@thesotiris 5 March 2026 more from that month

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Shaming: If you do the time, you might as well do the crime

If your “morality” relies on the systematic ridicule and humiliation of people, otherwise it won’t be sustainable, then either you lack conviction in your values, or your moral framework is inferior. Any supposed “morality” whose survival relies on utilitarian violence (physical or psychological) is not true morality. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-shaming-fallacy-part-2 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-cycle-of-abuse https://sotiris.substack.com/p/on-morality-part-1 And yes, there is such a thing as psychological violence — intimidation, shaming, guilt-tripping — and it might even be more traumatic than physical violence. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be using it so feverishly to manipulate and coerce each other. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/a-threat-based-civilisation-is-not https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-shaming-fallacy-part-1 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/why-the-west-is-ngmi-part-2 **The appeal to degeneracy** Sanctimonious moralists and holier-than-thou pontificators — the kind that seek to “justify” their atrocities by grasping at straws and unconvincing rationalisations — tend make fallacious appeals to “justify” their schadenfreude. They hide their abusive tendencies under a veneer of “excuses” that somehow “make it OK” for them to be abusive. This is a tale as old as time: from witch burning by supposed “men of God” to absolute totalitarianism in the name of “health” that puts Hitler and Mao to shame. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-loudest-moralists-tend-to-be https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-scourge-of-moralism https://sotiris.substack.com/p/covid-hypocricy Socialists, for example, appeal to their sacred “poor and downtrodden” — their condescended-upon “noble savages” — to rationalise **the satanic evil of** **socialist policies**, always enforced via violence, because good ideas cannot be realised without force, obviously. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/socialism-fascism https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-noble-savage-myth https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-roman-empire-was-socialist A similar lack of conviction in their ideas is demonstrated in the socialist state-worshippers of the “right-wing” branding: They fearmonger and appeal to the rise of “degeneracy”, unless they use force to push whatever brand of purism they fantasise about. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/hitler-was-controlled-opposition Imagine having such low faith and respect in your moral ideals that you confess they can’t prevail against degeneracy on an even playing field. This is how morality fails: When its self-announced “representatives” don’t even value morality at all. They just use it as a political statement. I loathe using the left-right political false dichotomy. But, **the right virtue-signals just as much (if not more) as the left**. The left virtue-signals through its self-righteous, condescending pity for those it deems its inferiors, and the right virtue-signals by pretending to define and enforce their generic, hypocritical moralism. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/why-the-west-is-ngmi-3 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-scourge-of-moralism **On degeneracy** Degenerates tend to seek privacy. We are all programmed by nature to develop healthy modesty in puberty. **Healthy modesty is not to be confused with toxic shame. Toxic shame is the twisting and weaponisation of healthy modesty**. When we enter puberty, we instinctively know, more or less, what makes us feel humiliated. This is true even when self-humiliation is artificially encouraged, like the brainwashing that promiscuity is somehow “empowerment”, that being unhealthy is somehow “body positivity”, and that making humiliating TikTok videos somehow makes you praiseworthy. We knowingly humiliate ourselves for cheap recognition, but make no mistake: we still know what we’re doing is shameful and erosive to our self-esteem. So yes, even the most outspoken and provocative degenerates tend to seek privacy, despite the state-sponsored propaganda tactic of promoting “**degeneracy as a virtue**” as a means of demoralising and subverting the populace. Check out Yuri Bezmenov’s presentation on Soviet subversion tactics, and you’ll understand. https://youtu.be/yErKTVdETpw? However, when you go out of your way to shame people — ridicule and humiliate them for behaviours they already know are objectively shameful — then they react by **flamboyantly exhibiting their degeneracy, just to spite you**. If you thought “pride” parades were not a direct response to shaming and of the pent-up resentment it causes, try to reevaluate. Once the punitive measure against degeneracy was lifted, and shaming was the only punishment, then the shamed felt the need to respond to a lifetime of shaming. And they do this by provoking and offending the shamers with the thing they know provokes and offends them. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not making excuses for shameful behaviours, nor am I granting the privilege of victimhood to the shame-based. I am simply **explaining** these behaviours from a non-judgmental, neutral, and dispassionate viewpoint. **Since emotion almost always overrides reason, logic can only be achieved once it is detached from feelings.** And we need to be dispassionate if we are to logically analyse and understand something. **Shaming the shame-based does not change their shame-based tendencies; it exacerbates them**. This is what degeneracy is: immense, toxic, unresolved shame — not to be confused with healthy modesty. But the vilest evil in the world — the moralists, the pontificators, the demons who presume to hold exclusivity to virtue — use morality as their excuse to be immoral, to be abusive, to harm people. Moralists aren’t fighting for good; they use “good” as an excuse to do evil and get away with it; the fucking cowards. Shaming the shame-based to somehow “stop degeneracy” is like pouring fuel on the fire and expecting the fire to be extinguished. Because this is what degeneracy is: shaming conditioning to the point where one identifies with the shame, and thus seeks identity-validating behaviours. Shaming is the twisting of healthy modesty. **Healthy modesty** comes naturally in adolescence and needs only guidance from sane parents, not twisting by insane moralists. **Shaming manipulation** The moralists of this world — who deserve all your contempt and more — act all puritanical and “proper” to compensate for their own degeneracy. They insist that shaming is somehow “a good thing”, supposedly because shaming “keeps society together” as a sort of “necessary” social engineering. