- These observations, and many others like them, convinced me that the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation, a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming, and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.
I used to think that there are many causes of violences, just as there are many kinds of violence. But I now am convinced that human violence is the result of shame, or a human's aversion to it.
(Pardon the .pdf file and its somewhat whacky punctuation.)
This entire article is about violence in males. It only glances over females for about a sentence or two. In those couple sentences, it basically says that females are culturally trained to behave differently in the face of shame and guilt. If the desired end result is the reduction of violence, can males be trained in the same way?
That's an interesting thought. In what "way" do you imagine that males should be trained the same as females?
Here's what the pdf says about a precondition of male violence. exists when the individual has been socialized into the male gender role that, in our patriarchal culture, means he has been taught that there are many circumstances and situations in which one has to be violent in order to maintain one's masculinity or sense of masculine sexual identity and adequacy, and in which a nonviolent man would be seen as impotent and emasculated, a coward, wimp, eunuch, boy, homosexual, or woman, a man who has "no balls." For men in a patriarchy, there are many situations in which violence is honored and nonviolence is shamed. For example, in wartime (which means most of the time) we have for millennia given Medals of Honor or even dukedoms to men who killed sufficient numbers of other men, or elected them president, and ridiculed, imprisoned, or even executed men who refused to kill other men, shaming them with names like coward or deserter or traitor. Those who are socialized into the gender role of women under conditions of patriarchy, by contrast, are not allowed to be violent, nor are they shamed and considered sexually inadequate as women for being nonviolent; rather, they are more likely to be shamed and considered "unfeminine" if they attempt to assume the male prerogative and duty and obligation to engage in violent behavior, whether on the football field or the field of combat. That is why for men violence can diminish feelings of shame, temporarily if not permanently, whereas for women it is, with rare exceptions, only likely to increase them. If a precondition of violence is for the male to be brought up in a male patriarchal society, then the way to decrease violence is to change the culture of the society to be less patriarchal and stress less gender identity with being aggressive. Of course, that might lead to a matriarchal society with the females being violent. As for shame and guilt, the author seems to feel that they're useful tools in the socialization process to keep individuals from becoming antisocial. Brene Brown, a researcher in the field of connection and shame, disagrees. Her research shows that guilt can play a helpful part in helping someone to see their mistakes and change but that shame is unproductive. People who mock other people are trying to use shame to shape other people's behavior. Depending on the person's belief system, it can be more destructive than productive.A fourth precondition that enormously increases the chance that shame will lead to violence