"Relax, it's just a joke."

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There is such a reach for understanding in this topic by everyone that I truly am inspired that there is vision out there and a pursuit of understanding. All interactions productive and moving forward. Differences met with simple requests for clarification and mutual respect for the same valued interpretation of what is it that is the question. Deleted member 16771 truly an amazing work of summarization and interpretation thank you. If I were to speculate on one avenue that has not been explored at least in this thread is the variable of what does it mean to interject with respects to another individual. That is to say what is the proper way of witnessing a degradation of an individual other than yourself? Take thyself out of the equation...what is the process for being "aware" of a situation that is not inclusive of ourselves, but impacting others?
 
Here's an interesting angle to this question: the difference between 'honour cultures' and 'dignity cultures' (and of course, 'victimhood culture')

Here's the abstract from Janet V.T. Pauketat, Honor and dignity culture differences in the concept of worth: Consequences for response to group insults (2013). Turns out that it's a Master's thesis, but interesting nonetheless:

Honor cultures place importance on socially conferred worth, reputation, and a positive social image, all of which can be granted or taken away by others. In contrast, dignity cultures place importance on context independent, individual, and inherent worth, which is less affected by the social regard of others. Thus, responding to insults is more important in honor cultures than dignity cultures. Study 1 first examined students' responses to different insults from a faculty group to a student group in the UAE (honor culture) and in the USA (dignity culture). This cross-cultural comparison of honor and dignity concerns was intended to illustrate whether heightened responses to group insult occur in honor cultures. Results exhibited initial evidence for differences in group-based responses to insults in the sampled honor and dignity cultures. Study 2 delved into the measurement of honor and dignity values. It sought to explain findings from Study 1 involving self-reported endorsement of honor or dignity culture values. Results demonstrated two separate underlying constructs for dignity and honor values.
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Wyote said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)
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Yep, exactly.

I'll re-post this here (from my blog), because it's relevant:

What affected me upon reading about that concept (of 'White Knight Narcissism') is that it essentially undermines my entire worldview, and so what it provoked was something akin to a crisis of faith. Don't get me wrong, I didn't have a freak out or existential experience, but it was certainly very dispiriting.

I think there's something to that difference between 'honour cultures', 'dignity cultures' and modern psychology I mentioned earlier, though.

I don't think it's controversial to point out that psychology as a discipline is currently in the grip of a crisis of legitimacy - the current 'Replication Crisis' (where the empirical bases upon which its theories are apparently founded have proven difficult to reproduce) is well-documented, for instance. As a historian my own critiques revolve around its insufficient sensitivity to 'idiographic' differences in subject populations and an overconfidence in the ability to extract 'nomothetic' principles of human psychological functioning from limited pools. In other words, it doesn't account enough for cultural differences, and a bunch of psychological 'truths' that were extracted largely from American college students in the 1950s, 60s and 70s are beginning to really break down as the cultural distance between those periods and experimental populations continues to dilute their validity.

In this context, the input of the idiographic disciplines which deal with culture and its evolution will become invaluable, and here, with regard to this question of 'White Knight Narcissism' (and, in fact, our parallel discussion about the appropriateness of offensive humour), an operant difference concerns what should be considered 'psychologically normal' in different cultural milieux.

Consider the difference between 'honour cultures' (or 'Shame-Honour' in anthropological parlance) and 'dignity cultures' (or 'Guilt-Innocence'):
Janet V.T. Pauketat said:
Honor cultures place importance on socially conferred worth, reputation, and a positive social image, all of which can be granted or taken away by others. In contrast, dignity cultures place importance on context independent, individual, and inherent worth, which is less affected by the social regard of others. Thus, responding to insults is more important in honor cultures than dignity cultures.
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Most of the West today is a 'dignity culture', where we can rely upon the rule of law to settle disputes and right wrongs. There is thus no real need for serious intervention by individuals in the name of justice; individuals do not have personal responsibility for enforcing it and instead defer that obligation to other authorities. Self-worth, crucially, is thus considered (as the quote says) context-independent, inalienable and inherent to individuals.

I don't think it's difficult to see how the modern psychological paradigm proceeds from a dignity culture and takes its norms to be natural and inevitable - it knows nothing else and the vast majority of its empirical foundations come from studies conducted exclusively among dignity-culture populations.

However, confront it with an honour culture and either it has to undergo a paradigm shift or diagnose the majority of its members with mental illnesses. I wonder how a Western psychologist would do in rural Pakistan, for instance. In this case, the crucial difference is that behaviours expected as 'normal' - and even critical - in an honour culture would be labelled as symptoms of 'White Knight Narcissism' to modern psychology, because the self-esteem of its members actually does rest on their actions. They do not have context-independent self-worth, and feel the need to earn their honour through action. The members of an honour culture feel responsible for justice.

