The Bad, Worse, (And Sometimes Good) Aspects Of Humiliation On A Larger Scale-Part Two-

Today is part two in our two-part series about humiliation. In part one, we talked about humiliation for the individual, where it comes from, and why it's so dangerous. In today's episode, we'll get into the big picture of humiliation using humiliation's positive force for change. Can we humiliate addicts into quitting their addiction? Can we humiliate fat people into losing weight or humiliate tax-dodging corporations into paying their share?

Joe: Everybody has friends when they're going through addiction. They have enabler friends, and they have friends and family that tried to sort of drag them out of it kicking and screaming. And it seems to me that the number one method people use is humiliation.

Todd: I think shunning is probably number one. Socially, there's a group of people that accept whatever you do, but then there's the other group that you have to hide it from. So I think the humiliation comes from the exclusion of all your friends and family because eventually you kind of lose everybody. I guess that's the thing about being at the bottom, right? I mean, that's what it really is…you’re just too humiliated that you've tried everything on your own, and you have to reach out for help from someplace else. You are just incapable of handling yourself, but I think that the bottom is humiliation. You just can't look at yourself in the mirror anymore.

Joe: Right. Humiliation’s cousin is shame and that's you feeling shame for yourself. But humiliation is when somebody else assigns you a low number and it doesn't match what you feel internally. Let’s talk about PSAs for a second. Have you ever seen those commercials where it shows an addict? There's the drunk driving commercial where it shows a car completely full of beer or the anti-weed commercials where it shows somebody melting into a couch literally? What I'm trying to get at is humiliation seems to be our method of choice if we don't know the person personally. I may be completely wrong on this, but I feel like an addict family treats you with if you go too far, we will cut you off because we have no choice. But the public treats you with humiliation. The method of choice for America's shame.

Todd: There's not usually that punch back on our values with family, because we're similar and share DNA. I think they understand a little more than somebody else because everyone has different things that are their weaknesses to them. Whether it's control, whether it's gambling…there's usually some kind of weird thing. But sometimes people seem to be very judgmental over someone else's weakness and not as much of their own if they're not family. But if their family, they just have a little bit of that same tick or on that same point of the spectrum.

Joe: In your experience, has humiliation ever worked for you? Has there ever been a moment where somebody says something to you where It implies shame or humiliation that you should feel bad about what you're doing, and it actually made you quit or quit for a time?

Todd: There has. In my relationships, I've had times when usually your spouse, who is closest to you, is the one that really kind of gets embarrassed by your behavior. I used to have really bad anger problems when I was younger and was shamed for it. They were in pain, and they were trying to get changed, you know? And they thought well, embarrassment works, and it does work.

Joe: Have you ever watched a humiliating or shameful PSA on TV and it actually worked on you?

Todd: Yeah, no. You read it and it sounds terrible, but it doesn't change your behavior at all. It doesn't slap you in the face. It doesn't work.

Joe: Dare actually had the opposite reaction. Have you heard of their anti-fat threads on Reddit and on online forums? I knew that fat shaming was something that happened online, obviously, but I Reddit started policing it. I found out that they had the largest fat shaming community online and it was to the point where hundreds of thousands of people came together because it was an easy place to post pictures and centralize and basically humiliate other people.

Todd: So, they see someone in the grocery store, take pictures of them and send it up there?

Joe: That’s exactly right. It would be like Walmart pictures, and they would see somebody who was overweight in line, and they post it, and other Redditors would just pile on them. It’s easy to pick out somebody who is doing worse than you. It could be somebody who weighs more, somebody who's an addict, etc. Double points if it's somebody who seems like they have a choice about what they are. If you have an addiction, it's easy to point to you and say, oh, that's a choice. You chose to be an addict, or if you're fat, you literally had to buy that sandwich to get fat. So, it's easy to get online and feel better about yourself if you don't have much going on by picking somebody else out and saying they chose to be worse than me.

Todd: But you're not picking on people with MS or Lupus or people who are sick. That's not their fault, right?

Joe: Right. I think that's why this fat-shaming thread on Reddit lasted so long and got so big because you could justify it. It's kind of like, how many taxes Target vices. So I think that's the overall message. We have a society where we believe if we humiliate you hard enough, you will stop whatever awful thing you're doing. And in reality, what we're doing is we're just benefiting from humiliating you, where we're making money off a tax that hits you. If you're an addict, we're making money off of you if we're going to publish a PSA and get funding for it. We're feeling better about ourselves because we get to pick on you on Reddit, when in reality, we're just sort of using you as an outlet. So I guess the big question for today is, does humiliation at a large societal level work? Does any of this broad humiliation do anything whatsoever except make us feel better temporarily and hurt the person we’re humiliating?

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Joe: I've got a really weird question for you. Have you ever heard of the Rat Park Experiment? It was also called the rat Heaven experiment.

Todd: What is that?