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-loudest-moralists-tend-to-be They see shaming as a tool of social structure and a protection of the moral fabric of said society. So **pathetic** are these people, and so **insecure in their conviction in their morals and virtues**, that they believe their morals and virtues are doomed unless they are backed by psychological abuse, an immoral act in itself. These are the people who presume to represent ethical frameworks they don’t even believe in. Deflecting their own closeted degeneracies behind their public shaming of degeneracy, the moralists are in fact doing a service to degeneracy; **shaming is the root cause of degeneracy**. **You can’t heal the trauma of shaming, especially not with more shaming**. But when you poke their wounds, then all you accomplish is drive them deeper, further entrenched into degeneracy. And when the political regime of a territory allows them to publicly demonstrate shameful behaviour, they will feel compelled to provoke you as a response to your shaming. It’s **the “admit and amplify” strategy of responding to insults**. And this self-sustained cycle is how the **political left-right false dichotomy** sustains itself: one side feeds the other in a deliberately vicious cycle, keeping people agitated, afraid, and reliant upon false-prophet politicians who manipulate using hope, “prophesying” salvation in the near future, always coming, always just around the corner. All the while, the political establishment is empowered by a desperate population bent on hating itself, while helplessly looking to masters to “save” it. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/1st-chapter-from-how-to-manipulate **Shaming determinism** **We are our childhoods**. The nurturing as well as the trauma we receive early in life determines who we are, as they solidify our **neural pathways**, our **thought processes**, our **cognitive foundations**, our **mental architecture** — whatever you want to call it. You can delude yourself that you have “free will” all you want — the fact remains that you are as “free” as an LLM responding to stimuli in a predetermined manner, with an element of randomness injected in there, which you conveniently call “free will”. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/free-will-revisited I know this is not a positive message; you’d much prefer to believe you’re free to will. But I think it takes courage to accept this reality. And before you accuse me of denying self-accountability, I’ve written extensively about how **you can still have accountability even though you don’t have free will**. It is a false dichotomy to assume you either have free will or a lack of accountability. You don’t have an excuse for your mistakes, but you at least deserve your explanations, some credit for the bad hand you were dealt. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/free-will-oxymoron https://sotiris.substack.com/p/excuses-vs-explanations-part-2 Anyway, **shaming acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy**. I was immensely and quite specifically shamed as a child and I ended up that exact thing I was shamed for; not because I wanted to, not because I needed to respond in provocation (maybe only subconsciously), but because trying so hard to appease my shamers end up deleting my sense of self (disselfment), leading to adopting a toxic, shame-based ‘false self’ identified by the shame. Thus, I gravitated towards behaviours that validated this false self. By enacting shame-provoking behaviours, I felt more ‘me’, even though it was just my false self. https://www.amazon.com/Homecoming-Reclaiming-Championing-Inner-Child/dp/0553353896 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-false-self-tribulation-part-2 Want to hear this story? From a young age, my father took out his psychopathic frustrations on me because my mother chose me as her emotional support pet, a substitute for a caring husband she never got. Thus, my father’s subconscious jealousy kicked in, so his cruel tendencies came out on me more than on my brothers. His favourite type of abuse: humiliation, ridicule. His go-to put-down was that “I’d turn out like my uncle Andreas, useless, without a family, without a steady career, just a loser that nobody respected”. This “prediction” came true, exactly true — not because my father was intelligent or endowed with clairvoyance, but because certain “announcements” function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, much like the story of Oedipus, or the economy and market manipulation: In your attempt to avoid what is predicted, you end up making it happen. It happens only because it was predicted to happen. In my childish desperation to appease my abusive father, to win the worthless, withheld approval of a person whose approval meant less than nothing, I completely ignored my interests and natural talents, and instead followed the self-destructive career path he had chosen for me, deliberately. No one to blame here but me for needing such worthless approval at the time. But I could have done without shitty, life-defining influences, as we all could. This is how shame begets shame. Shame is a killer. Shaming is evil. If your idea of “good” cannot exist without evil, then you are not good, and neither are the ideals you presume to defend. You want to show your disapproval of degeneracy? You can’t change anyone, let alone with shaming that only provokes even more shameful degeneracy. All you can do is simply decline association with anyone who doesn’t meet your moral standards. That’s all you can do; provide incentives more than threats, without entitled expectations. And it’s the most effective thing to do. Fighting fire with fire only burns everyone. Declining to associate is the only thing, and the most useful thing, you can do. **Conclusion** The more you shame someone — especially at a young, impressionable age — the more they identify with shame. Thus, shame becomes part of them, and they will seek identity-validating behaviours; in this case, shameful behaviours. Congratulations! You have directly contributed to fueling those behaviours you found undesirable. Shame to the shame-based is like petrol to a bonfire. It’s no accident that, for example, where homosexuality faces the harshest condemnation, that’s where you find the most instances of it. https://www.hivplusmag.com/stigma/2017/1/04/most-homophobic-countries-world-are-watching-gay-porn Shaming does not suppress an undesired behaviour; it bottles it up where it builds up pressure, gets twisted, and manifests in all kinds of sick perversions, not to mention the compulsion to seek even more shaming just to spite you. Once they do the time, they might as well do the crime, and when you shame the shameful, you help them do more of the crime. Shame people enough, and they identify with their shame. Since we all seek to validate our identity, guess what they’ll do once shameful, undesirable behaviours become part of their identity. I understand there are undesirable behaviours, and that we want to play a role in reducing their occurrences. But psychological or physical abuse is not the way. Incentives are. For the fundamental differences between threats and incentives, I urge you to read this article: Incentive-based order without government. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/incentive-based-order-without-government Shaming is adding fuel to the fire. It’s shooting yourself in the foot. It’s waging war for peace. It’s fucking around for virginity. Therefore, shaming as a means to somehow “prevent undesirable behaviours” is psychotic and schizoid.