Public outrage fixates on the absence of shame among elites. But the deeper problem is cultural and structural – a political economy that has pushed care to the margins of public life.

In recent weeks the word shame has returned to public conversation.

Each new revelation in American politics prompts the same question: why do those implicated in the Epstein files appear untouched? Why no visible remorse? Why no instinct to step back, to acknowledge harm, to accept consequence? It is tempting to conclude that shame itself has vanished from public life. But that diagnosis may be too simple.

Shame, in its healthy form, is not humiliation. It is not social media outrage. It is not reputational inconvenience. Healthy shame is quieter than that. It arises when we recognise that our actions have caused harm. It presupposes that the suffering of another registers within us, that it matters. Without that recognition, shame has nothing to attach itself to.

So, before we declare that shame is missing, we might ask a deeper question: has care itself been displaced? Not merely weakened, but edged aside by a culture that prizes dominance, celebrates accumulation and treats vulnerability as failure.

Care is not sentimental; it is civilisational. It is the quiet architecture that binds freedom to responsibility. When care recedes from the centre of public life, moral emotions such as shame lose their anchor. There is no longer an internal disturbance when harm is done, because harm no longer feels morally urgent.

The United States is currently the most vivid stage on which this drama is playing out. The Epstein scandal and the defiant indifference surrounding it seem to reveal an elite class insulated from moral gravity. But America may not be the anomaly. It may simply be the most advanced expression........

© Pearls and Irritations