by Jon Ronson
“I think he’s broken,” I said.
“When you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean?” Justine said.
“I think he’s broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness,” I said.
People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior. It’s like when I used to smoke and I’d hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read SMOKING CAUSES AGING OF THE SKIN instead of the pack that read SMOKING KILLS—because aging of the skin? I didn’t mind that.
—
Justine and I agreed to meet again, but not for months, she told me. We’d meet again in five months. She was compelled to make sure that this was not her narrative. “I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. I think Justine wasn’t thrilled to be included in the same book as Jonah. She didn’t see herself as being anything like Jonah. Jonah lied repeatedly, again and again. How could Jonah bounce back when he’d sacrificed his character and lied to millions? Justine had to believe that there was a stark difference between that and her making a tasteless joke. She did something stupid, but she didn’t trash her integrity.
She couldn’t bear the thought of being preserved within the pages of my book as a sad case. She needed to avoid falling into depression and self-loathing. She knew that the next five months were going to be crucial for her. She was determined to show the people who had smashed her up that she could rise again.
How could she tell her story, she thought, when it was just beginning?
• • •
The day after my lunch with Justine, I caught the train to Washington, D.C., to meet someone I had prejudged as a frightening man—a fearsome American narcissist—Ted Poe. For the twenty or so years he was a judge in Houston, Poe’s nationally famous trademark was to publicly shame defendants in the showiest ways he could dream up, “using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd,” as the legal writer Jonathan Turley once put it.
Given society’s intensifying eagerness to publicly shame people, I wanted to meet someone who had been doing it professionally for decades. What would today’s citizen shamers think of Ted Poe—his personality and his motivations—now that they were basically becoming him? What impact had his shaming frenzy had on the world around him—on the wrongdoers and the bystanders and himself?
—
Ted Poe’s punishments were sometimes zany—ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc.—and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996, Hubacek had been driving drunk at one hundred miles per hour with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash site, and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send ten dollars every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drunk-driving accident.
Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people. In 1982 a seventeen-year-old boy named Kevin Tunell had killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while driving drunk near Washington, D.C. Her parents sued him and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he’d mail them a check for $1, made out in Susan’s name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer.
Years later, the boy began missing payments, and when Susan’s parents took him to court, he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: “It hurts too much,” he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of prewritten checks, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.
Judge Ted Poe’s critics—like the civil rights group the ACLU—argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America—it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed. How could Poe take people with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?
But Poe brushed the criticisms off. Criminals didn’t have low self-esteem, he argued. It was quite the opposite. “The people I see have too good a self-esteem,” he told The Boston Globe in 1997. “Some folks say everyone should have high self-esteem, but sometimes people should feel bad.”
Poe’s shaming methods were so admired in Houston society that he ended up getting elected to Congress as the representative for Texas’s Second Congressional District. He is currently Congress’s “top talker,” according to the Los Angeles Times, having made 431 speeches between 2009 and 2011, against abortion, illegal immigrants, socialized health care, and so on. He always ends them with his catchphrase: “And that’s just the way it is!”
—
“It wasn’t the ‘theater of the absurd.’” Ted Poe sat opposite me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. I’d just quoted to him his critic Jonathan Turley’s line—“using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd”—and he was bristling. He wore cowboy boots with 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 theater of the different,” he said.
The Rayburn building is where all the congressmen and congresswomen have their offices. Each office door is decorated with the state flag of the congressperson who 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 e-mail 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 e-mail requests from him.”
He recounted to me some of his favorite 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 had 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. Sixty-six percent of them go back to prison. Eighty-five percent of those people we publicly shamed we never saw again. It was too embarrassing for them the first time. It wasn’t the ‘theater of the absurd,’ it was the theater of the effective. It worked.”
—
Poe was being annoyingly convincing, even though he later admitted to me that his recidivism argument was a misleading one. Poe was far more likely to sentence a first-time offender—someone who was already feeling scared and remorseful and determined to change—to a shaming. 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 driving drunk 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, D.C., wasn’t turning out how I’d hoped. I’d assumed that 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. “Ninety percent of the responses on the street were ‘God bless you’ and ‘Things will be okay,’” 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 were no shamings. We were Eve in the Garden of Eden. We chatted away unself-consciously. As somebody back then wrote, “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 remember how exciting it felt when hitherto remote evil 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 at 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 the people I’d piled onto and what terrible things 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 masseur. “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 reminisced fondly on the moment someone suggested we gas the cunts. That had given me such a good feeling that 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 Ted Poe was afraid of people like us. But he wouldn’t sentence people 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 making war on other people’s flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.
Five
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 m
an, 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 JJB Sports, 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, an epidemiologist writing in The Observer—by a virus that infects the mind and causes a “collective communal group-think-motivated violence.” (Here Slutkin was quoting the cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck.) 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 were 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 that 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 would have carried on up the hill. Our hill, Highgate West Hill, is very steep—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 LeBon. His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior 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 LeBon. For being 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.
