"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. "
I think you need to do more work on this concept. It is doing a great deal of work in your argument, but it is not at all clear that it is true. Off the cuff, it seems that the majority of behaviors have neutral equilibriums without shame, neither celebrated nor stigmatized. Propriety is pretty broad since most behaviors don't directly effect other people in major ways.
I think you would do better considering why some behaviors go from being merely indifferent to celebrated/shamed, in society in general and more specifically in the political movement sense. Why do some groups or subcultures push odd or even destructive behaviors into the celebration category, while other groups tend not to. It does not seem to be just human nature, but the result of some other human behavior, as such totalizing behavior such as putting everything into the forbidden and mandatory categories is definitely a subset behavioral type.
"If you had a kid out of wedlock, you became an outcast" is kind of a travesty of history. It's a little like saying about today, "if you lost your home, you became an outcast."
What I would say is:
* Welfare-cases and community-dependents were resented and virtue-tested, and children of absent fathers were treated worst of all
* Women were stigmatized as prostitutes, or the equivalent, based on whether their family structures conformed to expectations, almost completely regardless of the woman's actual behavior
* Upper-class men were slightly stigmatized from being too open about their second and third and fourth families, and had trouble bestowing inheritances to them and so on
I would also add that none of this actually worked particularily well for any desired purpose, and that mostly its effects were things like making 19th-century London a paradise for upper-class perverts to buy sex.
"Negative social judgments serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness." is on the right track; however, it seems to me that "enforcing of stigmas around certain *views*" and "what is the proper balance between the enforcing of stigmas and the marketplace of *ideas*" leads the argument astray. J.Random Psychopath may have the view that group X is retarded or group Y supreme, but until and unless he acts on it beyond the voices in his head, until and unless those internal things result in behavior (even merely telling me he's a rotten bigot (or right-thinking person)): I don't care -- & vice (should be) versa.
Decisions are not the same thing as views. Behavior is not the same thing as thought or preference. These are not semantic distinctions. The trick of the current moment is/was the attempt to materialize out of thin air a new but internally incoherent, thus unsustainable, norm: It Is Good for 'society' [a select few] to impute or assign views/ideas to others -- groups and individuals -- based on nothing, no decisions, no behavior. With no evidence of those others having those opinions, feelings, beliefs in any way whatsoever, much less acting on them, folks with this mindset demanded the rest of us kowtow. Ever so earnestly.
Having gained a certain kind of ascendancy during lockdowns, I am thankful that they promptly took it too far. Fatal, because all the while it was a make-believe norm, this normalization of the abnormal in order to abnormalize human nature. I suspect it could never become a societal norm when one group arrogates to itself the all-knowing right to transition the rest of us to Calvinball wrongthink rules about imaginary things.
The real choice architecture has not changed. Decisions that lead to unhappiness have not changed. Embrace the suck, take the hit; if you won't learn from grandma tut-tutting your choices, you have a second opportunity to learn from failure's feedback.
Maybe it sounds hard-hearted but as you say, "there is a significant difference between being nice and being good". Pain is a valuable signal (fire is hot) discouraging behaviors that will inexorably slam up against into hard realities of human nature/relationships, the physical world, and consequences. I'm pretty sure we're in the 'hard times make hard men' part of the cycle, and stigmatizing aberrant behavior (and psychosis &c. evidenced in behavior) is on the upswing. That is objectively a good thing.
Stigma is a socialized cost in service of preserving communal upside, usually by preserving error correction, i.e. morality in the DD sense.
Stigmas are a penalty for openly transgressing community norms, thereby chasing certain historically recurring human preferences underground, into the closet. If discovered, often by actively conventional minded community zealots, then you get the public penalty: the scarlet letter for adultery, the witch trials for unmarried, childless, masculinized ladies, the chemical castration for the gays.
Sodom & Gammorah were famously devoid of stigma and Yahweh penalized the towns with an erupting volcano or so the ruling powers who enshrined God's stories let it be known. Without stigma you have greater freedom but also a more generalized crossing of disgust thresholds. Homosexual PDA grosses many out, as do displays of transgendered identity, but to stigmatize these behaviors as antisocial has itself become stigmatized, i.e. cancel culture.
