My dear ones,
Lately, I’ve found myself needing to read historical accounts of how ordinary Germans experienced the slide into authoritarianism in the 1930s.
Not the architects of it, so much as the neighbors, the teachers, the shopkeepers, the churchgoers, the people who still bought bread and made dinner and tucked their children into bed while the moral world around them evaporated.
I think I’m reaching for those accounts because I want help understanding what it feels like from the inside when society submits to fear, lies, and public cruelty. And I’m not just talking about hindsight, either, when everything has a label and a neat spot on the timeline, but in real time, when we’re all exhausted, frightened, and still hoping that we haven’t yet reached the moment that will demand something costly of us.
And if I’m being honest, I’m not reading those accounts only to understand them.
I’m reading them because I’m trying to understand us.
Milton Mayer, a US journalist working after WWII, wrote a book entitled, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. Mayer spent roughly a year living in a small German town after the war, befriending ten ordinary men: a tailor, a cabinetmaker, a bill collector, a philologist, etc. He wanted to understand from the inside how ordinary people become complicit in catastrophe.
One of his friends, the philologist (ironically, a man whose entire professional life was devoted to the precision of language and meaning), described the only options that remained once you found yourself already living inside the authoritarian regime:
“What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know.”
I can’t stop thinking about that phrase: “This poor kind of hero.”
I don’t know about you, but I always assumed that if history ever knocked on my door, I’d be ready. Like, immediately. I always figured I’d be among the brave, recognizing the danger, refusing the lie. I know me. I’d say the hard thing early, before silence had become a habit.
But history rarely arrives with a Braveheart soundtrack, does it?
Usually, it shows up as fatigue and confusion, dressed as social pressure and risk calculation. First one tiny compromise, then another. Just keep quiet this once. First, you can justify it as prudence, later as a strategy. One more decision. Do we keep our heads down, wait a bit longer, and hope somebody jumps out in front of us to be first in the courage line?
But then one day you look at yourself in the mirror, and you realize that the person you always imagined you’d be in a moment like this and the person you’ve actually been aren’t exactly the same person.
The realization of that gap between aspiration and reality hurts.
It should.
So, I’m writing this Monday morning to all of us who thought we’d be braver by now. Maybe spoke up, risked a bit more by this point in the story.
I’m writing to all those of us who are discovering, painfully, how much we still want to be liked, protected, untroubled, and comfortable.
Which also means that I’m most likely writing to those of us who’ve found ourselves spending appreciably less time contemplating our heritage of bravery, and more time loathing the moments when it disappeared.
Please understand, I’m not talking about performative shame. You know, the kind that seeks credit for feeling bad. I mean the quieter, more humiliating kind. The kind that knows you haven’t been nearly as brave as you once assumed you would be in your idealistic moments.
But I want to say, as plainly as I know how: There are worse things than shame.
Like what?
One thing that’s worse than shame is the untroubled conscience that’s learned to bless what it should have been appalled by.
There’s the soul that has adjusted itself so thoroughly to indecency that it no longer blushes, let alone flinches.
There’s the person who watches a society normalize cruelty and who’s still capable of narrating themselves with positive descriptors as “realistic,” “balanced,” and “wise.”
Then, there are those incapable of feeling the moral injury at all anymore.
Against that fish-eyed deadness, shame may be meager heroism, but it’s a kind of heroism nonetheless.
Because shame is what a conscience sounds like after courage has packed its bags and headed for the beach.
So, shame’s not innocence, nor is it redemption. It’s powerless to undo what it failed to prevent. But shame’s not nothing. It’s still the refusal to call evil good … just because opposing it has become inconvenient.
Shame is the refusal to rename complicity as self-aggrandizing helplessness. It’s the shabby, threadbare insistence that the lie hasn’t yet become our native language. Not much, but something.
And in a shameless age, that matters.
It matters because we’re living among people who seem casually unburdened by conscience.
That’s what’s so hard, isn’t it? It’s not just that bad things are happening, but that people who should know better don’t seem troubled by it. People who can watch rights disappear, watch vulnerable neighbors targeted, watch lies become policy and cruelty become spectacle, and still glide blithely through the world with the untroubled air of those who believe themselves “realistic.”
Whole political movements now depend on training people to ignore their shame. To ignore empathy and the ability to morally recoil from that which should cause us embarrassment.
That person with the domesticated conscience is farther gone than the ashamed one.
So to those of us who thought we’d be braver, I want to say this: “We shouldn’t despise our shame too quickly. It may be one of the last honorable things left in us. It means we haven’t fully accommodated, and that the machinery hasn’t completed its work. It means some part of our soul still knows the difference between what is and what ought to be.
That knowledge hurts. Good.
Pain isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes it’s the final proof that a limb hasn’t died.
But we can’t stop there. We mustn’t turn shame into a hiding place, mustn’t romanticize our disappointment in ourselves. It’s too easy to confuse self-loathing with repentance.
So, let’s let shame perform what little heroism it can. At least it can tell the truth and send us back into the world less impressed with ourselves and more ready to be useful.
Maybe you haven’t been the hero you thought you’d be.
Maybe neither have I. (Okay, neither have I.)
But if shame still lives in us, then conscience hasn’t entirely died. And if conscience hasn’t died, then the story isn’t over. Shame’s not enough, but it may be the last honest thing in us before courage finds its feet again.
Sometimes, under the circumstances, that poor kind of heroism is where everything better has to start.
Be gentle and brave,
Derek
Republished from the Substack Heretic Adjacent.
