Reintroducing Stigma

There is no neutrality

There is this myth that our government is supposed to be neutral on some of the biggest questions, and let people decide for themselves. This could work if we truly had federalism, or local spaces making their own decisions. But when we have a government in charge of public education, of determining free speech, getting involved in people’s lives from child custody to marriage to everything in between, it’s clear that the government has to make moral, and not only rational, decisions. And when you see state sponsored riots, when you see lockdowns, when you see departments of misinformation—it’s clear that someone’s values are still operating. We never just have this kind of Blind Watchmaker who sets things and has them run. Instead, there's always someone whose values are being applied to our decisions. There is no neutrality. There's no condition in which we are not shaped by a set of preconditions that lead us to certain kinds of choices, what Cass Sunstein calls a choice architecture, or a “nudge”.

A famous example of a “nudge” is that when you set up a cafeteria in the school, if you put the healthy food as the first thing you see, you’re more likely to stock up on healthy food rather than the dessert. Now there's lots of ways we can organize choice architectures, but to pretend that you can create a situation in which there's no choice architecture is impossible—there is always a choice architecture. 

To give a sense for how much choice architecture matters, think of the Amish tradition of Rumspringa, where an 18 year old Amish is required or forced to leave the community for a year or two, and to live out in the liberal world and at the end of which then they have to make this this decision of whether or not to live in that world permanently, or to reenter the Amish community which is highly restrictive of their individual liberty.

Of course, 90% of the young people who do this Rumspringa end up returning to the Amish community, which infuriates some people who will say they didn’t make a free choice. They had been so brainwashed, so shaped by the worldview that they came from that they weren’t really free. That the only way you can actually make a free choice is when you are actually already a non-Amish person. Well then you've already stacked the game as much as the Amish have, right?

Re-introducing Stigma

Stigma essentially influences this choice architecture of society at large. Consider this in the context of having children out of wedlock. We’ve done this in marriage. Having a child out of wedlock used to make you a pariah. Now having a baby as a single parent is sometimes celebrated. We spoke about this in How Elites Abandoned The Masses:

While elites could get away with not getting married — even though they get married at higher rates — much of society has needed marriage as a grounding structure to have a family. These were well-founded conclusions. As a result, if you had a kid out of wedlock, you became an outcast. If you weren’t a good father — if you walked out on your kids or otherwise didn’t provide for your family — you were considered a bum. Compare that to today, where we seem sheepish to say that it's suboptimal for women to have babies outside of wedlock or for fathers to walk out on their kids or drop out of the workforce.

Now, we certainly don't want to make life more difficult for women in that situation, though, as “Coming Apart” proposes, maybe we could judge men for not taking sufficient responsibility. But by doing neither and wanting to be nice, we have ceased to think about what's good for the child in the long-term, let alone the general health of society. Herein lies the distinction: there is a significant difference between being nice and being good. Being non-judgmental may seem like the nice thing to do, but it has real costs: children living in fatherless homes are ten times more likely to experience abuse (often from the mother’s boyfriends) or neglect than those who grow up with fathers. By destigmatizing fatherlessness, we are implying that those costs stem from the continued stigma on single parents, and not from the consequences of the actions the stigma aimed to prevent—fatherlessness itself.

Rob Henderson puts this well, emphasis mine:

“The luxury belief class thinks that the unhappiness associated with certain behaviors and choices primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviors and choices themselves.”

But in fact, negative social judgments serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness.

To avoid misery we have to first admit that certain actions and choices are actually in and of themselves undesirable—fatherlessness, obesity, substance abuse, crime, and so on—and not simply in need of normalization.”

Eliminating the stigma eliminates the choice architecture, the guardrails that kept people on the right track. Ripping out the stigma because shame hurts ends up hurting them even more, because it no longer saves them from the act that was stigmatized. And it create a self perpetuating loop where their lives get worse and we think it’s because of the stigma as opposed to the negative behavior they’re doing that the stigma aimed to prevent in the first place.

One ostensible reason we withhold stigma is to grant people dignity, which here means not judging them for making choices that hurt themselves and those around them. This non-judgmentalism, however, is an ineffective version of dignity. Real dignity is the feeling one gets when they know that they have done the best that they can with what they have. Real dignity cannot be given. It can only be earned.

I think that core is what sort of non-judgmentalism is that we institutionalize indifference where we liberate ourselves from having to be actually deeply concerned or involved in the lives of others. And so that’s how you can have people dying in the streets and the government think it’s our duty to give them more needles for drugs since it’s they’re honoring their free choice. 

If we want to have norms, we need stigmas. But for norms to mean anything, something must happen when they are violated. The truth is that stigma can be traumatic for the individual. It can hurt and alienate in myriad ways. Still, we can’t sacrifice the collective for the individual. The stigma ensures the norms of the world that our 18-year-old wakes up in are guiding them into a direction that makes sense for both them and the group they’re embedded in. 

In a world without stigmas, what was previously derided becomes celebrated. Stigmas can’t be dissolved, they can only be transferred. If a society stop shaming people for being obese, for example, it’ll inevitably start shaming people for losing weight. If a society stops shaming people for going to therapy, it’ll eventually start shaming people for not going to therapy. For most behaviors, there’s no neutral equilibrium where there’s no shame. You can either stigmatize or celebrate something, there’s no stable in-between equilibrium. That’s partially why the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it’s an inevitability. 

And yet the call is often to destigmatize and normalize. The Left and libertarians alike make a powerful argument: “What’s it to you?” Individual people have distinct personal preferences, the logic goes, and if they so desire, they should be able to exercise choice. 

But stigma and other informal norms set up a basic package of signals for individuals that may not offer guaranteed happiness but offer insurance against patented forms of misery. Most people follow the informal norms of their society willingly or blindly, as they are the “default”. If we set the default to “choose your own adventure”, the knowledge encoded in previous traditions is lost and people are led to repeat the same mistakes again. People might respond “Hey, but it’s their choice.” I don't know if our children need to rediscover evergreen forms of suffering because our societies choose to worship at the altar of choice. 

John Stuart Mill wanted our best people to be free of stigmas, so they could experiment without risk. In general I’m intrigued by this idea — and we do implement things like tenure that aim to give people that freedom in academia, as an example — but the devil is in the details in terms of identifying the people who should be free to experiment across the board because it might work out for them or they have a safety net if they fail. Not everyone has that same potential or support, and for them the tried and true is often the best solution. It’s a little bit like “don’t try this at home”.

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A question, then, as we enter another moral movement but with different dynamics is whether the enforcing of stigmas around certain views (within reason) was the problem all along, or whether it was just reinforcing the wrong stigmas, and to what is the proper balance between the enforcing of stigmas and the marketplace of ideas since we’re not always sure we’re enforcing the correct ones?