So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8)

by Jon Ronson

  ‘It wasn’t the “theatre of the absurd”.’ Ted Poe sat opposite me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington DC. I’d just quoted to him his critic Jonathan Turley’s line - using citizens as virtual props in his personal theatre of the absurd - and he was bristling. He wore cowboy boots under his suit - another Poe trademark, like the catchphrase and the shaming. He had the look and mannerisms of his friend George W. Bush. ‘It was the theatre of the different,’ he said.

  The Rayburn building is where all the congressmen and women have their offices. Each office door is decorated with the state flag of whichever congressman is inside: the bald eagles of Illinois and North Dakota and the bear of California and the horse’s head of New Jersey and the strange bleeding pelican of Louisiana. Poe’s office is staffed by handsome, serious-looking Texas men and tough, pretty Texas women who were extremely nice to me but totally ignored all my subsequent email requests for clarifications and follow-up interviews. Although Poe ended the interview by warmly shaking my hand I suspect that the moment I left the room he told his staff, ‘That man was an idiot. Ignore all future email requests from him.’

  He recounted to me some of his favourite shamings: ‘Like the young man who loved the thrill of stealing. I could have put him in jail. But I decided that he had to carry a sign for seven days: I STOLE FROM THIS STORE. DON’T BE A THIEF OR THIS COULD BE YOU. He was supervised. We worked all the security out. I got that down to an art for those people who worried about security. At the end of the week the store manager called me: “All week I didn’t have any stealing going on in the store!” The store manager loved it.’

  ‘But aren’t you turning the criminal justice system into entertainment?’ I said.

  ‘Ask the guy out there,’ Ted Poe replied. ‘He doesn’t think he’s entertaining anybody.’

  ‘I don’t mean him,’ I said. ‘I mean the effect it has on the people watching.’

  ‘The public liked it.’ Poe nodded. ‘People stopped and talked to him about his conduct. One lady wanted to take him to church on Sunday and save him! She did!’ Poe let out a big high-pitched Texas laugh. ‘She said, “Come with me, you poor thing!” End of the week I brought him back into court. He said it was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him. It changed his conduct. Eventually he got a bachelor’s degree. He’s got a business in Houston now.’ Poe paused. ‘I have put my share of folks in the penitentiary. 66 per cent of them go back to prison. 85 per cent of those people we publicly shamed we never saw again. It was too embarrassing for them the first time. It wasn’t the theatre of the absurd. It was the theatre of the effective. It worked.’

  Poe was being annoyingly convincing, even though his recidivism argument was a misleading one. He was far more likely to sentence a first-time offender to a shaming - someone who was already feeling scared and remorseful and determined to change. But, even so, I was learning something about public shaming today that I hadn’t anticipated at all.

  It had started earlier that morning in my hotel room when I telephoned Mike Hubacek, the teenager who had killed two people while drink-driving in 1996. I had wanted him to describe the feeling of being forced to walk up and down the side of the road holding a placard that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK. But first we talked about the crash. He told me he spent the first six months after it happened lying in his prison cell, replaying it over and over.

  ‘What images did you replay?’ I asked him.

  ‘None,’ he replied. ‘I had completely blacked out during it and I don’t remember anything. But I thought about it daily. I still do. It’s a part of me. I suffered a lot of survivor’s guilt. At the time I almost convinced myself I was in a living purgatory. I lived to suffer. I went more than a year and a half without looking in a mirror. You learn to shave using your hand as a guide.’

  Being in purgatory, he said, he had resigned himself to a lifetime of incarceration. But then Ted Poe unexpectedly pulled him out. And he suddenly found himself walking up and down the side of the road holding that placard.

  And there on the side of the road, he said, he understood that there was a use for him. He could basically become a living placard that warned people against driving drunk. And so nowadays he lectures in schools about the dangers. He owns a halfway house - Sober Living Houston. And he credits Judge Ted Poe for it all.

  ‘I’m forever grateful to him,’ he said.

  My trip to Washington DC wasn’t turning out how I’d hoped. I’d assumed that Judge Ted Poe would be such a terrible person and negative role model that the social media shamers would realize with horror that this was what they were becoming and vow to change their ways. But Mike Hubacek thought his shaming was the best thing that had ever happened to him. This was especially true, he told me, because the onlookers had been so nice. He’d feared abuse and ridicule. But no. ‘90 per cent of the responses on the street were “God bless you,” and “Things will be OK,”’ he said. Their kindness meant everything, he said. It made it all right. It set him on his path to salvation.

  ‘Social media shamings are worse than your shamings,’ I suddenly said to Ted Poe.

  He looked taken aback. ‘They are worse,’ he replied. ‘They’re anonymous.’

  ‘Or even if they’re not anonymous it’s such a pile-on they may as well be,’ I said.