The culture wars are best understood as stigmatization via legislation of once common disgust threshold-triggering stigmas-- most of this is in the service of morality in the DD sense-- good explanations can come from folks who don't look like you or act like you, so those people shouldn't be stigmatized or marginalized, nor their ideas dismissed.
The question to ask when a historical stigma goes away is: who is benefiting from the removal. With the first wave of race and sexual orientation related stigmas, it was clearly the minorities receiving equal protection under the law. Handicapped folks same thing. But just as stigma begets stigma, ie Old Testament prohibitions piled up over time, less stigma begets less stigma because the rule that's understood is stigma = bad. This is an inversion of the original point of stigma which was: stigma protects the community memes and money (shared upside) by discouraging behaviors that are cross-wise to community values or destructive to community wealth, often measured by family formation and procreation as the ultimate shared resource of the community.
Clearly the destigmitization of single mothers, deadbeat dads, fat people, childlessness, dishonoring of the elderly, etc. is the removal of a pro-communal nudging by forces that benefit from greater consumption, taxable income, and dependence on benefits, ie the state. I've written about the Dad Bod meme in this context here: https://x.com/TimParsa/status/1695860514952478977?s=20
The state is the largest possible community but the shared memes are weak sauce (flag, pledge, constitution) and the shared upside is now very debatable, i.e. rule of law vs. taxes + fiat debasement + debt + sometimes conscription to fight in wars with no direct benefit to the citizens). Top down works to remove stigmas but is not great at forming community, which always grows organically, bottom up via shared blood and land. Naval has a cogent string of thoughts on this topic in a Room on Airchat dedicated to Israel/Palestine here: https://www.getairchat.com/parsaverse/israelpalestine?r=38888374-7cdf-4ac4-9b3c-2743beb0bf39
"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. "
I think you need to do more work on this concept. It is doing a great deal of work in your argument, but it is not at all clear that it is true. Off the cuff, it seems that the majority of behaviors have neutral equilibriums without shame, neither celebrated nor stigmatized. Propriety is pretty broad since most behaviors don't directly effect other people in major ways.
I think you would do better considering why some behaviors go from being merely indifferent to celebrated/shamed, in society in general and more specifically in the political movement sense. Why do some groups or subcultures push odd or even destructive behaviors into the celebration category, while other groups tend not to. It does not seem to be just human nature, but the result of some other human behavior, as such totalizing behavior such as putting everything into the forbidden and mandatory categories is definitely a subset behavioral type.
"If you had a kid out of wedlock, you became an outcast" is kind of a travesty of history. It's a little like saying about today, "if you lost your home, you became an outcast."
What I would say is:
* Welfare-cases and community-dependents were resented and virtue-tested, and children of absent fathers were treated worst of all
* Women were stigmatized as prostitutes, or the equivalent, based on whether their family structures conformed to expectations, almost completely regardless of the woman's actual behavior
* Upper-class men were slightly stigmatized from being too open about their second and third and fourth families, and had trouble bestowing inheritances to them and so on
I would also add that none of this actually worked particularily well for any desired purpose, and that mostly its effects were things like making 19th-century London a paradise for upper-class perverts to buy sex.
So being woke is excessively stigmatizing others for not being inclusive and progressive enough? And cancelation is the expulsion?
There would be fewer unwed mothers with more slut shaming. We should shame bad behavior.
"Negative social judgments serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness." is on the right track; however, it seems to me that "enforcing of stigmas around certain *views*" and "what is the proper balance between the enforcing of stigmas and the marketplace of *ideas*" leads the argument astray. J.Random Psychopath may have the view that group X is retarded or group Y supreme, but until and unless he acts on it beyond the voices in his head, until and unless those internal things result in behavior (even merely telling me he's a rotten bigot (or right-thinking person)): I don't care -- & vice (should be) versa.
