The Dangers of Shame Culture in Online Heathen Communities

heathenry, cats, Hearthside Community, Hearthside Blog, Heathen blogger, shame culture, social media, meme, online heathenry, heathens online

If you have been a Heathen for any length of time you probably are familiar with the concept of guilt culture vs. shame culture.

The argument is that Christianity is a guilt culture, which means people internalize and self-regulate their behaviours based on whether or not they think they are living up to the standards of the broader community. (Even if their own assessment of this is not true.) The downfall of this is if you have any level of perfectionism or anxiety then you are beating yourself up a lot unnecessarily for things that everyone else probably doesn’t care about.

Heathenry by contrast, is a shame culture, which means we rely on our community to tell us if we have misstepped and how to correct it. On the surface, you may think of public shaming as someone in stocks, getting rotten tomatoes thrown at them and this may seem unappealing. However, this is not how it is meant to be. The idea of shame culture is that it actually allows the individual a lot of extra freedom because they are not beating themselves up over imagined missteps. They always know exactly where they stand. Shaming is meant to be corrective, not damaging.

Of course, there still is the extreme of niðing, which is where someone has done something so bad it is beyond reproach and has been exiled by the community. For a Heathen, to become niðing is worse than death. To be without community and to be without honour is to be without worth. Even the dead have honour.

But if you say something stupid in your Heathen community, that isn’t going to make you niding, it just means you are going to hear about it. You are going to be told exactly what you did wrong so you don’t do it again. Of course, if you continuously make the exact same mistake and aren’t learning from it then you will find that you are losing worth in the eyes of your community.

What I want to talk about here though, is not Heathen shame culture, but rather another form of shame culture that is emerging and which has Heathen participants. This shame culture is much more like that image of the person in stocks having rotten tomatoes slung at them and it is much more insidious.

The culture of shame I want to talk about is online shaming. In our fast-paced modern world it is becoming more and more easy to publicly shame someone in a moment of anger, but unlike the shaming of Heathen culture historically, this sort of shaming can have a permanent effect on someone’s life with no room for recovery. What we see in the extremes of someone getting shamed the world over for some small misstep that would normally be handled at the tribal level and corrected, then forgotten. Beyond this, public shaming on the internet does not cause people to change their behaviours. It may even have the inverse effect.

Now this is not just a Heathen problem, but let’s face it, our online Heathen communities are very prone to it. You can see this right down to the gate-keeping of newbies, but it far outstretches that. There are a couple of types of online Heathen communities that we need to look at. First there are the large groups that have some very Brosatru vibes going on, that are not good at welcoming newbies and any time anyone asks a question they will get curb stomped. There are also the groups that exist basically as cancel-culture groups that make fun of the Brosatru or White Supremacist elements within our religion. In some ways, these are even more problematic, because they are reposting photos and screenshots of conversations from other groups for the purpose of humiliating the OPs.

We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves. Most of the people being shamed in these posts we know precious little about, beyond that one post, which may have been a bit of foolishness in the moment. We all say stupid things from time to time, and we are all learning. Why should something we said 10 years ago when we were just starting out shape who we are after significant growth? I have said this before in previous posts but… It is not up to Heathens online to police other Heathens. It is up to that Heathen’s tribe to call them out if they think they have misstepped. Tribe does not exist online, because it cannot. It is just a shadow of tribe. You cannot build those meaningful bonds in an online context, not fully anyways. I am not saying you can’t have friends online who are Heathen. I know, I do, but eventually if that bond is strong enough you are going to meet. And then that bond will strengthen further. We all know this deep down. We all feel that loneliness of disconnection caused by online “community.” And believe me, I know how much heartache it is when you are longing for that in-person community but cannot have it for whatever reason. The online Heathen community has its place, but it is also not always a friendly place. And it can never fully substitute for tribe.