  ‘They’re brutal,’ he said.

  I suddenly became aware that throughout our conversation I’d been using the word ‘they’. And each time I did it felt like I was being spineless. The fact was, they weren’t brutal. We were brutal.

  In the early days of Twitter there had been no shamings. We were Eve in the Garden of Eden. We chatted away unselfconsciously. As somebody wrote back then, ‘Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.’ Having funny and honest conversations with like-minded people I didn’t know got me through hard times that were unfolding in my actual house. Then came the Jan Moir and the LA Fitness shamings - shamings to be proud of - and I remembered how exciting it felt when hitherto remote billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump created their own Twitter accounts. For the first time in history we sort-of had direct access to ivory-tower oligarchs like them. We became keenly watchful for transgressions.

  After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot. And the rage that swirled around seemed increasingly in disproportion to whatever stupid thing some celebrity had said. It felt different to satire or journalism or criticism. It felt like punishment. In fact it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking fingernails, treading water.

  I’d been dismayed by the cruelty of the people who tore Jonah apart as he tried to apologize. But they weren’t the mob. We were the mob. I’d been blithely doing the same thing for a year or more. I had drifted into a new way of being. Who were the victims of my shamings? I could barely remember. I had only the vaguest recollection of who I’d piled onto and what terrible thing they’d done to deserve it.

  This is partly because my memory has degenerated badly these past years. In fact I was recently at a spa - my wife booked it for me as a special surprise, which shows she really doesn’t know me because I don’t like being touched - and as I lay on the massage table the conversation turned to my bad memory.

  ‘I can hardly remember anything about my childhood!’ I told the masseuse. ‘It’s all gone!’

  ‘A lot of people who can’t remember their childhoods,’ she replied as she massaged my shoulders, ‘it turns out that they were sexually abused. By their parents.’

  ‘Well, I’d remember THAT,’ I said.

  But it wasn’t just the fault of my lousy memory. It was the sheer volume of transgressors I’d chastised. How could I commit to memory that many people? Well, there were the spambot men. For a second in Poe’s office I re
minisced fondly on the moment someone suggested we gas the cunts. That had given me such a good feeling it felt a shame to interrogate it - to question why it had beguiled me so.

  ‘The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,’ Poe said, ‘but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It’s worldwide forever.’

  It felt good to see the balance of power shift so that someone like him was nervous of people like us. But he wouldn’t sentence a person to hold a placard for something they hadn’t been convicted of. He wouldn’t sentence someone for telling a joke that came out badly. The people we were destroying were no longer just people like Jonah: public figures who had committed actual transgressions. They were private individuals who really hadn’t done anything much wrong. Ordinary humans were being forced to learn damage control, like corporations that had committed PR disasters. It was very stressful.

  ‘We are more frightening than you,’ I said to Poe, feeling quite awed.

  Poe sat back in his chair, satisfied. ‘You are much more frightening,’ he said. ‘You are much more frightening.’

  We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us.

  It felt like we were soldiers in a war on other people’s flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.

  5

  MAN DESCENDS SEVERAL RUNGS IN THE LADDER OF CIVILIZATION

  Group madness. Was that the explanation for our shaming frenzy, our escalating war on flaws? It’s an idea that gets invoked by social scientists whenever a crowd becomes frightening. Take the London riots of August 2011. The violence had begun with police shooting to death a Tottenham man, Mark Duggan. A protest followed, which turned into five days of rioting and looting. The rioters were in Camden Town, a mile from my house, smashing up kebab shops and JB Sports and Dixons and Vodafone stores. Then they were in Kentish Town, half a mile down the hill from us. We frantically locked our doors and stared in horror at the TV news. The crowd had become ‘contaminated’ - according to Dr Gary Slutkin of the World Health Organization, quoted in the Observer - by ‘a virus that infects the mind and causes a collective communal group-think-motivated violence’. It sounded like a zombie film. In the Guardian, Jack Levin - a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston - called the riots ‘the violent version of the Mexican wave … People are infected with emotional contagion. It is a feature of every riot … People get together in a group and commit acts of violence that they would never dream of committing individually.’

  Luckily the rioting fizzled out at the bottom of our hill that night. Which, now I thought about it, didn’t sound like the violent version of the Mexican wave at all. If the rioters had really lost their minds to a horrifying virus you’d think they’d have carried on up the hill. Our hill, Highgate West Hill, was a very steep hill - one of the steepest in London. I think the rioters made the extremely lucid decision not to climb it.

  It turns out that the concept of group madness was the creation of a nineteenth-century French doctor called Gustave Le Bon. His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behaviour in a crowd. Our free will evaporates. A contagious madness takes over, a complete lack of restraint. We can’t stop ourselves. So we riot, or we jubilantly tear down Justine Sacco.