Joe: We talked a bit about this like 100 episodes ago, but scientists for a very long time had been experimenting on rats to measure engaged addiction and try to get people out of it. They would put rats in cages, and they would give them a water bottle with drugs in it or alcohol and a water bottle with just water. And they would wait to see if the rats got addicted. And that was their measure of how addictive a substance was. If they put cocaine in one water bottle and water in another, the rats would choose the cocaine until they died. But at some point, another scientist came along and said, "Well, why don't we put other things in this tank, like toys? Give them outlets. And they found out that addiction rates plummeted very quickly. Even more, this was a repeatable experiment. This wasn't a one-off. There is a 15% change in mammals across the board where addiction exists regardless of what outlets are available, but it's not nearly as lethal as giving them nothing else to do.

Todd: Is that Middle America with the methamphetamine problems? Just seems like that's what you see in these small towns because there's nothing else to do. And that seems to be the general opinion of why drugs are rampant in these areas and not in more populated cities.

Joe: Right. And we keep trying to humiliate people out of their bad behavior and in reality, it's just they don't have other outlets and we're not giving them other outlets. We're just trying to humiliate them out of the behavior and effectively making it worse. There is a slew of studies on this. One of which I found that was really great was a report that talked about Portugal decriminalizing drugs. They made all substances legal. And if you're wondering what that looks like…they decriminalized all drugs in Portugal, and they put just a fraction of that money into resources for addicts to get clean and sober and they put a fraction of that money into places they could go to start recovery and you know, counseling. They stopped the humiliation tactics and gave outlets and acceptance. They basically emulated the Rat Park experiment and got a 50% reduction in addict rates and deaths. There's a really good TED Talks by Johann Harry. And he basically breaks a lot of the stuff down, like he hits a lot of the same beats. He talks about how if you want to kill as many addicts as possible, you use the American system. If you want to save as many addicts as possible, the opposite of addiction isn't prevention; it isn't to go to war on addiction; The opposite of addiction is acceptance. It's finding ways to plug people back into society.

Joe: Have you ever seen humiliation work on companies?

Todd: Well, I think so, I think when there's the big lawsuits or bad press from bad work conditions. I think that they have to clean that up.

Joe: We recently had an episode about the Princeton sex scandal, which honestly should have destroyed their reputation, but it didn't. Could you briefly talk a little bit about what we covered in that episode?

Todd: There was a linguistics master professor who was grooming relationships with a lot of younger undergraduates. And then when he was called on and he was asked to stop, his ego just went out of control and his core values showed through. Instead of apologizing and stopping, he doubled down and worked twice as hard.

Joe: Right. He turned it political and said he was being canceled and attacked cancel culture. When in reality he was going after 18 to 19 year old girls and grooming them for years. I'm starting to believe, and I don't know if you're with me on this, but doing this podcast and researching stuff like that has convinced me that I don't think corporations change unless they're humiliated. If we talk about positive forces of humiliation, I don't think it's addition and fat shaming that makes people more depressed and makes them double down. I'm starting to convince myself that humiliation's only positive force is on a large scale. We covered in the last episode how humiliating the individual in the right way can teach humility. I'm starting to think that you have to target corporations and large groups because I think the only reason why the Princeton thing was addressed was because it got so much bad publicity.

Todd: I think they care more about the bottom line, success, and their own pockets than they do about how ethical that really is.

Joe: I think that if humiliation doesn't last long enough for a company, they slip back into their old ways even worse. There's a difference between briefly humiliating somebody and exposing their bad practices forever. I think this is what happened at Wells Fargo. They had a system where if you didn't sell enough credit cards and open enough accounts, you got fired. The turnover was huge. People started opening fake accounts to not lose their jobs. Speaking of scandals, I think it's also possible for a company to be too powerful to be humiliated. Did you hear about Apple being caught tax-dodging?

Todd: Yeah, I did. Tax evasion goes back to about 2013. Tim Cook, the CEO was brought from the Senate because it turned out that Apple has three major parts of their business, somehow based in Ireland. They figured out that by moving over to the small company in Ireland, they made 30 billion dollars without paying taxes in 10 years. Then another section of that Apple company did 22 billion in profit and only paid 10 million in tax.

Joe: It points to a larger problem to me, which is I hadn't heard of it. I had no idea they were flagrantly and openly tax dodging, and that they had been caught and grilled by the Senate. That humiliation didn't work obviously because they didn't stop doing it either. They never changed their policy after that grilling. They absorbed that humiliation because they are so big. I went looking for something to counter that. I want to know what it looks like when big companies actually do get humiliated long-term. I found a real instance, this comes from the University of North Carolina at the Kenan Flagler business school, where they did a long-term study after Australia passed a really interesting law. Australia back in 2013, they passed the tax laws amendment bill, which means that it allows the Australian tax office to publicly release corporate tax information.

Todd: The world's biggest audit.

Joe: Exactly. It makes business weep and sweat because everything is on the table. Now, what happened was mass shaming right away. People went to the streets and we're boycotting different businesses pulling an Apple where they're moving their money overseas. They found out that about 900 out of 1,800 companies weren't paying taxes in Australia and found out that the shaming didn't really work that well because so many of them were breaking the rules that they kind of got lost in the crowd.