For the most part, the online community does not have your best interests in mind. There may be some friendly groups, but even so, what do those people owe you really? You have not established bonds of trust and so it is not beneficial to them to put much effort into helping you out. It is also not beneficial to you to help others out in the same context. Which is not to say you should be a total troll instead, balance. Rather, there is no point in engaging if you don’t have anything valuable to contribute. If you don’t want to do the work for someone since you have no obligation, then don’t, but saying “Google it.” isn’t helpful either. Just keep scrolling.

But, gatekeeping is really just threshold level internet shame culture. It isn’t nice, but for the most part is just a waste of time. I am thinking bigger here. For example: on a particular social media group today I saw an image of a young woman wearing a mjolnir and it had been screenshotted saying that she had just found her pendant again and that it was important to her culture. The purpose of reposting this image of the woman was to ridicule her, for her strange choice of wording. Now, while the wording was slightly amusing, this image was reposted in another group without her consent or knowledge. Worse were the comments, which went beyond the post’s original intent to ridicule this woman for her wording, and decided to point out her other attributes. This is the ugly face that internet shaming takes on. It is mob mentality and spirals into dangerous territory of bullying and even defamation. Over what? Someone’s bad word choice.

A harmless individual becomes the object of ridicule, causing them to feel alienated and perhaps push them onto a more dangerous path. A path where people accept them as they are, because this play at niceness is in their best interest. I am talking about the dirty underbelly of our faith, white supremacy. This is exactly how white supremacists increase their numbers, because “inclusive Heathenry” sometimes isn’t so inclusive. What reason do we have to make fun of someone we don’t know? It may give us a little serotonin boost in that moment, making us feel like part of the in group, but at the expense of someone else’s life. The stakes are too high.

We do not have the right to police other Heathens who are not of our tribe. This hurts all of us. And we should not be limiting the self-expression of others unless it is harmful to themselves or others. If you see someone saying something racist or sexist you can call them out on it for sure, but you shouldn’t be reposting it elsewhere just to make fun. Call them out directly. If someone is just posting a picture of themselves and showing off their mjolnir, and you don’t agree with their exact wording, keep scrolling.

If we adopt internet shame culture we are undermining Heathen shame culture and its benefits.

I am also not saying you should not disagree on the internet. If you aren’t regularly disagreeing with things you see on the internet, or at least questioning them, you better take a closer look at yourself. What I am saying is even when you disagree you don’t have to comment or repost. If you are commenting to disagree, make sure what you are saying is actually valuable, not just a knee-jerk reaction that will harm the other party. This can be very difficult in the moment. You can feel angry, or triggered. Take a deep breath. Is it useful? Is it harmful? If it is harmful, you need to keep scrolling.

We all enjoy being trolls sometimes, but we need to think about how we are trolling and what long term effects there might be. We don’t know these people or their backstories. We are making assumptions based on our own experiences, and that isn’t right or fair.

And I am sure a few of you are asking yourselves, if you don’t like the content on certain parts of social media, why don’t you just unfollow it? That is a good question. Again, it is about balance. If we ignore the darker underbelly of our religion completely and pretend it doesn’t exist, then we aren’t solving anything. I follow certain content for the same reason I occasionally read books by questionable authors, because I need to understand what other people are thinking and saying. Ignorance doesn’t solve problems. If we just block everyone we don’t like we are only trapping ourselves in a bubble of rhetoric that makes us feel safe. We aren’t creating the safe spaces for others that we need. We aren’t solving the issues surrounding safety. We are just pretending they don’t exist.

I could call out the people making bad comments on that post. But that particular platform specifically exists for trolling and calling out trolls in their own lair is neither safe, nor wise, nor productive. So, I am moving the conversation. The platform is here. The discussion can take place on my social media, or you can share this and host the discussion on your social media. This is the discussion that we need to have right now, to move Heathenry forward.

Search This Blog

Hearthside

The Dangers of Shame Culture in Online Heathen Communities

Popular posts from this blog

List of Inclusive Heathen Groups in Canada

Grieving as a Heathen in a Non-Heathen World

Language Trees: The Importance of Mother