The History and Benefits of Ridicule, Shame, and the Public-Square Trial

We never stopped shaming people. We just changed venues.

Walk through any medieval market town and you’d find the stocks in the square — not hidden behind the courthouse, but front and centre, where the ridicule could do its work. The punishment wasn’t the wood around your wrists. It was the neighbours. The laughter, the rotten vegetables, the fact that everyone you’d ever traded with watched you sit there. For most of human history, that was the justice system for everything too small for a hanging: cheats, gossips, drunks who beat their wives, merchants with a thumb on the scale.

Rural Europe refined it into an art form. They called it charivari — the whole village turning up outside an offender’s window with pots, pans, horns, and insulting songs, sometimes for nights on end. No judge, no jail, no appeal. Just the community announcing, loudly, that it had noticed. And here’s the thing the modern reader isn’t supposed to admit: it worked. It was cheap, it drew no blood, and it kept order in places where the nearest constable was two days’ ride away.

Then ridicule went to print. Swift shamed an empire’s indifference to Irish starvation with a single satirical pamphlet. The political cartoon did more damage to corrupt machine bosses than most prosecutors managed — Boss Tweed reportedly didn’t fear the newspapers’ words, because his voters couldn’t read, but he feared the pictures. Mockery was the one weapon the powerful never fully controlled.

But there’s a difference between the old square and the new one. The medieval villagers could see who was banging the pots. Today’s pile-on arrives pre-sorted by algorithms nobody elected, amplified or buried by platforms with their own interests, and — often enough — seeded by actors who never show their faces. The charivari has been captured. The instinct is ancient and honest; the system channelling it is neither. Which makes it more important, not less, to understand what the instinct was for in the first place.

Now the square is digital, the pillory is a quote-post, and the village has three billion people in it. The mechanism is identical. The only real questions — the ones this article is actually about — are the ones we’ve stopped asking: what is ridicule for, who gets to aim it, and what happens to a society that pretends it can live without it?

The Trial Nobody Convenes

Ridicule is how a community tests ideas without having to die for them.

Every claim that enters the public square is making a demand: believe me, act on me, reorganize your life around me. Most claims are wrong. None of them are dangerous — ideas don’t flood rivers or empty bank accounts; only actions do. But wrong ideas left untested become actions eventually, and a society needs a cheap, fast way to sort them before that happens. Formal institutions are neither cheap nor fast. Peer review takes years. Courts take longer. Royal commissions arrive after the damage is done. Laughter takes four seconds.

That’s what the public square actually is: a standing trial with no judge, no docket, and no exit from jurisdiction. You bring your idea, you make your case, and the crowd renders a verdict in real time. A sound idea absorbs the mockery and keeps standing — and comes out stronger for it, because now it has answers to the obvious objections. A hollow idea pops like a soap bubble the moment someone laughs at it, and everyone watching learns something at zero cost.

This is why the men with the worst ideas have always worked hardest to make ridicule a crime. Blasphemy laws, lèse-majesté, sedition acts, and their modern descendants dressed in the language of safety and harm — every one of them is the same move: exempting a set of claims from the trial. Not because the claims passed. Because their owners knew they wouldn’t.

The recent examples are close enough to touch. The six-foot rule governed the planet for two years — closed businesses, emptied churches, redrew every school in the Western world — and when the officials behind it finally testified, the distance turned out to have no study behind it at all; it “sort of just appeared.” A tavern full of ordinary people in any other century would have laughed that number out of the room by asking one question: why six? The question was instead classified as misinformation. Universal masking went from “don’t bother” to “moral obligation” to “mandate” without ever passing through “open debate” — the crowd that noticed the reversals was throttled, labelled, and deplatformed for noticing. The claim that sex comes in more than two categories, or dozens, was installed across schools, medicine, and law while questioning it became a firing offence — whatever one thinks of the claim, a proposition that punishes its examiners has told you it doesn’t expect to survive examination. And the monuments came down at night, by crane and committee, in cities where no referendum was ever held — verdicts announced on behalf of communities that were never convened. Different topics, identical move: the trial was skipped, and the skipping was the tell. Ideas confident of acquittal demand their day in the square. Only the other kind needs the square closed.

