Public outrage fixates on the absence of shame among elites. But the deeper problem is cultural and structural – a political economy that has pushed care to the margins of public life.

In recent weeks the word shame has returned to public conversation.

Each new revelation in American politics prompts the same question: why do those implicated in the Epstein files appear untouched? Why no visible remorse? Why no instinct to step back, to acknowledge harm, to accept consequence? It is tempting to conclude that shame itself has vanished from public life. But that diagnosis may be too simple.

Shame, in its healthy form, is not humiliation. It is not social media outrage. It is not reputational inconvenience. Healthy shame is quieter than that. It arises when we recognise that our actions have caused harm. It presupposes that the suffering of another registers within us, that it matters. Without that recognition, shame has nothing to attach itself to.

So, before we declare that shame is missing, we might ask a deeper question: has care itself been displaced? Not merely weakened, but edged aside by a culture that prizes dominance, celebrates accumulation and treats vulnerability as failure.

Care is not sentimental; it is civilisational. It is the quiet architecture that binds freedom to responsibility. When care recedes from the centre of public life, moral emotions such as shame lose their anchor. There is no longer an internal disturbance when harm is done, because harm no longer feels morally urgent.

The United States is currently the most vivid stage on which this drama is playing out. The Epstein scandal and the defiant indifference surrounding it seem to reveal an elite class insulated from moral gravity. But America may not be the anomaly. It may simply be the most advanced expression of a broader drift.

For several decades western democracies have absorbed a powerful organising idea: that society functions best when understood as a marketplace. Individuals compete. Markets sort. Winners rise. Losers fall. Success is treated as evidence of merit.

In well-defined spaces – sport, for instance – this logic works. At the Australian Open there is one champion. The contest is finite. The rules are known and the legitimacy is accepted.

The difficulty arises when competitive logic expands beyond confined contests into the architecture of public life itself. When education, housing, healthcare and even political power are framed primarily as competitive markets, winning ceases to be situational. It becomes moralised.

If wealth is proof of virtue, inequality becomes proof of failure. If accumulation signals merit, then those who fall behind must somehow deserve it. Empathy does not disappear overnight; it becomes inconvenient. Care begins to look naïve. Restraint looks weak.

And once restraint is framed as weakness, shame becomes suspect.

Regulatory emotions only function in cultures that value them. Shame works quietly when there is a shared understanding that harm matters. But when public discourse begins to mock moral concern, when empathy is dismissed as ‘wokeness’, when attentiveness to injustice is caricatured as excess, something deeper is occurring than rhetorical skirmishing.

The cultural signal is being reversed.

The act of noticing harm becomes more controversial than the harm itself. In that environment, the internal alarm system that shame provides is not merely ignored; it is overridden. Power detaches from relational accountability not because individuals lack emotion, but because the surrounding culture has trained them to suppress it.

Late-phase competitive systems often display similar features. Wealth concentrates. Influence consolidates. Institutions strain. Public trust thins. Cynicism spreads. The language of shared obligation fades, replaced by the language of entitlement.

At such moments societies face a choice. They can reform and recalibrate, restoring boundaries, renewing institutions, reasserting norms of mutual obligation. Or they can drift until accumulated strain eventually produces shock and a rupture of our social cohesion.

The United States may be closer to that threshold. But Australia would be naïve to imagine immunity.

We flatter ourselves that our political culture is more moderate, more pragmatic, less theatrical. In many respects that is true. Compulsory voting stabilises participation. Electoral integrity remains strong. Our institutions, while strained, are not yet brittle.

But strain is visible.

The steady rise of grievance-based politics, the normalisation of rhetoric that frames institutions as adversaries rather than shared assets, the dismissal of empathy as ideological indulgence, these are not imported curiosities. They are local expressions of a global pattern.

When political discourse becomes primarily transactional, focused on tactical advantage and electoral arithmetic something essential recedes. The moral vocabulary of public life narrows. Policy becomes managerial rather than principled. Into that narrowing space steps a simpler narrative: strength over care, entitlement over restraint, victory over responsibility.

Neither major party is immune.

When Liberals reduce freedom to market freedom alone, liberty risks detaching from obligation. When Labor retreats into technocratic incrementalism, it risks sounding managerial rather than moral. Both approaches can unintentionally reinforce the idea that politics is merely an administrative contest rather than a shared ethical project.

Democracies are not sustained by efficiency alone. They endure because citizens broadly accept that power carries limits, that advantage brings responsibility, and that the vulnerable are not expendable in a competitive game.

If we misdiagnose our moment as one of ‘missing shame’ among particular individuals, we will continue to search for visible contrition. The deeper task is structural. It requires rebuilding incentives so that care once again carries political weight, so that relational accountability is not optional but expected.

History suggests that systems pushed beyond equilibrium do not stabilise indefinitely – they correct. The correction can take the form of deliberate reform, recalibration through policy, institutional renewal and cultural recommitment to mutual obligation. Or it can take the form of shock.

Shock arrives when accumulated strain exceeds tolerance. It is rarely tidy. It is seldom gentle. The choice between reform and rupture is made gradually, in the tone of our politics, the boundaries we defend, and the values we reward.

Shame, properly understood, is not about embarrassment. It is about recognising when power has crossed a line. But shame can only function in a culture where care still matters.

Australia stands at a quieter point on the same continuum visible in the United States. We are not at the edge. But we are not outside the pattern. The question is not whether we can demand shame from our elites. The question is whether we can restore care to the centre of public life before the system corrects itself in harsher ways.

Reform remains possible – it always is – but equilibrium, once ignored long enough, has a way of reasserting itself.