On the Shame that Breeds Deviance

Formation

You don’t survive shame.

You become what it needs you to be.

Not in one moment, and not in response to a single harm - but over time, through repetition, silence, and cultural enforcement. Through the slow redirection of instinct into obedience, of autonomy into performance, of natural impulses into strategic ones.

Shame is not without precedent. For much of human history, it functioned as a social signal - marking behaviour that endangered the group or violated collective agreements. It was not inherently pathological. It was a tool for accountability, a way to reorient the individual toward mutual survival. But the shame in question here is not that. It does not guard against violence or betrayal. It does not emerge in service of others. This shame is ambient, internalised, and foundational. It is not a response to what one has done, but to what one is. And that shift - from behaviour to being - is what makes it corrosive.

Shame doesn’t arrive like trauma. It arrives like structure. Like policy. Like common sense.

It doesn’t announce itself. It embeds. It lives in the way schools separate mind from body. In the way families speak around truth but never into it. In the casual discomfort around touch, expression, vulnerability. In the subtle social penalties for saying too much, wanting too clearly, feeling without shame.

This is not a call for cultural erasure. It is a recognition that while norms differ, the internalisation of shame as identity distortion is a globalised phenomenon - one that transcends specific traditions and reflects a larger architecture of control.

Shame in this world seems to be rooted in the sexual self and all that it encompasses, and once embedded, it spreads. Shame in the body becomes shame in the mind. Shame in pleasure becomes shame in power, in ambition, in vulnerability, in intimacy. It fractures a person’s sense of wholeness - and then disguises that fracture as identity. Mother, father, boss, partner, student, employee - all these roles begin to carry hidden debts of shame: for not being enough, for wanting too much, for failing to meet one social myth or a thousand. Most people aren’t just ashamed of their desire. That’s the tip of the iceberg. They are ashamed of their very design.

Shame functions not through punishment, but through conditioning. Not through open force, but through withheld affirmation. One learns early which expressions gain approval and which receive silence, disgust, distance, humiliation. Over time, that shaping doesn’t feel external. It feels like the self.

This is not something one encounters as an adult. It is the blueprint of social becoming. From birth, shame is embedded in every institutional and interpersonal environment. It defines what is seen as appropriate, respectable, educated, employable, feminine, masculine, parentable. It dictates what kinds of people are legible - and what kinds of people are liabilities.

There is no opting out of this. There is only proximity to it, or to its logic.

Inheritance

Shame is not a feeling. It is a mechanism. A system-wide method of producing social control through internalised aversion. As Foucault described in Discipline and Punish, modern power does not need to punish the body overtly - it disciplines it through internalised surveillance, subtle correction, and institutional design. It defines what cannot be said, touched, admitted, or desired, not even to yourself - in fact it’s built so that those who step outside those limits self-police before the system needs to intervene.

Its brilliance is in its efficiency. It doesn’t only punish action. It punishes thought. It punishes the impulse before the thought. And when enough of the self has been shaved away, it offers a place back in society - on the condition that what was lost is never spoken of again.

This is why shame lasts. It doesn’t need reinforcement once the internal split has taken hold. It sustains itself through imitation. People begin to believe the rules are their own. They teach them to others. They call it dignity. They call it tradition. They pass it on through parenting, institutions, and social approval.

The damage shame causes isn’t limited to the person who receives it. It extends to everyone who is shaped by that person’s adaptation. Through every conversation not had. Every question not asked. Every intimacy that performs instead of connects.

Distortion

Most of what is called “deviance” in this world is not the product of excess freedom. It is the result of long-term suppression. What society reacts to with moral panic is often the inevitable consequence of denying people the tools to live unexpurgated lives.

Desire does not vanish when denied. It’s shunned and left to starve deep inside you, where it warps and contorts itself without oxygen, forced to adapt to survive. Freud noted that repressed instinct does not disappear - it returns, displaced and magnified, often in symptomatic or compulsive forms. This same principle applies to societies: denied erotic instincts tend to re-emerge not as freedom but as pathology. When disconnected from empathy, context, and language, it can manifest destructively - not because it is innately harmful, but because it was never allowed to develop in full. Harm is not a natural consequence of exacted desire - it arises from the disconnection.

This is not speculative. Repression correlates not with reduced harm, but with increased secrecy, compulsivity, abuse, and violence. In countries with high religious moralisation - such as Iran or parts of the U.S. Bible Belt - rates of sexual violence, teen pregnancy, and porn addiction often outpace those in more open, secular societies. In contrast, Scandinavian countries with comprehensive sex education consistently report lower sexual assault rates and healthier sexual well-being. Where sex is highly moralised or forbidden, rates of assault, shame-based trauma, and relational dysfunction increase. What cannot be named cannot be protected. What cannot be understood cannot be responsibly lived.

Yet the dominant culture of perceived normalcy continues to express surprise. As if children raised in silence should grow into adults fluent in consent. As if systems that punish curiosity should yield connection. As if a culture that pathologises instinct should produce intimacy.

