Shame, Humiliation and Death on Everest

Portrait of Mary Ann Shadd, McKenzie House, Bond Street, Toronto

You know who Monica Lewinski is. You've never met her, but you could pick her face out in a crowd. You likely have an opinion of her, too, and a strong one at that, even though you have never met her nor perhaps heard her side of the story of how she became so famous.

Lewinski's the producer of an HBO Max documentary called 15 Minutes of Shame, the true topic of which seems to be how a mix of the Internet and ancient human behaviours can as randomly as lightning bolts blow people's lives to smithereens.  

People have for ages used shame to expel others. Long ago, in Indian villages, women beat rapists with shoes and forced them out of town. The preferred expulsion in the Internet age is for someone to lose their job. The dog-walking Karen who called the cops in Central Park lost her job; Emmanuel Cafferty, who the Internet claimed to have made the wrong hand gesture as he drove by a BLM protest, lost his job. Lindsay Stone, who joked while posing in front of a sign at Arlington Cemetery, lost her job. Justine Sacco tweeted to 150 friends a poorly-written wisecrack about her own privilege, and lost her job. And so on. None of these people was entirely blameless; neither were their actions in any way proportionate to the price they paid.  

Oddly enough, humans also use shame to welcome others into their group. Ritual humiliation as a rite of passage is as old as public shaming. An increasingly unpopular example is hazing in university. Perhaps the greatest exemplum of this is initiation into the military. Grunts tell how boot camp breaks them them down and builds them into a soldier. 

Initiation comes at a price. Once you are part of a group, there are rules to follow on pain of expulsion. If you leave the group, you risk not having any status anywhere, which may explain why some army veterans have it so tough.

Shaming and humiliation are both about power. People don't hate the person they shame on Facebook as much as they love how shaming makes them feel. It's righteous, that indignation. Shaming is a point on the bullying spectrum; the power people feel when they pick on someone else.

And what, you may be longing to know, does any of this have to do with death on Mount Everest?  

I read somewhere that some people who climb Everest want to feel as if they are not a part of society, that's it's just them and the mountain. Perhaps that's why there can be such shameful behaviour above 8000 metres. People get left for dead on Everest, and robbed by their sherpas and other climbers. People bent on summiting will walk right by others obviously in distress. 

The acknowledged expert on all things Everest is Alan Arnette. Arnette summited Everest on May 21, 2011, after attempts in 2002, 2003 and 2008 where he reached about 8400 meters before health, weather or his own judgment caused him to turn back. There's no shame in that.

One More Thing

Facebook the corporation and climbers on Everest both do shameful things on the way to what they perceive to be a more important goal. The latter want to summit, the former wants to keep on making money without taking any responsibility for the social damage Facebook and Instagram do.

All of which is to say I have deleted my Facebook account.To all of my Facebook friends who read this blog, rest assured I "like" you now more than ever, I just won't be using Facebook anymore to tell you so. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

All alone? On Everest? Please.