When Truth Comes Late: The Social Politics of Scams, Myths, Shame, and Recovering Ourselves

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. — JFK Yale Commencement, 1962

Dear Reader,

There is a peculiar and insidious sort of humiliation that comes not from doing wrong, but from trusting wrongly.

In recent years, Americans have lost billions to financial fraud and identity theft. But that number only tells part of the story. According to the organizations tracking these crimes, most victims never report the crime. Not because they can’t, but because they are embarrassed. And when it comes to political deception, the numbers are incalculable.

In our society, folks who fall victim to scams often beat themselves up with blame and powerful feelings of shame. This gripping, and frankly crippling emotion can lead to pretending the trick never happened or searching endlessly for another explanation. Surely something else must have happened. Fortunately, there is a name for this phenomenon, and if we can name it, we can confront it: it is known as "fraud shame."

There is a lot of noise in our lives, things that disturb the peace and ruin tranquility. We are surrounded by screens, useful at times, yet all potential amplifiers of noise. A new outrage, a new addiction, a new trend. But surrounded by noise though we are, there are particularly insidious interactions that lead us down bad roads. Some that are more than unhelpful distractions. Ones we should have avoided for a variety of reasons. And after realizing it, the new noise is our self-condemnation for mistakes that we see as more than errors of fact or data, but misjudgments in character, our character. Misdirected loyalty. A misplaced hope. A false parental figure that discarded you. That shame takes many forms. It might follow the realization that a politician you defended turned out to be a grifter. Or that a media figure you admired was spinning narratives for profit. A religious figure who failed catastrophically. Maybe it is the more modern sting of a digital scam, or the slow disillusionment of a conspiracy theory once embraced despite all the advice to turn away. It doesn’t matter how it came. The emotional strain is the same.

You’re a sucker. That’s the gist of the emotional punch in the gut that knocks out your self-esteem with your wind. An internal condemnation.

Shame is not an uncommon emotion in American life, but it is a uniquely isolating one because, unlike anger or grief, it feels like…well, it is a kind of moral self-indictment. It says: “You should’ve known better.” And that voice doesn’t whisper, instead it mocks you - loudly - and you cannot escape, because that voice is you. Recently, I recalled a talk I attended a couple of years ago where the scholars discussed a term from military psychology that deserves wider use in our civic life: moral injury. It describes what happens when someone experiences or participates in something that violates their deepest sense of right and wrong. In popular culture, thankfully, we are much more familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than we were a generation ago. However, unlike PTSD, which is usually rooted in externalized fears and trauma, moral injury is rooted in betrayal, especially betrayal by someone in legitimate authority. It is not just about what happened to you, but rather it is about what they and the incident made you become or be a part of. The concept has stuck with me; a haunting intellectual ghost.

Most commonly, moral injury has been used to describe servicemen who saw or committed acts in war that shattered their moral compass. But I think we can apply it to civil society and the roles citizens have a members of a community. What happens when you vote, donate, argue, and defend something or someone important, really serious, only to find out the cause or person you served was never what you believed? You don’t just feel embarrassed. You feel complicit. Something inside you fractures.

I think that fracture is a personal and civil moral injury.

And I think the concept is adjacent to the shame of being scammed. It helps explain why the shame of being scammed -especially by a political figure or ideology- is not merely psychological. It is moral. It threatens your identity, your sense of being a decent person, even your belief that good and evil are still recognizable. I do not think it is enough to say, “Don’t blame the victim.” That’s a start. But what’s truly needed is restoration.

Yet, I am thinking, what if that shame isn’t just misplaced? What if the greater mistake is not in having trusted, but in letting that shame turn you into someone silent, bitter, or worse, cynical? This means overcoming the myths of deceivers. There’s an old tradition in American civic life that speaks to moments like this. It reminds us that being wrong/wronged is a stage, not a permanent station. What matters is what comes after. You see, Americans are world-class at reinvention and rebuilding. You can lay the first brick to building a path out of the pit of shame and moral injury, back to the person you want to be. And you can help others get out of the pit. And not just Americans, of course, any society can decide to redevelop its dignified sense of self.

