Shamelessness

Shamelessness is the state of being in the wrong but feeling no reaction to that fact. It is like a man who says his conscience is clear simply because that is the truth: his conscience is vanished, is gone, is as clear as the air on a mountain peak. Shamelessness is not having any sense of shame at all.

Shamelessness is spending time to recount your triumphs without acknowledging your disasters, spending time developing hubris without arete; it is something to do with always talking about excellence but never about improvement.

Shamelessness is when you trifle with lives and blame it on the lives you are trifling with; shamelessness is when you play favourites and show respect only to certain persons, and then claim that you are doing it all for the best.

But there are truly shameless people. They have surgically excised it from themselves, with a scalpel, cauterising the resultant wound and letting a keloid form where the capacity for shame once was. They can now be as loyal as they like to those who are greater than they in shamelessness, and never feel a twinge.

It is fitting then that the word 'shame' and 'sham' are from the same root, as are 'scum' and 'scam'. The idea is one of covering up the truth, whitewashing the evidence, letting something grow over the corpses. But I can still hear it in memory and in imagination, the sound of voices telling the necromancer, "O lord, you are so clever, so very clever, so very bright and right!"

And it amuses me, although it makes me sad.