Social stigma

“ To induce the state of mind in parents which will help on the better and more adequate social care of these afflicted members of society, the sense of shame and the keen suffering from social stigma in such cases must be mitigated. It must be seen that although it may be the fault of one or both parents that such a child has come into the world, it is an added and deeper fault, even in many cases a social crime, to leave that child in ordinary relations of life. ”

“ But, in a day of increasing light and purity, you can never rid treasures, thus acquired, of a stigma, which will render him miserably poor who holds them. Upon the dwelling you occupy, upon the fields you enclose, upon the spot that entombs your ashes, there will be fixed an indescribable gloom and odiousness, to offend the eye and sicken the heart of a virtuous community, till your memory shall perish. Quit, then, this vile business, and spare your name, spare your family, spare your children’s children such insupportable shame and reproach. ”

“ Nor could there be any disgrace so lasting, even to the third and fourth generation, as the stigma an outraged community would place upon the renegade who refused her aid and comfort. An unprogressive, quixotic life if you will—a life without growth and dominant personalities and lofty responsibilities and God-given rights—but oh! ”

“ But more often in the case of problems that directly affect our moods—i.e., "psychological problems"—we feel ashamed and afraid of the stigma, the disgrace, that our society attaches to those who admit they have unhappy or confused feelings. ”

“ Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. ”

“ The feelings of love and hate, and the broader feelings of race-prejudice and patriotism are consequently based first of all in the instincts.
Perhaps the most particular and interesting expression of the general fact of susceptibility is seen in the sensitiveness of man to the opinion in which he is held by others. Social life in every stage of society is characterized by an eagerness to make a striking effect. ”

“ There is, thus, from the earliest times, a certain form of elimination of the anti-social character which results in the gradual formation of an emotional and mental disposition that habitually and instinctively falls into line with the requirements of the social whole. ”

“ What discrimination and union of gentleness and firmness these cases require! Then think of the children in our families! To the girls and boys, the young women and men, who grow up under our ministrations, what an inspirer of nobleness and purity, what a guardian from temptation the true physician can be!
Again, in the treatment of the poor, an immense demand is made upon our pity, patience, and courage. These poor victims of our social stupidity are often extremely trying. ”

“ The problem of abnormality—crime, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, etc. How far is abnormality the unavoidable manifestation of inborn tendencies of the individual, and how far is it a matter of deficient social organization,—the failure of institutional influences? There is a quantitative difference of efficiency between individuals, but if there is hardly a human attitude which if properly controlled and directed could not be used in a socially useful and productive way, must there remain a permanent qualitative difference between socially normal and anti-social actions? ”

“ The only practicable solution that we may be tempted to offer, would be for society to brand the men with the stigma of its contempt, the same as it does the women, when he sinks himself below her level in an attempt to pervert her purity. ”

“ Those of one class, not realizing what they are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with the little that is given them in exchange for their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study, and who, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? ”

“ Examinations now keep daltonic gentlemen out of locomotives, and ladies who have lost their “keys” are apt to find their friends’ pianos closed. What we cannot guard against is a variety of the genus homo which suffers from “social color-blindness.” These well-meaning mortals form one of the hardest trials that society is heir to; for the disease is incurable, and as it is almost impossible to escape from them, they continue to spread dismay and confusion along their path to the bitter end. ”

“ Rub in the comfort and the utility, the hygienic virtues of our Small-Clothes; that will catch their self-preservatory feelings. Aim at their dread of public opinion, at their ambition to be one better than their fellows and their terror of being different—at all the ludicrous weaknesses a well-developed social instinct exposes them to. ”

“ Later, the anti-social man was regarded as a pathological product—the victim of disease; and it is one of the fashions of to-day to regard him as 'a social product'—the victim of adverse social environment. ”

“ By this mental bondage morbid sympathy is clearly and definitely distinguished from all subordinate degrees of this instinct, however closely allied the imitation of a disorder may seem to be to that of a mere folly, of an absurd fashion, of an awkward habit in speech and manner, or even of a confusion of ideas. Even these latter imitations, however, directed as they are to foolish and pernicious objects, place the self-independence of the greater portion of mankind in a very doubtful light, and account for their union into a social whole. ”

“ Not in mere wealth and poverty, she thought, but in things of quite another order—things of social sympathy and relation—alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions, by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man. ”

“ The rage for public entertainments seems to have infected all the classes of society. The pleasures of private life seem to be held in universal detestation and contempt; opprobrious epithets, defame the humble enjoyments of domestic love, and those whose hours are not consumed in unmeaning visits, or unsocial parties, are regarded as censors of the common conduct of the world, or as enemies to their fellow creatures; but although mankind appear so extremely social, they certainly [152] were never less friendly and affectionate. ”

“ How deplorable that social affections, which contribute so much to make life pass agreeably, should be liable to a wild upbreak from perhaps some trivial cause, not in itself worthy of a moment’s regard, and only rendered of consequence by the sensitiveness of pride and a deference to false and worldly maxims! ”

“ This rather than intellectual inferiority explains the lack of social sympathy, the presence of such barbarous institutions as cannibalism and slavery, the low position of woman, inefficiency in the industrial and mechanical arts, the low type of group morals, rudimentary art-sense, lack of race-pride and self-assertiveness, and in intellectual and religious life largely synonymous with fetishism and sorcery. ”

