Ableism, Social Ostracism, and the Truths Behind The Human Desire for Belonging
In the Netflix documentary Crip Camp, Neal Jacobson tells the recording crew an antidote about the internal hierarchy between people with disabilities. Back in the 70s, Neil met the love of his life, Denise. She was a woman who was wheelchair dependent from cerebral palsy. When Neal told his mother that he wanted to marry Denise, Neal's mother responded, “I understand why you want to marry a handicapped girl, but why can't you find one with polio?” When Neil's mom says polio, she is, of course, referring to people with the actual disease because, in her mind and the mind of the campers, someone with polio would be more desirable. Compared to cerebral palsy, someone with polio might appear less disabled. That idea that some disabilities would be ranked higher than others is known as ableism.
It's a hidden internal class system among disabled campers - a hierarchy that, according to INCLUDEnyc, puts people with more obvious physical disabilities below those with invisible impairments. This hierarchy is ultimately a minor footnote in a grander Crip Camp documentary, a documentary about acceptance, belonging, and social awareness. It was featuring disabled campers and non-disabled counselors coming together in a way they never expected. But it's this footnote that we want to focus on for today's episode. In the camp where everyone is equally an outsider in the eyes of society and where everyone wants to belong, these campers couldn't help but still rank each other, at least subconsciously. Because being human is needing to belong, and belonging means knowing how you stack up alongside everyone else.
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Speaking of belonging, anyone who's indulged in Netflix’s buffet of cult documentaries has seen that educated people frequently end up in doomsday cults. Gangs are structured like family's, a kingdom that made a dangerous zoo full of meth and 400-pound carnivores semi-functional - thanks to a dedicated crew who banded together like a dysfunctional family. We all need to belong somewhere. An episode about why we need to belong would be very short. We need a family of some sort for emotional support. As humans, we need each other to survive against tigers and storms. So how do we bond? What do human bonds look like from the outside? What prevents us from being accepted into a group in the first place? So, in today's episode, we want to tackle these questions and bust a few myths.
Myths like…
} Myth 1: Why can't we all just get along? If you decide to stop feeling ashamed and just act confident, you'll stop being treated differently, right?
} Myth 2: Take risks, live your truth, and express your authentic self. The only thing you risk is social ostracism. That isn't so bad, is it?
} Myth 3: Why don't we adopt hate in the first place? Are acceptance and love as contagious as behaviors?
Joe: The first time Todd and I met, we talked about how interesting it is at our public speaking group that everyone professes acceptance culture and that everyone just needs to be braver and have confidence. And then the very next week, we saw somebody get cut from the group. Nobody voted them out, but we definitely saw social ostracism in a very accepting culture.
Todd: That was supposed to be a safe place where they build you up to go out in the world. Even organizations like religious groups and sports teams are very cliquey.
Joe: Nobody should feel ostracized. I mean, we've done episodes on loneliness - if you want to go back and listen to Arthur Bremer. We know that not belonging is horribly detrimental to your health. We see people being made into a pariah and ostracized online all the time. Cancel culture is a thing. You don't just need to fear it because you've done something wrong; you need to fear it if you made yourself look socially awkward or someone in a
socio-economic class that doesn't fit.
Todd: I've been on both sides of that, Joe. But being on the outs of it, it's humiliating, and it's painful.
Joe: I think the reason why we're talking about today is because the whole documentary is wonderful. And there's a very poignant moment where everyone is supposed to feel like they finally belong, but they still start ranking each other. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Todd: This documentary is one of the powerful ones. It stirred up emotion. But let me go back - kids in this were in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, kids in those days with any kind of disability were total outcasts. Most of them weren't allowed to go to public schools, and some of them were kept like dogs in a kennel in the basement of schools. They were also sent out to institutions, and these are more like prison camps. Sometimes the kids don't even get fed and were rolling around in their own feces. It's disgusting and sad.
Joe: That to me was the saddest and most heart-wrenching part of the documentary. I know that it was all very emotionally charged, but the videos of the facilities they were using to warehouse disabled people was the worst.