The system never needed to destroy the body. It only needed to make the body suspect. Once that distrust is established, everything else follows.

Erasure

This is not a cultural misstep. It is the result of deliberate reinforcement. Religious institutions embedded sin into instinct and made obedience the only path to absolution. Shame became theology. Redemption became control.

Colonial powers globalised this logic. They dismantled indigenous structures where erotic knowledge, fluidity, and communal care existed. They replaced relational teaching with hierarchy, gender rigidity, ownership. From the sexual rituals of the Igbo and Dogon to the gender-fluid priesthoods in ancient India and Polynesia, embodied knowledge and sexual plurality were once woven into cultural life. Colonisers labeled these as barbaric, replacing them with Christian moral codes and patriarchal hierarchies. Sensuality was renamed savagery. Touch was regulated. Queerness was criminalised.

And capitalism turned the aftermath into profit… it took longing and packaged it. It took isolation and sold it. Shame became a market. What people were punished for in public was sold to them in private. Desire, stripped of meaning, became performance. The result: a system that punishes sexuality and depends on it economically. That moralises purity while advertising simulation.

Even resistance is often shaped by this architecture. Shame survives in the aesthetics of rebellion, in scripts of empowerment that mimic control, in self-branding disguised as freedom. One can reject the rules and still live inside their emotional logic.

Even those who come close to clarity - queer communities, erotic lineages, cultural continuums - have no mask against breathing the same air. Freedom under this system is not inherited. It is negotiated. Improvised. It often exists in isolation, against pressure, without institutional support. And it must begin again each generation, because the system never allows it to fully take root.

These ways of being have existed. But they were disrupted. Undermined. Erased. The traditions that might have passed on an embodied, relational, whole sexual culture were fractured. The map is no longer intact. Those who seek to live differently must do so without instruction - starting from the beginning.

Unremembering

What most people call maturity is often the aftereffect of this fracture. Developmental psychologists like Alice Miller and Gabor Maté have noted how societal structures reward dissociation from the self - calling it responsibility or discipline - while pathologising emotional authenticity. What most people call discipline is often trauma responses formalised into norms. They do not realise what was taken. They only know what is missing, if they’re lucky.

Intimacy collapses under pressure. Relationships fail under silence. The ability to feel without shame becomes rare. And all of it is passed on - as wisdom. As etiquette. As the only way to ensure safety.

And one may attempt to imagine something else…

A society where children are taught about their bodies with the same clarity they are taught to read. Where consent is not a post-trauma intervention, but a shared cultural instinct. Where pleasure is part of wellness, self discovery, connection, and growth, not taboo. Where queerness is as unremarkable as eye colour. Where sexuality is not hidden or exploited - just lived, contextualised, respected.

That world is almost impossible to fully picture. The nervous system hesitates. The brain resists. The far-fetched alarm bells sound. Not because it is impossible, but because the current world made sure it couldn’t be remembered.

This is not simply cultural. Trauma research has shown that prolonged exposure to shame or repression alters neural pathways, limiting imagination and self-trust. The body quite literally unlearns the ability to anticipate safety or freedom.

Even when shame is intellectually understood and rejected, its shape can’t help but remain. In hesitation. In the need to explain. In the way one moderates expression before even being asked to. In how quickly one flattens desire in anticipation of rejection. And pathologised by society itself when shame doesn’t direct people’s decisions - as arrogant, sexually deviant, selfish.

Most will never name this. They’ll continue to call it responsibility. They’ll call its mutations growth. They’ll teach it to others as caution. And in doing so, they’ll continue the pattern.

But some will recognise it - not as clarity, but in candid discomfort. A sense that something vital was interrupted before it could become whole. That sense is not confusion. It is recognition.

Writers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde spoke often of reclaiming the erotic as power - not as spectacle, but as a pathway to wholeness. It is not a return to innocence, but a refusal to inherit disconnection.

What was lost was not purity. It was coherence. The ability to live as an undivided human being. What was taken was not innocence - it was access to one’s own inner world without self degradation as a filter.

That loss is not poetic. It is structural. And it is felt every day - in relationships, in silence, in shame passed as love.

Postmortem

This is not a call to arms. It is a postmortem.

What was called morality was often management. What was framed as virtue was compliance. What was named deviance was the predictable outcome of a long-term distortion.

Not more purity scripts. Not more discipline as a substitute for safety. Not more performance as protection.

What was needed - and still is - is unlearning. Systemic, personal, embodied. Language reclaimed. Boundaries redefined. Permission removed as a gatekeeping mechanism. Presence made ordinary again.

But, alas, the cycle continues. Repress. Distort. Punish. Repeat.

And clarity on the subject will not soothe.

It will expose.

Exposure that could be the beginning of something else.

Deviance does not fade under surveillance.

It pales when people are no longer forced to live in conflict with their own existence.

That world is not fantasy.

It was overwritten.

It was ours.

Once.

Before shame taught the species to recoil from the very instincts that once kept it whole.