Meta-Shamelessness: Shameless Pride at Being Shameless

The culture war is not fundamentally between left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and intolerant. It has nothing to do with ideals, values, or visions of the future. It’s a fight between decent people and the meta-shameless, people who are shameless about their shamelessness.

Psychopaths are congenitally shameless. Born that way, they are neurologically deaf to the inner nag of conscience or empathy.

The meta-shameless aren’t born but made. Some are brainwashed, but many are not. Being meta-shameless is a tempting and addictive lifestyle if you can get away with it.

Shamelessness is a liberation. If you learn to be absolutely shameless—even shameless about your shamelessness, you grant yourself the ultimate dream come true, a reliable feeling of perfect freedom and perfect invincibility, as though you can do anything and whatever you do beats all. Meta-shamelessness is like granting yourself a wildcard and a trump card. You can do anything and whatever you do is right and righteous, unassailable, something to be proud not ashamed of.

Learning to be absolutely shameless is easy. It takes no study and very little practice before you get the hang of it. Whatever path you’re on has easy detours down to the haven of meta-shamelessness.

There are many ways to learn it. They all boil down to learning to blurt words as if you really mean them, without you thinking about their meaning at all.

What words? Any words that declare you the proud triumphant winner. No matter what you do, you can always find words to blurt that will do the trick, and if you don’t care which words you use but use them with intense conviction, the trick will work—so long as other people misinterpret you as meaning your words.

Once you’re getting away with it, it’s smooth sailing. Even if people say “shame on you!” you can just blurt more shameless words that make you feel like a winner.

Once it’s smooth sailing, your conscience just atrophies. You don’t need it anymore, and it only gets in your way. Eventually, you become a proud, deaf meta-shameless jerk, blurting whatever makes you feel invincible no matter what.

People become proud meta-shameless jerks by many routes. Some just get fed up, say, “Aw, hell no! I’m tired of being pushed around,” and start blurting cliches they get from popular culture. For example, they can say “just deal with it” at people already dealing with it by challenging them. And weirdly, the people back down. If they grab a cliché that works, they’ll use it more.

Some people fall into a patch of such cliches all clustered around some brand-name ideology that enables them to make a crusade out of proudly, shamelessly insisting that they’re the winners. It could be any brand, left, right, spiritual, religious, philosophical, whatever.

As a cluster, the words are hypocritical ways to play god, or by humble-brag, the humble servant of a god or demagogue lording it over everyone:

Omnipotence: “I’m heroic because I’m winning/I’m heroic because I’m an oppressed martyr losing.”
Omniscience: “I know everything/I don’t know about that, so it’s irrelevant.”
Omnificence: “Shame on you for not living up to my moral standards/Moral standards are for losers like you.”

They’ll even take meta-shameless pride in their hypocrisy. Still, they’re consistent about one thing: “I never contradict myself, and no matter what happens, it proves I’m right, righteous, and heroic.”

I call the meta-shameless “trumpbots”—lowercase “t” not after the Donald, though he fits the description perfectly as would a leftist parroting the same cliches branded differently.

The word “trump” means both fake as in “trumped-up” and “beats all.” A trumpbot robotically plays fake trump cards. Again, it’s a tempting lifestyle that one can fall into from any angle, left, right, center, religious, spiritual, philosophical. One can become a trumpbot for anything or nothing. Once one falls into this tempting lifestyle, there would be no reason to leave so long as one can get away with it.

Embarrassment Essential Reads

Humiliations Galore: Surviving, Perhaps Thriving?

Managing Embarrassment

So how can we keep them from getting away with it? How can we make trumpbotting costly? How can we honorably shame the absolutely shameless? How can we humbly humble people who will say anything to avoid humility?

The answer is simple and obvious and yet consistently overlooked in our culture wars: Expose and flout their trumpbot formula; taunt and flaunt the alternative.

Expose and Flout Their Trumpbot Formula

Flout: Care about their words as much as they do: Not at all. That’s wrong. You’ve been taught to listen, value, and be open to everyone’s ideas. Do that with decent people, but with trumpbots it’s as enabling as listening to a psychopath.

Expose: If you have to deal with a trumpbot, simply declare over and over that they’ll say and do anything to pretend they’re right and righteous. You know what they’ll do in response? They’ll confirm your diagnosis. They’re one-trick phonies. They’ve got nothing else. When they trumpbot at you in response, say, “there he goes again.” Again and again. They’ll give up and declare themselves the winners, but you will have to cost them, especially if you do it in front of others.

Taunt, and Flaunt the Alternative

Taunt: What’s the alternative to being a trumpbot? Being human, trying to guess what best to do. Experiencing ambivalence and being brave enough to show it. Trumpbots want you cornered, wincing at your moral failings. Trying to prove your morality to them is deadly. They don’t care about morality. They’ll shame you for immorality and then laugh at you for caring about morality. So be yourself. Stand your ground without trying to prove it. Your power lies in taunting them with brave, honest humanness while they’re robotically playing god.

Flaunt: If they accuse you of violating some moral code (that they don’t care about), don’t deny it. For example, if they shame you for shaming, say, “Of course I shame, like everyone, like you just did, trying to shame me for shaming. I try to shame where it’s deserved, whereas you pretend you don’t shame while shaming.”

It is our civic duty to make trumpbotting costly. The ideas in this post are from my new book on the subject.

Here's a four-minute video about how the Dark Triad personality reflects an appetite to play God.