Todd: These kids, when at home, had no extracurricular activities, no friends, and they had no community. But everything changed when they went away to their first disability camp. They weren't outcasts anymore, and they immediately fit in. These kids got so comfortable in their own skin. A lot of it was being away from their overbearing parents. The funny thing about this camp was all it really did was let the kids be kids. They were holding hands, playing music, and ate together like a family. They also dated, kissed, and messed around as healthy teenagers would. The best part was they got counselors who had no experience with health care or special needs children. These counselors didn't treat these kids like patients like everyone else had – they treated them like kids.
In this part of the show, we are going to talk about shame and guilt now. Do you ever feel guilt or shame about something that is naturally a part of you? For example, your instincts, how you feel about something, or how you react naturally? Currently, the more modern one we have been trained to be aware of is feeling shame or guilt about whether or not we are in the social right. It’s also referred to as virtue signaling. The reason this is relevant is because we are trying to apply the need to belong. We have a primitive need baked into us to want to get along with the tribe because if you feel shame or guilt, it is a social calibration. Your brain is built to feel guilty or shameful when you do something that is beyond the norm so that you recalibrate and look like the rest of the tribe and not get kicked out. The problem with that is our brain is built to be in a small tribe of like a dozen people. Today, we are on places like Twitter with thousands and thousands of people, and we're getting a lot of different messages. But the pretty consistent message across the board is acceptance. Everything can be argued online except acceptance or people who don't like acceptance culture.
We're going to go with a Scientific American article because we want to know how guilt works and shame works. If we can mechanically understand what the difference is and how they work, we can divine how we should be acting. The last piece of this is it healthy to feel shame and guilt? Because a lot of people want to make you believe that if you stop feeling ashamed and just confident, everything will work out. I think a little bit of shame and guilt keeps you in your place from becoming too extreme and hurting other people and hurting yourself. There is an amount of social grooming that can be healthy. Of course, if you feel shame or guilt to an excessive degree, seek professional help, please. We are not professional help – researchers at best.
Overall, according to the article, conditions must come together for someone to feel shame. Notably, the person must be aware of having transgressed the norm. They must also view the norm as desirable and binding because only then can the transgression make someone feel truly uncomfortable. I think practicing awareness and context helps a lot. For example, if you are blowing your top and you see a line of people behind you who are not blowing their top, that is social calibration, and they'll be giving you the stink eye. They'll be making sure you feel that tribal shame. That's not to say that people won't have those moments. It's better to be aware that you're going to have those moments and then be able to look at the emotions as they happen to observe them and then recalibrate after.
Self-esteem can also affect this. If you have chronically low self-esteem, you may feel more shame than guilt. Guilt is almost like a reaction. You must commit a transgression action or crime to feel guilt. In short, you have to have something to feel guilty about. Shame is simply about feeling bad for “me” or having a problem. This article talked about how adolescents are more prone to this and that the propensity for shame goes lower when they hit middle age – then by age 50, it decreases. But later in life, it goes back up again, possibly because people are getting older, and their body is not holding up. We had a great article early in our show on self-esteem, where we found out that self-esteem peaks around 50 or 60. We worry more about our declining body, but we also give less shits about norms that we have transgressed. By middle-age, our character is more or less set, and norms have less impact. But as we enter old age and worry about declines in our body and our appearance, we start feeling self-conscious again.
You don't have to have cerebral palsy or a disability to feel shame or guilt. Everyone comes prepackaged feeling shame or guilt, and it's a function that keeps you from straying too far from the norm. I ran into another study in NPR, and it's about how the brain is wired for gossip. In fact, that's the title of the article. In there, they looked at how volunteer brains bonded two different kinds of information. They found that pupils get big taking in more information. Now, gossip actually exists for evolutionary reasons - to get your role and your value in the group by knowing information by sharing information. Gossip can calibrate us. It lets us know what our chances are so that we don't have to rely on our own judgment all the time.