Todd: Well, that makes a lot of sense. It’s not as sexy to lump them all together.

Joe: I think that's kind of the point we want to land on, which is that bad behavior isn't unique to any one corporation or really any one person. It really just comes down to who's in the crosshairs at the moment. They even say in the study that transparency and getting caught as a corporation, that's not really what changes anything. Australia didn't change this tax information or moving on companies to get them to reform because of this outrage, the outrage didn't do anything. It was the long term transparency. It's not about outrage and humiliation for the moment. It's about awareness and long-term transparency and making people outraged enough to change law. Ultimately, I think that's where humiliation actually works. If it changes the laws in a productive way, that's when you get good humiliation. Can we say good humiliation?

Todd: I think I think that's okay. People like me need a little bit of embarrassment, a little bit of correction.

Joe: I think, for me, the lesson in this is that humiliating an individual makes them decouple themselves from society, and you make them worse as a person and pretty much every instance; they don't learn, and they don't correct themselves…they perish. If you humiliate a large entity like a corporation, they can recover by spinning public Image. But if you expose a flawed system and get enough people outraged at the policy, you can actually change something.

Joe: Let's talk about something light-hearted. If we've landed on the idea that humiliation can be a positive change to two laws and to policy, let's look at an actual policy or law that has benefited from humiliation. Do you have any examples?

Todd: I do - Bogota, Colombia. It’s a very beautiful and big country, but it has a very high crime rate. It’s extremely dangerous to commute. There's a lot of carjackers, a lot of kidnappings, a lot of murders, a lot of people hit by cars. So, the new mayor comes in and has a really interesting philosophy on this. Instead of the usual police in Colombia policing the streets, he hired mimes to do it. I'm talking about ones you'd see in a circus. When he painted them up and he put them in, it cut traffic deaths in half instantly. He also would paint red silhouettes of people who had died in different places, not as a tribute but as a reminder that it's dangerous. It broke everyone's state. And when they see the red paint on the street it makes them stop and pause and think, I don't want to die today, and I don't want to kill anyone today. So it's a very interesting and effective way of lightening the mood in a very dangerous city.

Joe: So, the mayor who did this, this guy is known for doing these sort of large-scale, systemic changes by using weird social experiments. He launched an event called night for women, where he asked men to stay at home. So, 700k women who would normally be at home caring for kids could go out and have a couple nights of fun dedicated to them. Do you want to talk about an update about Apple and whether or not the humiliation actually lasted after they were dragged into to testify?

Todd: No, there wasn't anything that really changed. I write it off as in something else happens in the world that is more important or distracting. I think overall people think if you pay too much in taxes or if you can get out of taxes and it's somewhat legal, it’s okay. It's not black or white in this country and we often see those who avoid taxes as great leaders and great businesspeople. We don't see them as stealing or not being patriotic. We see them as being intelligent.

Joe: If anything changed from this one instance of humiliation, in 2016, the European Union and the European commission found that the Irish state had facilitated Apple's international tax avoidance. That's their words. Not mine. And they ordered that Ireland would have to collect 13 billion euros, about fifteen billion dollars, in unpaid taxes from Apple.

Todd: That’s from years and years.

Joe: That was in 2016, and pretty much right away, the general court of the European Union overruled the commission's decision and found in favor of Apple and Ireland. So they reversed the decision. They said no, you don't have to pay taxes…it's fine.

Todd: Sorry for the inconvenience.

Joe: So, Apple won that round. However, last year, Ireland itself got mad. Ireland changed its tax laws to kick these companies in the balls. There's an article we'll share from The Verge that talks about how they weren't just targeting Apple, even though that was a huge factor. It said Ireland joined an international agreement that sets taxes and profits for multinational corporations at a minimum of 15%. So anybody who's tax sheltering in Ireland will now face 15%. That's huge compared to what they're paying now.

Final Thoughts

Humiliation on its own doesn't move the corporate needle. In our last episode, we learned that humiliation can't hurt you if you have rock-solid values. When Douglas H. was called the credibly stupid one every day by the guards at the Hanoi Hilton, it didn't hurt. In fact, he played into that role knowing at his core what he stood for. Want to know why public humiliation didn't work on Apple or Starbucks? Because deep down, most successful corporations know where their moral bedrock lies. It's making a profit for the shareholders. That's why Apple continues to use Ireland as a tax haven, even after being exposed.

It doesn't seem to matter who you are humiliating - the individual or the group. The act of shaming someone into compliance is an all-around failure. Humiliating an addict makes them more secretive and prone to overdose. Humiliating companies makes them rethink their public relations campaign, and humiliating political groups for terrible policies just makes them entrench themselves harder. In rare cases where we see humiliation work, it's never the humiliation that does the changing, it's raising awareness. It’s getting people to unite to change laws.

Good journalism and public awareness can change laws. Acceptance and health resources can reform addicts. Humor and a basic sense of empathy can reduce crime better than shame techniques or crooked policing. The next time a politician brags about locking up addicts because he's tough on crime, we should ask what they're planning to do about the 100 billion dollars Apple sent overseas to avoid paying their share.