The Death of Taboo: Should We Bring Back Shame?
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It’s truly exhausting to be a consumer of any form of news in 2025. Every morning our phones are flooded with headlines reporting the latest craven comment made by the current President, the tone-deaf prattles of billionaires, and the growing market for celebrity bathwater. Living in the social-media age of unlicensed expression, which empowers everyone (and I mean everyone) to mindlessly share whatever crosses their mind, conduct which would once have been considered unimaginable, is now the norm. I would suggest that our collective abandonment of shame, which we now seem to perceive only in negative terms (disregarding its importance as a restraint for our worst impulses), is to blame for this disturbing phenomenon.
In days past, a presidential candidate caught making sexual comments about his own daughter would have been left in the dustbin of history. And yet somehow even a violation of the universal taboo - incest - didn’t discourage the American people from twice electing a shameless, spray-tanned grifter as the ‘Leader of the Free World’. One has to wonder when, and more importantly why, we abandoned our collective sense of disgust, and what the implications are of a new era of shamelessness.
As with so many things today, the embrace of the outrageous may be a reactionary response to the advent of so-called ‘wokeness’ and ‘cancel culture’ (nauseating terms so overwrought that they’ve ceased to possess any real meaning). While progressive politics have tended toward the performative in recent years - potentially prompting a desire for authenticity and unabashed speech - the remedy to this certainly isn’t to support politicians who are openly racist.
Although a newfound permissiveness for lewd and insensitive comments is bad enough, a tolerance for the taboo has real implications for the direction of our politics and our society at large. Reform UK’s gross policy announcements are, though worrying, not a surprise. The Conservative Party’s recent shift rightward is potentially more concerning, as it legitimises the views of bigots as simply ‘right-wing’ ideology. We should feel ashamed for allowing prejudice to become anything but intolerable, and yet we don’t.
I propose a solution: we bring back the taboo, we bring back shame, and we restore accountability. Some things simply shouldn’t be tolerated; freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence and defending our rights begins with the defence of our discourse. If we cared more about how we are perceived, and society rushed more quickly to condemn the abominable, perhaps we would not be living through a tired rehash of the 1930s.
I cannot claim this is an original observation. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Othello immortalised the importance of shame in the dialogue of Cassio: ‘Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial’.
Perhaps, like Cassio, we should start caring about reputation again. And maybe, just maybe, we should bring back the shame that keeps the bestial part of ourselves at bay.