And here’s the part that gets left out of polite discussion: being ridiculed is useful to the person holding the bad idea. It’s the lowest-cost correction available. The tribe that mocks your plan to cross the river at flood stage is doing you a favour the river won’t. Shame stings precisely so you don’t have to bleed. A society that protects everyone from the sting hasn’t abolished consequences — it has only deferred them to enforcers far less gentle than laughter.

Who’s Banging the Pots

The trial only works if the crowd convenes itself.

That’s the feature everyone misses when they defend or attack “cancel culture” as a single thing. Organic ridicule is bottom-up: somebody says something absurd, the people within earshot laugh, and the verdict spreads because it’s funny, and it’s funny because it’s true. Nobody organizes it. Nobody could. That’s the charivari — messy, spontaneous, self-correcting, and finished by morning.

Institutional shaming is the same costume worn by a different animal. It moves top-down. It has coordinators, spreadsheets, and press contacts. It doesn’t target ideas — it targets people, and specifically their employment, their banking, their platforms, their ability to exist in public at all. Its purpose isn’t to test a claim in the square; it’s to make sure the claim never reaches the square again. The organic version says your idea is ridiculous, defend it or drop it. The institutional version says you are ridiculous, and there will be no defence.

The tell is what happens when the target answers back. Organic ridicule welcomes the rebuttal — that’s the trial continuing, and if the rebuttal lands, the crowd switches sides without embarrassment. Institutional shaming treats the rebuttal as a second offence. Escalation instead of engagement. The verdict was written before the hearing.

And the modern square makes the counterfeit nearly free to manufacture. A few thousand accounts, a friendly algorithm, a wire-service story citing “widespread outrage,” and you have a synthetic charivari — the appearance of a village verdict with no village behind it. The people running these operations understand exactly what they’re borrowing: the ancient, legitimate authority of communal judgment. They’re forging the tribe’s signature.

Which is the real scandal — not that we shame, but that shame has been industrialized by the same institutions ridicule was designed to check. The pillory was never supposed to be owned.

Living Without Laughter

So what happens to a society that suppresses the honest version and keeps the counterfeit?

First, the bad ideas stop dying. Deprived of the four-second verdict, they linger, institutionalize, acquire budgets and letterhead. An idea that would have been laughed out of a tavern in 1750 can now survive for decades inside a bureaucracy, protected by the polite fiction that mocking it would be uncivil. The trial hasn’t been abolished — it’s been postponed, and postponed trials get settled by reality, which charges interest.

Second, the people stop trusting their own judgment. Ridicule is participatory; it requires ordinary people to believe their sense of the absurd counts for something. Train a population that laughing at official nonsense is hateful, dangerous, or “misinformation,” and you haven’t made them kinder — you’ve made them spectators. They still see the emperor’s skin. They’ve just learned to admire the tailoring.

Third — and this is the dangerous one — the instinct doesn’t disappear. It goes underground, curdles, and comes back as something worse. Communities that can’t mock their leaders eventually stop wanting to correct them and start wanting to replace the whole apparatus, by whatever means present themselves. Ridicule was always the pressure valve. Weld it shut and you don’t get a calmer boiler.

The way back is not complicated, only uncomfortable. Laugh in the open, under your own name, at ideas rather than at men’s livelihoods. Refuse the synthetic pile-on even when it’s aimed at someone you despise — especially then, because every forged verdict devalues the real ones. And when your own idea takes its turn in the square, stand there and take it. The sting is the fee for admission to a society that still corrects itself gently.

The pillory in the market square looks barbaric to us now. But at least everyone could see it, everyone knew who was in it and why, and by sundown it was over. We didn’t retire the pillory. We privatized it, automated it, and made it permanent. The old villagers would recognize the instrument immediately.

They’d just want to know who owns it now — and why nobody’s allowed to laugh at him.

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