Every scam, every political swindle, every ideological bait-and-switch has something in common: it requires your trust. Not your gullibility, your trust. The scammer flatters your instincts, mirrors your fears, and adopts your language. Kennedy’s persuasive and persistent myth. And for a time, it works. You believe him. Not because you’re naïve, but because you are decent and don’t think like scammers do. That’s the point, they know you don’t think like they do and would never think of pulling the awful deceit they have planned. This is how corruption works in institutions as varied as business, dramatic arts, religion, education, and yes, politics.

The shame that follows begins as a sly punishment, perhaps a slow nagging reordering of how you see yourself. You question your discernment. You hesitate to speak up. You tell yourself it’s better not to get involved next time. The result is paralysis, or worse: retreat. The scammers hope for that too, for the victim to be unwilling to break out. And here's the deeper danger: the longer that shame is left unaddressed, the more it becomes pride in disguise. Pride that says, “I wasn’t wrong.” Pride that turns error into identity. Pride that calls the foolish wise, and the malicious merely mistaken. And that’s how the scam continues, not because the scammer is so clever, but because the citizen cannot yet bear the weight of having been deceived.

How many people continue to support disgraced leaders, not out of conviction, but because they cannot bear the shame of public reversal? How many citizens defend the indefensible because admitting the truth feels like a moral indictment? How many do not report being wronged because they come up with a way to blame themselves? This is where shame becomes a civic threat. A republic cannot function if its citizens are trapped in private shame while the conmen roam free. Recovery requires a different model that sees confession of error, or perhaps merely vulnerability, not as weakness, but as a return to honor through the acceptance of reality. Reflection should not be seen as a weakness.

It can be tough to overcome myths.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

—John F. Kennedy 1962

I think what some call “wokeness” is a response to the moral injury of realizing the gravity of American misdeeds, especially in the 19th century; a guilt assumed by virture of familial connection or group identity that hurts the perception of the self and their society, and a guilt that absent traditional moral categories, many people have no where to put it. Our divisions over the past may be at their root a cultural attempt to metabolize moral injury without a redemptive framework. It can be hard to learn that we are not moral superhumans. It can feel like a deception was perpetrated when the veil of myth is torn, letting in the blinding light of a more complex, morally compromised history, which can feel existentially disorientating. It appears to many as though their national moral inheritance has been stolen or forged, and without the right moral interpretive tools, that sentiment either hardens into cynicism or dissolves into performative guilt. Americans are pulled to opposite extremes because the realization of just how human our past and our present have been is too much. Professor Joshua Mitchell, in his book American Awakening, gets at this issue when he describes modern identity politics as a failed secularized attempt at atonement, in part because of being trapped in a warped version of an honor-shame paradigm.

Deception is nothing new. Perhaps what is new is a weaker moral order that makes it harder to deal with the increased magnitude of the awareness of how we and our societies have gotten things wrong. We are learning more and becoming more vulnerable to threats of deception at a moment when we are more confused about what to do with our failings. It reminds me of the pre-COVID TV show The Good Place starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. I recommend it. If you have seen it, you recall that in The Good Place, the moral point system is broken because modern life is so morally convoluted, it is too difficult to live rightly. Every action carries unintended consequences, making moral clarity basically impossible. The afterlife isn’t working because there’s no grace, only judgment.

In such a system, the old moral categories like repentance, atonement, and deliverance matter. They offer a helpful GPS update for the moral disorientation of our age. They remind us that integrity is not the absence of error, but the willingness to confront it. Recovering from deception, shame, and moral injury is a one day at a time journey out of demoralization.

A restoration of the moral coherence that should be at the heart of the dignity of citizens in a great republic is an urgent need. If this sort of loss of self has not afflicted you, do not mistake that for superiority. Remember the confused, ashamed, and angry folks around you were once like you. The difference is timing, not intelligence. We can help ourselves and others by creating space. Space for reflection, not ridicule. Space for redemption, not recrimination. Places for the quiet reassurance that being wrong/wronged is not the same as being worthless. We need a culture that values moral honesty over performative certainty. A culture where changing your mind is a sign of growth, not taken as a lack of resolve. So that we can find ourselves, again, in our actual present, not an imagined past.

Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. — 1 Corinthian 10:12-13

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