Let's talk about these three concepts, as the one thing they have in common is that they can be used to control the adherence to moral standards on a societal level. In the past, it has been attempted to classify societies based on which of these factors is predominantly used. I would like give my own take, arguing that such a classification is absurd, as all these concepts rely on each other.
But before we get into that, let's get on the same page what these concepts even mean, where last week's blog post can actually serve as a good example. In essence, I argued that there are too many tragedies in the world for you to be involved in all of them. Hence, if someone approaches you with a tragedy that you really don't care about, it might cause a feeling of guilt. I explained that this feeling arises as you judge yourself and that it might be healthier for you to let that feeling go. On the other hand, other people might judge you if you show your disinterest too honestly. That might cause a feeling of shame. Since that is something you don't have any control about, I advised you to keep your lack of guilt to yourself. Finally, although it wasn't mentioned in the last blog post, a powerful entity, such as the government, might make it illegal to not not help in certain situations. I don't know about your country, but here in Germany it would be illegal to pass a dying person in the street without helping them. You could go to prison for this, which is something you're likely afraid of. So even if, for some reason, you didn't feel guilt or shame for not helping the dying person, you might still do it out of fear for going to prison.
To summarize: You feel guilt when you do something that is against your own moral code, you feel shame when you do something that is against the moral code of your immediate social environment and you feel fear when you do something that is against the moral code of powerful entity that is able to harm you in retribution. You may think of it as three different "layers", the individual, the social and the state.
This already brings me to my first point of criticism: In a perfect world, all these factors would be in sync. Hence, saying there are "guilt societies" where every individual sufficiently judges themselves implies that all individuals share a moral code that is at least compatible enough for them to function as a society. This would make them inherently better than "shame societies", where individuals would be implied to have much lower personal moral standards, or their moral views would be less in agreement. Imagining what it would imply to live in a fear society is left as an exercise for the reader.
So this classification implies a certain hierarchy between the categories. That's not inherently problematic, as classifications are allowed to do that. After all, I can also classify snacks into "delicious snacks", "okish snacks" and "disgusting snacks". There's a clear preference there, regarding the main quality you're usually looking for in a snack. But this classification is only useful if you sort every snack into exactly one category. And there's the problem with the guilt, shame and fear concepts: they are orthogonal.
Any combination of tose feelings can be a response to an action. Let's look at a few examples. First, say you live in a religious community that prohibits pornography. So if you watch porn, you'll feel guilty since it's your own belief that what you're doing is wrong. If someone from your community found out about it, you would be terribly ashamed. And yes, you might feel fear that this might happen, but you don't feel any fear that the police might find out, because pornography is legal. As another example, assume you're a teenager who wants to be accepted in a group of other teenagers. For this to happen, they want you to commit a crime, say, slit open a car tire. If you do this, you may feel guilt and you may be afraid of getting caught and prosecuted, but your peers will actually honor you for it (which is the opposite of shame).
So my point is that the shame, guilt and fear categories are just a disingenuous way to measure how well a society is doing at aligning its moral values among all its members. Let's do a thought experiment where we have a concrete moral code which will stay constant the whole time. First, everyone magically shares it and we would call it a guilt society, because the main thing stopping people from performing immoral acts would be the prospect of guilt. But now randomly throw in a few people who think they don't have to play by the same rules (i.e., they have different moral codes) and those people would frequently get shamed for breaking the common moral code (that's still magically shared by most people). Now gradually increase their percentage. At some point we might see how many people only stay in line because they don't want to be shamed and call it a shame society. If you increase the degree of dissonance even further, people with alternative morals will be able to form groups to alleviate the shame more and more often. At that point, the only way to keep the people in line will be the prospect of punishment. Assuming we have a strong police to still enforce the moral code we started out with, at some point we will have no other choice but to call it a fear society.
I found it kind of funny when I learned that western societies are generally classified as guilt societies. It really shows where the classification was invented. It's yet another way to say "our society is better than yours" in disguise. Also I don't think it's true. To explain why, we'd need to look at a dimension I haven't discussed in this post: how extensive the moral standard is. I'll probably write about that in the next blog post.