  It wasn’t easy to learn about Gustave Le Bon. For the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European Intellectual History at Oregon State University.

  ‘Le Bon was from a provincial town in the west of France,’ he told me over the telephone. ‘But he decided he wanted to go to medical school in Paris …’

  This was a France so wary of the crowd that in 1853, when Le Bon was twelve, Napoleon III commissioned the town planner Georges-Eugene Haussmann to demolish Paris’s twisted medieval streets and build long wide boulevards instead - urban planning as crowd control. It didn’t work. In 1871, Parisian workers rose up in protest against their conditions. They took hostages - local bureaucrats and police officers - who were summarily tried and executed. The government fled to Versailles.

  Le Bon was a great admirer of the Parisian elite (even though the Parisian elite didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in him - he was making his living as an ambulance driver at the time), and so he was hugely relieved when two months into the revolution the French army stormed the commune and killed around 25,000 rebels.

  The uprising had been traumatizing for Le Bon. And in its aftermath he decided to embark upon an intellectual quest. Could he prove scientifically that mass revolutionary movements were just madness? And, if so, could he dream up ways the elite might benefit from managing the insanity? It could be his ticket into the upper echelons of Parisian society, because that was exactly the kind of thing an elite liked to hear.

  He began his odyssey by spending a number of years among the Anthropological Society of Paris’s huge collection of human skulls. He wanted to demonstrate that aristocrats and businessmen had bigger brains than everybody else and were less likely to succumb to mass hysteria.

  ‘He’d take a skull and fill it with buckshot,’ Bob Nye explained to me. ‘Then he’d count the number of pieces of buckshot in order to determine volume.’

  After measuring 287 skulls Le Bon revealed in his 1879 paper, ‘Anatomical & Mathematical Researches into the Laws of the Variations of Brain Volume & Their Relation to Intelligence’, that the biggest brains did indeed belong to aristocrats and businessmen. He reassured readers who might have been worried that ‘the body of the Negro is larger than our own’ that ‘their brain is less heavy’. Women’s brains were less heavy too: ‘Among the Parisians there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.’

  He conceded that a few ‘distinguished women’ did exist, but ‘they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, consequently, we may neglect them entirely’.

  And this, he argued, was why feminism must never be allowed to flourish: ‘A desire to give them the same education, and to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera. The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.’

  ‘When I was writing my biography of Le Bon,’ Bob Nye told me, ‘he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.’

  Le Bon’s 1879 paper was a disaster. Instead of welcoming him into their ranks, the leading members of the Anthropological Society of Paris mocked him, calling him a misogynist with shoddy scientific methods. ‘For Le Bon, woman is seemingly an accursed being and he predicts abomination and desolation if woman leaves home,’ the Society’s Secretary General, Charles Letourneau, announced in a speech. ‘We naturally have all kinds of reservations about this conclusion.’

  Stung by the humiliation, Le Bon left Paris. He travelled to Arabia. He asked the French Ministry of Public Instruction to fund his trip, proposing to undertake a study of Arabians’ racial characteristics which would be useful were they ever to ‘fall under French colonial domination’, but his request was denied and so he paid for it himself.

  Over the next decade he wrote and
self-published several books on the neurological inferiority of Arabians, criminals, and exponents of multiculturalism. He was honing his craft. As Bob Nye solicitously put it in his Le Bon biography - The Origins of Crowd Psychology - he was now ‘concentrating on brevity, using no sources or notes, and writing in a simple and graceful style’. What Bob Nye meant was that there were no more skulls and buckshot, no more ‘evidence’ gathering, just certainty. And it was in this style that, in 1895, he published the book that finally made him famous: The Crowd.

  It began with Le Bon’s proud announcement that he wasn’t part of any recognized scientific society: ‘To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices.’ And after that, for 300 pages, he explained why the crowd was insane. ‘By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct … In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious.’

  Every metaphor Le Bon used to describe an individual in a crowd highlighted his or her mindlessness. In a crowd we are ‘microbes’ infecting everyone around us, a ‘grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will’. We are impulsive, irritable, irrational: ‘characteristics which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution - in women, savages, and children, for instance’.

  It was no wonder Le Bon had identified in women, ethnic groups and children a universal trait of irritability if that was the way he talked about them.

  But The Crowd was more than a polemic. Like Jonah Lehrer, Le Bon knew that a popular science book needed a self-improvement message to become successful. And Le Bon had two. His first was that we really didn’t need to worry ourselves about whether mass revolutionary movements like communism and feminism had a moral reason for existing. They didn’t. They were just madness. So it was fine for us to stop worrying about that. And his second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. Le Bon listed the tricks: ‘A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.’