Stigma is a funny thing. Almost a superstitious mindset. Especially when it concerns a non-contagious agent. When a person becomes a victim of such an agent, the tendency is for others to withdraw from them, as if afraid they might catch it. One such instance of this is cancer. When someone is diagnosed, many people either keep silent or distance themselves from the person who received the diagnosis, as if even saying the word might put them in harms way. Being married to a cancer survivor, I have experienced that firsthand. Another instance, I recently discovered, is when you’re the victim of a scam. Not only do you feel bad for your loss, but others tend to step back silently, as if they too might contract scam germs. In both these cases, and many others, it’s easy to feel isolated.
As social animals, humans long ago learned that shunning is an effective tool in controlling social behavior. A shunned person leaves a community or withers and dies within it. As much as we value individualism, it means nothing if there’s no social group to acknowledge it. Stigmas can lead to a kind of shunning. A perhaps more lighthearted example is the person who tells others they’ve seen a UFO. There’s adequate documentation that, beginning in the forties, the US government instituted a policy of ridicule to prevent such reports from proliferating. It worked. I remember growing up in the sixties and seventies that anyone who’d claimed to’ve seen such a thing was socially stigmatized with ridicule and claims of insanity. We crave the approval of others. Stigma and the associated shunning are among the most effective forms of social control.
As an introvert, I think quite a lot about this. I’ve moved several times in my life and it takes quite a long time for me to get to know people. Even now, having lived in my current town for over seven years, I know only four others in town by name and none of them socialize. One of the reasons I keep at this blog is that it develops a sense of community. Those who are really successful on the internet develop followings of thousands, or millions. My posts tend to be thoughtful (I hope) and often deal with stigmatized subjects. (Although it’s starting to gain some respect, horror is a stigmatized genre.) I very much appreciate my readers. These thoughts are in my head and I let them out to roam on this blog. I do hope that this post on stigma doesn’t lead to any shunning. It’s just something I’ve noticed over the years.
Steve A. Wiggins 