This is an interesting lecture - available to Dish Satellite viewers - will be running through the 20th.
http://www.uctv.tv/schedule3.asp?summary=show&keyword=11251Scheff largely deals with unconscious shame as the source of violence.
This can be manifested on the world stage - as seen by Hitler - and I expect Bush, also. It can also part of everyone's life to a larger or lesser degree.
He has a series of papers on the web including:
SEPT. 11: /MALE EMOTIONS AND VIOLENCE
Males are particularly socialized to cover over feelings of shame: the sense of being weak, powerless, helpless, impotent, or incompetent. Rather than experience these painful feelings, men usually go blank or get enraged. Hitler provides an example of the latter path. He experienced the defeat of Germany in 1918 as a humiliation, both for him personally and for Germany. His entire political career was built on the need to regain pride for himself and for his country, by transforming shame to rage and aggression (Scheff 1994, Chapter 5).
The need for Germany to restore its pride and to achieve prestige among nations was the most frequent note in all of Hitler’s speeches and writings. It was blended into all of this other themes. For example, the following passage from Mein Kampf combines the shame theme with another of his themes, the cooperation of all social classes in Germany against the external enemy:
There is ground for pride in our people only if we no longer need be ashamed of any class… Only when a nation is healthy in all its members, in body and soul, can every man’s joy in belonging to it rightfully be magnified to…national pride. (p. 427).
In his political campaigning in the twenties and early thirties, Hitler quick found that his audiences responded most strongly to the theme of changing German shame into pride by rageful aggression. "The abundant, almost unheard of expression of hate and rageful anger…fired (Hitler’s) successful orations (p. 313, Bromberg and Small 1983)…Hitler’s efforts to deny his shame…pervade much of what he said, wrote, and did" (p. 184).
http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/20.htmlhttp://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/Also:
Thomas J. Scheff Comments on Blind Trust (2004) by Vamik Volkan
These steps are implied in two of Dr. Volkan's earlier books, The Need for Enemies (1988), and Bloodlines (1997). However, the new book provides a fifth element not made explicit in the previous work. The key to the failure to mourn is that the group has experienced the chosen trauma as a humiliation, they are ashamed of their defeat. To avoid feeling shame, a "us-them" world is constructed: we have nothing to be ashamed of, its those bastards who did this to us. This path leads down the slippery slope of revenge. Even if no enemy is at hand, one can be fabricated in order to avoid one's true feelings....
It now seems to me that both of our approaches also need to be expanded to include fear, along with grief and shame, as an element in collective violence. Recent studies of "terror management" (Pyszczynski, et al. 2003) suggest that fear is an important element in response to violence. Although this work is stated in cognitive terms, it implies fear as a key element. Indeed, Landau et al (2004) in introducing their study of the terror management underlying support of G.W. Bush, quote Becker (1971, p. 161) to this effect:
It is (fear) that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices.
...Volkan's theory seems to explain many elements in today's world. For example, the state of Israel has taken the Holocaust as its chosen trauma, and public support for Sharon's destructive policies toward the Palestinians is generated by the suppression of grief, shame and fear. In this country, we have 9/11 as our chosen trauma. The failure to collectively mourn our losses and to face our fear and shame has resulted in the completely gratuitous Iraq war. Hidden vulnerable emotions and all too obvious anger may be the matrix from which unnecessary violence arises.
http://www.humiliationstudies.org/news/archives/000168.html
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