“ The prudish and hypocritical attitude of society is universally regarded as the main cause of all-pervading diffusion of the social evil, furthered by a most flagrant ignorance on one hand and a morbid curiosity produced by this attitude on the other. ”

“ Just as in a community of graft and corruption the individual soon loses the finer feeling for honesty, and crime flourishes simply because every one knows that nobody expects anything better, so in a community in which sexual problems are the lessons of the youth and the dinner talk of the adult, the feeling of respect for man's deepest emotions fades away. ”

“ We must distinguish between social and anti-social passion, the one favoring the conditions of life for the species and collectivity, the other antagonistic to the development of the collectivity. In the first case, we have love, injured honor, etc, which are passions normally useful to society, and aberrations of which may be excused more or less according to individual cases. On the other hand, we have inexcusable passions, because their psychological tendency is to antagonize the development of society. ”

“ In a word, they believed—even those who longed to believe otherwise—the exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive force of society. ”

“ The presence in all civilised communities of police and fire departments, boards of health, and the like, testifies impressively to the influence of social fear working normally as a conserving agent. But there may be, and frequently is, social as well as individual abnormality of fear; as in panics, massacres, lynchings. In order to deal with this effectually, in order to keep social fear within the bounds of reason, it will always be necessary to recognise that, after all, society is made up of a mass of individuals, and can only think and feel and act as individuals think and feel and act. ”

“ Whenever we ask how our lives are to be directed, what are to be the terms on which we form our most intimate ties, whom we are to support or suppress, how we are to win respect or incur contempt, we are profoundly affected by the social relations in which we are placed at our birth, and the corresponding beliefs or prejudices which we have unconsciously imbibed. ”

“ Strange parody upon the incongruities of our every-day life, costume serving but to typify the moral incompatibilities which are ever at work in our actual existence! for are not the people we see linked together—are not the social groupings we witness—just as widely separated by every instinct and every sentiment as are these characters in all their motley? ”

“ At the other end of the scale, we have the parasitic class of the beggars or thieves. They, too, are not personally responsible for the conditions into which they are born. But they are not only to be pitied individually, but to be regarded, in the mass, as involving social disease and danger. ”

“ Such personal causes as mental defect are extremely important, indeed, many students maintain that bad economic and social conditions are negligible causes of crime, unless found in connection with low mentality and a depraved moral sense. ”

“ We already live in a world of stupendous hypocrisies, a world wherein rakes and rascals champion the sacred institution of the family, and a network of sexual secrets, vaguely 41suspected, disagreeably present, and only half-concealed, pervades every social group one enters. ”

“ By that inevitable law of action and reaction which prevails alike in moral and social as in physical phenomena, the community which has so large a portion of its members in a condition of ignorance and brutality, must, throughout its whole body, partake of the degradation which exists within it, and must be affected, by the very contact, in all its feelings, sentiments, and purposes, through the gross and ignorant passions which such an association cannot fail to arouse. ”

“ The cultivation of credulity, the absence of critical judgment and the lack of recognition of good and evil, with consequent increase of suggestibility make man an easy prey to all kinds of social delusions, mental epidemics, religious crazes, financial manias, patriotic wars, enthusiastic parades, resulting in slaughter and plagues which have been the baleful pests of aggregate humanity in all ages, and more specially in our times when the wave of social suggestibility of the worst type spreads like wild fire throughout the world. ”

“ Law and prejudice surrounded a great share of the work with notions of stigma and hopelessness and weirdness—while to those who see the facts in terms of life problems there can be but few more inspiring tasks than watching the unfolding of the problematic personality, seeking and finding its proper settings, and preventing the clashes and gropings in maladjustments and flounderings of fancy and the faulty use and nutrition of the brain and of the entire organism. ”

“ To be sure one must free himself from the theoretical prejudice that one has to deal with abnormal brains of degeneres and deséquilibrés, in whom the freedom of overthrowing the common psychological laws of the association of ideas is a stigma, or in whom a preferred idea without any motive may grow intensively excessive, and another without psychological motives may remain indestructible. ”

“ Let them discourage the popular belief that they are prodigies, freaks of mental expansion. Let them shun pedantry and the affectations of the dons’ common-room as they would the plague. Let their first desire be to show themselves good, useful, hardy, serviceable citizens, and they will do much to remove the stigma from their profession. ”

“ And, further than this, it ought to be demonstrable, a priori, that a mind fed on the best and not confused by the weak and diluted, or corrupted by images of the essentially vulgar and vile, would be morally healthy and best fitted to cope with the social problems of life. ”

“ There are certainly cases of constitutional inferiority, but the clinical psychologists are now realizing that these must be studied, like the cases of the maladjustment of the normal, in connection with life records showing the social influences tending to organize or disorganize the personality. ”

“ The Rubicon between good Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide and sexual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had become less womanly, man more effeminate. ”

“ Assuming that it is nearly impossible for the male to control his instincts, and that, after all, it does not matter so much whether he does or not, society has blinked at license in men, and thus has fostered a demoralizing, anti-social double standard which has broken up countless homes, has been responsible for the spread of venereal diseases, and has been among the greatest curses of modern civilization. ”