Stepping into myth 3, what makes us willing to hate somebody else? What makes that behavior seem okay? Are you better than someone else because we seem to separate ourselves from the process of hate, and we treat it like it's something only monsters can do. When, in reality, we have it baked into us to do this - to ostracize each other. To start, let’s go through that process from behavior to hate. Now, we like to believe that we are immune to hate, but I have realized there are times I remember hating somebody or hating a group. It's built into our brains to hate, regardless of if we like to believe that our default is peaceful and loving. Our default is really to pick sides and stick with your group when there is a conflict.
We then justify it by saying we're saving ourselves and we would rather separate ourselves. Research indicates that hate gets the most traction by not actively deciding to hate someone or a group but simply cutting them out of your life, so you do not have to worry about them anymore. I think that's why awareness becomes such a force in this documentary when they're talking about not wanting immediate change; they want awareness. We did an episode on Google's teams where we looked at how social groups looked like chemical bonds. If you look at a social group from the outside, the way they connect to each other looks like chemical bonds. Now, not everyone is a connector or node. Not everyone offers themselves up to multiple groups to be a source. Those are the people who network or tie you to other groups.
In our team's episode, we talked about how the more groups you are in, the better informed you are on your overall worldview. And the more you become an information broker, the more resources you gain. It all stems from a trending behavior spreading, and the more people who see it among groups, the more they are exposed to it. Thus, the more likely they are to pick it up and do it. This means, according to another Scientific American article on anthropology and the science of social pressure, if your cluster or network picks up a behavior, I can go back to another group and spread it. It literally spreads virally. I took your behavior, adopted it because I thought it was neat, and then showed it off to my other group of friends, who then pick up on it themselves.
We had an obesity episode where we talked about how obesity was considered contagious among friend groups. If one person became obese, the likelihood of a friend becoming obese was exceptionally high. Furthermore, people are more likely to quit smoking when their friends do, and this is especially true if that friend was a node in your cluster. Somebody who shares your social group, and they are known as being a temple of information, and you are much more likely to pick up their behavior. Even more, people pick these things up purely to keep their social bond intact. People pick up behaviors because it means that, like shame and guilt, they are calibrating themselves to the tribe. However, if you don’t like the tribe you are in, get involved with different clusters. Go interact with them, calibrate to their behavior group, and share information. If you are a node, stop shaming other people or groups and inspire others to follow and spread that healthier behavior.
Final Thoughts
We encourage people to be themselves and live their authentic lives. Don't bother blending in because of your being true to yourself, you'll find a community to embrace you. But here's the real deal. Homeless services are full of people being their true selves recklessly. Gossip and being perceived as ‘an other’ will limit your options in life. If social groups look more like chemical bonds from the outside and behaviors must be repeated before they are adopted, then behaviors might spread more like viruses. Meaning, we don't adopt the behavior that's best for the group, and we don't adopt behaviors that will keep us safe. We adopt behaviors virally, aka, what we see. We adopt the behaviors of our close friends and family.
Shaming disabled people or gossiping about them won't change anything. You know logically you can't catch cerebral palsy, and shaming fat people won't cure them of obesity. Statistically, it does the opposite. But what it does is makes you feel better for upholding the group's adopted behavior, even if that group isn't around to witness it.
If your best friend Karen and Sunday brunch friends laugh every time you share a fat joke, you are more likely to continue the behavior and snicker at people who are different than you, whether people in our group are around or not. Besides, we could text Karen about it later, and she'll share it with the group; she always does that.
Joe: For the next couple of weeks, I want to issue a little bit of a challenge to Todd. I was hoping we could take things that have been on our episode doc that are dear to us, but we're just not going to have time to get to. So, we'll do a couple of short 30-minute episodes in the next few weeks. Now, I already have one picked out. Todd, are you willing to accept this challenge and pick out an episode to knock off our doc list?
Todd: I do, and I got a good idea that just popped in my head. I'm an ideas guy, so I think I’ve got something.
Joe: Okay! If you're a regular listener, look forward to that please. We're going to have a Joe episode where I get to read the narrative, and then we'll have a Todd episode where he does the writing.
Todd: You’ll know which one is mine!
Joe: Mine will be super dense…
Todd:…and mine will be like reading a kid’s book.