This is part three in a six-part series in which Fleet Maull explores some major themes we all struggle with:
Fundamental Goodness vs. Fundamentalism
Working with Fear & Vulnerability
Awakening Through Service
In my last blog, I explored themes having to do with the blame and shame-based cultural influences in western society. We looked at the all too prevalent western cultural view that, due to some inherent flaw in our human nature, we must be coerced into good behavior through the threat of shame or punishment, and how we have lost track of the historically much more widely-held view of our innate goodness.
So, in this blog, I want to explore what, in our western culture, locks in and systematizes these feelings of shame and unworthiness, which underlie most of our coping mechanisms and personality adaptations.
Through mass media and marketing, our Western culture creates a certain standard of unworthiness. Marketers have discovered that by tapping into the public’s feelings of unworthiness, it becomes easy to sell a product by creating the illusion that it will restore self-worth. As we all know very well, in the world of marketing, the message is: “If you have this, then you’ll feel better about yourself and/or be more attractive to others.”