Decisions are not the same thing as views. Behavior is not the same thing as thought or preference. These are not semantic distinctions. The trick of the current moment is/was the attempt to materialize out of thin air a new but internally incoherent, thus unsustainable, norm: It Is Good for 'society' [a select few] to impute or assign views/ideas to others -- groups and individuals -- based on nothing, no decisions, no behavior. With no evidence of those others having those opinions, feelings, beliefs in any way whatsoever, much less acting on them, folks with this mindset demanded the rest of us kowtow. Ever so earnestly.
Having gained a certain kind of ascendancy during lockdowns, I am thankful that they promptly took it too far. Fatal, because all the while it was a make-believe norm, this normalization of the abnormal in order to abnormalize human nature. I suspect it could never become a societal norm when one group arrogates to itself the all-knowing right to transition the rest of us to Calvinball wrongthink rules about imaginary things.
The real choice architecture has not changed. Decisions that lead to unhappiness have not changed. Embrace the suck, take the hit; if you won't learn from grandma tut-tutting your choices, you have a second opportunity to learn from failure's feedback.
Maybe it sounds hard-hearted but as you say, "there is a significant difference between being nice and being good". Pain is a valuable signal (fire is hot) discouraging behaviors that will inexorably slam up against into hard realities of human nature/relationships, the physical world, and consequences. I'm pretty sure we're in the 'hard times make hard men' part of the cycle, and stigmatizing aberrant behavior (and psychosis &c. evidenced in behavior) is on the upswing. That is objectively a good thing.
Stigma is a socialized cost in service of preserving communal upside, usually by preserving error correction, i.e. morality in the DD sense.
Stigmas are a penalty for openly transgressing community norms, thereby chasing certain historically recurring human preferences underground, into the closet. If discovered, often by actively conventional minded community zealots, then you get the public penalty: the scarlet letter for adultery, the witch trials for unmarried, childless, masculinized ladies, the chemical castration for the gays.
Sodom & Gammorah were famously devoid of stigma and Yahweh penalized the towns with an erupting volcano or so the ruling powers who enshrined God's stories let it be known. Without stigma you have greater freedom but also a more generalized crossing of disgust thresholds. Homosexual PDA grosses many out, as do displays of transgendered identity, but to stigmatize these behaviors as antisocial has itself become stigmatized, i.e. cancel culture.
The culture wars are best understood as stigmatization via legislation of once common disgust threshold-triggering stigmas-- most of this is in the service of morality in the DD sense-- good explanations can come from folks who don't look like you or act like you, so those people shouldn't be stigmatized or marginalized, nor their ideas dismissed.
The question to ask when a historical stigma goes away is: who is benefiting from the removal. With the first wave of race and sexual orientation related stigmas, it was clearly the minorities receiving equal protection under the law. Handicapped folks same thing. But just as stigma begets stigma, ie Old Testament prohibitions piled up over time, less stigma begets less stigma because the rule that's understood is stigma = bad. This is an inversion of the original point of stigma which was: stigma protects the community memes and money (shared upside) by discouraging behaviors that are cross-wise to community values or destructive to community wealth, often measured by family formation and procreation as the ultimate shared resource of the community.
Clearly the destigmitization of single mothers, deadbeat dads, fat people, childlessness, dishonoring of the elderly, etc. is the removal of a pro-communal nudging by forces that benefit from greater consumption, taxable income, and dependence on benefits, ie the state. I've written about the Dad Bod meme in this context here: https://x.com/TimParsa/status/1695860514952478977?s=20
The state is the largest possible community but the shared memes are weak sauce (flag, pledge, constitution) and the shared upside is now very debatable, i.e. rule of law vs. taxes + fiat debasement + debt + sometimes conscription to fight in wars with no direct benefit to the citizens). Top down works to remove stigmas but is not great at forming community, which always grows organically, bottom up via shared blood and land. Naval has a cogent string of thoughts on this topic in a Room on Airchat dedicated to Israel/Palestine here: https://www.getairchat.com/parsaverse/israelpalestine?r=38888374-7cdf-4ac4-9b3c-2743beb0bf39