It gets trickier when people are raised with 'honour values' within dignity cultures, because they're going to be torn between competing paradigms. In my case, anyone who knows me on here would have to say that the issues with my father, and how my mother raised me, imparted values which are more characteristic of an honour culture. For example, Justice is my responsibility; 'integrity' is earned through trials and hardship, and yet is easy to lose, &c. Indeed, a great deal of my personal psychological makeup and worldview orbits around these ideas of earnable/losable honour, dignity, courage, &c. It's a valuable and precious resource and definitely does contribute to how my ego functions.

So, because part of my self-esteem derives from these earned virtues, does that make me a narcissist with medicalised self-esteem issues? I'm sorry but I'm not going to submit to that label because I'm proud of doing good, for fuck's sake. I don't have empathy or compassion issues, so what's the problem exactly? That people might question my motives? Well fuck them, as Korg might say.

And to extend the idea, yes it's nice that people can have an internalised sense of worth independent of their actions, but I'm simply going to accord more respect to people that go out there and actually do good. When I shake the hand of my niece's boyfriend, it's with pride because he's a good man who loves her to pieces; he knows I respect him. It's the same with my friends, and especially Joe because we fought a long industrial dispute together and stood shoulder to shoulder. On the other hand, when I'm forced to shake the hand of my sister's boyfriend by the conventions of courtesy, then it's with nowhere near the same level of respect. I'm sorry, but for all our inherent worth, there are simply better men and women who are defined by their actions, and those people get more respect and, frankly, 'honour'. It means something to me, it really does. When I tell a friend 'I'm proud of you' for living according to their values, I fucking mean it and I beam. It's nice to empower people with validation - no, it doesn't mean they 'need' it, or they are suckling on your supply of validation like some unsocialised infant. Those virtues are edifying and empowering and my whole moral-emotional universe orbits around them. Tell me that these are the symptoms of some tricky, sneaky form of narcissism and you'll destroy my whole world. You can fuck off.

And actually, physician, heal thyself and fix your replication crisis with some basic methodology.

To this question of inappropriate humour, then, I think 'what's right' is going to depend on the cultural differences I've outlined. Responses to insults are going to be, need to be different depending on your socialisation into a dignity or honour culture (or whatever other form of culture). Telling a head of household in rural Balochistan to 'take a joke' is simply going to get him and his family killed or robbed and shatter the entire protective aura which proceeds from his 'honour'.
 
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sassafras said:
How much do you depend on your external environment to give you your internal peace? How much do you depend on other people's behavior and responses to define who you are? The more permeable your boundaries and sense of self, the more prone you are to emotional contagion, so of course you're going to want to control your environment.
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How do you feel about this idea of 'honour culture', sass? That for individuals socialised within it, their inherent sense of self worth does depend upon their external environment to some extent. That they need to 'earn' such self-worth through actions which instill it; to be 'worthy of self-worth' they need to prove it to themselves.

Would it make you nervous that they might resort to engineering or manipulating situations in order to give themselves this sense of self-worth/honour? Force people to tip-toe around their need for respect perhaps. Or are these simply the traits of an emotionally dysregulated person regardless of culture?


What I'm thinking, too, is that honour cultures are going to do a number on the family patriarchs socialised within them, since they feel an intense responsibility for the safety of their families (the buck stops with them; they are responsible for justice; no reliable state to help them) and this responsibility is directly attached to their personal sense of self-worth, respect and 'honour'.


P.S. Also:
Kuba Krys, Cai Xing, John Michael Zelenski, Colin Capaldi, 'Punches or punchlines? Honor, face, and dignity cultures encourage different reactions to provocation', International Journal of Humour Research 30.3 (2017).
Research on culture-related violence has typically focused on honor cultures and their justification of certain forms of aggression as reactions to provocation. In contrast, amusement and humor as the preferred reactions to provocation remain understudied phenomena, especially in a cross-cultural context. In an attempt to remedy this, participants from an honor culture (Poland), dignity culture (Canada), and face culture (China) were asked how they would react and how they would like to react to a series of provocative scenarios. Results confirmed that aggression may be the preferred reaction to provocation in honor cultures, while the preferred reaction to provocation in dignity cultures may be based on humor and amusement. The third kind of provocation reaction, withdrawal, turned out to be more complex but was most popular in dignity and face cultures. Furthermore, results confirmed that the way individuals think they would behave is more culturally diversified than the way individuals would like to behave.
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