See three of Brene Brown’s TED talks – on “shame” and “vulnerability. She shows how unconditional self-love gets converted into limiting conditional self-esteem, and she describes the damage that this frequently does both the the person and to their relationship with others. From the educational point of view, shaming would be a very indoctrinatory process, impairing the abilities of individuals to perform their duty of self-respect.

Brene Brown has done extensive work on shame, vulnerability and related concepts, and her TED talks have been highly influential.

Shame is very effective in its power to overwhelm unconditional self-love with a destructive and limited conditional self-esteem. Her work on shame connects with a nest of other concepts and our perceptions of them, including vulnerability – all having to do with our capacities to live our lives well.

I introduced her work briefly in my book,
Education – as if our lives depended on it,  where I was discussing unconditional self-love and conditional self esteem, and how the former – which is vital to our abilities to carry out our duty of self respect – can be undermined by the latter. You will find the discussion in

Guilt, she says, is about having done something bad. Shame, on the other hand,

is about being a bad person. Because we can detach guilt from our worth as a person, it is possible to do things to recover relationships; to put things right when we have done something wrong and experience guilt. There are, indeed, traditional tools available within morality to enable us to do that.

Shame, on the other hand, redefines our worth as a human being, making our very worth conditional upon things we have done. What is to be expected of us, even of ourselves, if we are a bad person? We are not worthy. Brown lists disastrous anti-social and personal correlates with this loss of worth.
Clearly, it is harder to recover from shame.

There are, of course, “shame” cultures, and even cultures in which you are supposed to experience shame for things done by your ancestors. In such cases, you enter life at a moral disadvantage.

From the educational point of view, shaming can be a very powerful indoctrinatory mechanism – one that can be both unwitting, or used deliberately.

Laying guilt can be too, of course, when people are brought up to think of themselves as always guilty – such as the “guilt trips” parents sometimes lay on children. “After all I have done for you!” Or we can be brought up to believe that we were born sinners, and find ourselves irredeemable. There is a whole family of related mechanisms here, but it is the ones that go to our worth as human beings, or that
appear to be beyond human decision to correct that can do the most damage.

Brown has written numerous popular books, but the sense of her work can be grasped easily and vividly from her presentations at TED talks. I have set three of them up to stream here, as a vivid supplement to the discussion on self-respect in my book.

While her material here is a valuable supplement to my discussions of self-respect and conditional self-esteem, I should point out too, that they seem to me to be a gold mine for philosophical discussions of many of these concepts, and for developing cases for training our sensitivity to indoctrination. She gives enough detail to enable us to move quite quickly to examples and applications that could generate topics for educationally appropriate discussion.

My only hesitation is that some of her discussion, such as that in “the price of invulnerability”, should, perhaps be reserved for experienced groups that are disciplined and could mine its philosophical possibilities. A facilitator would have to give some thought as to the potential for the discussion to
hit home hard unexpectedly, and to turn too much towards “group therapy”
as a result. Though many philosophical discussions of issues of good living may have
such unknown potential, this one may be a bit too potent, depending on the
group. As always with such discussions, participants should have their attention
drawn to these possibilities and consider whether they are ready to enter into
the discussions, and facilitators should have tools available to deal with what
may arise.

When I used to teach the educational theory, I used to alternate sessions between ones that advanced the theory itself, and sessions that showed, in some way, what there might be to discuss about life that could be the content of an education that took “good living” seriously. I wanted to show from the vast storehouse in contemporary media, as well as in thousands of years of intellectual tradition, just how much possibility there was for the sorts of discussions few of us have any chance of pursue at length, and with some rigour,
though we may wish we could. Brene Brown’s TED talks are very suggestive of that, I think.

The first of these, directly below, was not the first of her TED talks, but it is the one in which she speaks most directly about shame, though the first half is about the role of vulnerability. I have put her first TED talk as the second of them here. It will give more context to some of the things – particularly about vulnerability – that she refers to in the others.

Here is the one on shame:

Here is Brene Brown’s first TED talk, the one that she delivered at considerable psychological cost. Vulnerability, too, is a topic that is probably worthy of our attention when we are considering our own decisions about how we might want to cultivate our character in the interests of living good lives.

This final video has more punch to it. See the warning above, if you are thinking of running philosophical discussions.