of “just let people enjoy things,” “only consent matters,” “you’re perfect just the way you are,” etc., then you don’t need to push yourself to work hard, do the right thing, or accept personal responsibility for any of your flaws or failures in life. You can spin a victim narrative where everything is out of your control, you can’t help that you were made this way, and it is everyone else’s responsibility to accept that and not to judge you for any of it. God isn’t real so he’s not looking down on you and free will doesn’t exist anyways, right?

You can see this affecting people’s identities and lifestyles almost anywhere you look:

--The rise of people claiming mental illnesses and self-diagnosing themselves with things like autism
--The rise in young people who are content to just live in their parents’ basement and do nothing
--The rise in childlessness and decline in marriage
--The rise in transgenderism and other deviant sexual behaviors
--The anti-cop, anti-law enforcement BLM/”defund the police” movement, which regularly raised up violent criminals as martyrs
--The acceptance of rampant homelessness and of the severely mentally ill being left free to roam the streets, an attitude best exemplified by the newspeak term “unhoused” used to describe such people
--The acceptance of mass illegal migration (notice how, when claiming asylum gets you a free ride into the country, everyone and their mother is immediately willing to make fraudulent asylum claims—textbook moral hazard)

This list could go on forever. Practically any anti-social behavior you can imagine falls under this umbrella. In the example of someone with a drinking problem, the moral hazard is that they can relapse and see how much drinking they can get away with this time, knowing that if things go south it’ll just mean at worst another stint in rehab surrounded by sympathetic voices who will commiserate with them about being sick and getting well for a few months, or a few years, or however long until they feel like trying their luck again, rinse and repeat.

If they had to face more severe consequences from a relapse—let’s say harsh social sanctions from friends and family, never mind society at large—perhaps they’d be more likely to hold onto the wagon a little harder. The liberal will point out that some people are just going to drink anyways, and then if their friends and family cut them off, they’ll have no reason not to spiral even further from there. And that’s true, that would definitely happen to some people. In a sink-or-swim situation, a few people will, unfortunately, probably sink. But I imagine that when “swimming” consists of just making some bare minimum efforts to cultivate virtue, most people will find it in them to swim.

I’ll end this post by relating a life experience of mine, that of being bullied as a child and a young teenager. I know I wrote a note about this at some point, but I’m not sure if it’s popped up in a post yet. Anyways, yeah, I was that weird kid who got picked on for a few years. A lot of it was definitely pointless cruelty; I am sure there are better ways to discipline people than outright bullying, but hey, kids aren’t exactly paragons of virtue. The important thing about my experience with bullying was that if I cried about it, no one gave a shit.

Adults might grudgingly offer me some sympathy, but their heart wasn’t really in it, and there wasn’t much they could do about it. They couldn’t force the other kids to like me and they didn’t really try to. Some of them said that I brought it on myself. The bottom line was that I had no easy out—there was no victim story I could tell to anyone that could buy me any reprieve. I was a weird, awkward young white boy and no one cared about me. The result of this was that, slowly, painfully, I had to change. My only option was to change my behavior or just keep getting shit on forever.

That was a long process with a lot of hurdles but I got there eventually. By the time I got into high school proper my bullying days were behind me and I was able to cultivate a social life from there. The truth was, I did bring a lot of it on myself. Probably not all of it, but I was socially dysfunctional, and I could see that clearly in hindsight. I learned the hard way that I could change my behavior and get results, that my problems were up to me to solve and no one else.

I’m not going to sit here and unironically say that we should bring back bullying, but I do think that perhaps things have gone too far in the opposite direction. I have to wonder what kind of person I’d be as an adult if I’d grown up some decades later, in today’s “no bullying” hugbox world. What if everyone around me just “accepted me for who I was,” and told me that I was perfect already and didn’t need to change? Would I have stayed a dysfunctional loser forever, my personality crystallized into that of a schizoid twelve-year-old? Probably not fully, but still.

The point is, there’s a real trade-off there that people often don’t think about. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that adolescence seems to be extending longer into the lifespan with each new generation, to the point that these days people’s entire twenties are often seen as an extended period of adolescence. Some might be tempted to say, well, what’s the harm? Who cares? No one’s getting hurt, after all.

The concern here is similar to the concern with the national debt. The national debt has spent decades ballooning wildly without any severe consequences, yet. There’s that key word: Yet. Likewise, this cultural trend can’t go on forever—is it just going to keep scaling up until people are still acting like teenagers in their forties, and even beyond? What happens then? Unclear, but it probably won’t be pretty. These sorts of bills tend to come due very slowly, then all at once.