Social status (the respect and admiration of others) is more important to our health than any other social or economic factor. In Hippolytus Stefaniphoros, Euripides distinguishes between good shame (aedos), when the good ideal of the ego encourages us to respect justice, and bad shame (aschyni), which bears a heavy burden of contempt and drives a person out of his “home”. somewhere he belongs to the common with others – like him, it starts from somewhere, returns somewhere.

Imagine the heartache that a child experiences when he is stripped, shamed, dragged in front of his social group. The pain is unbearable. A person experiences confusion, depersonalization and merging of himself with another. The earth opens and swallows him, he becomes invisible. It’s a psychotic class defense. The individual ceases to be a thinking subject. He sinks into sadness. He cannot judge, check reality.

Social networks are a public space. These are not services. They represent the architecture of the modern social universe and create security problems. They cause a split in the cohesion of society. They need adjustment. They can become places of public broadcasting. They can easily create temporary herds that have only one way of existence: the exclusion of someone for extermination. I’m not just talking about extreme cases. I’m talking about the brutality of everyday bullying. There are others who hate and want to destroy you. Let’s keep our wits about us. And let’s look after each other. Let’s not be silent.

The democratic city is made up of separate spaces and times (marketplace, parliament, press, theatre, courts, churches, television, internet, companies, meals, parties, gossip) that institutionally govern how the private can be presented publicly. Democracy is made up of honest, unintelligent people united by friendship, not by the all-powerful fantasy of belonging to the inner ring. Honesty is the tact to tell the truth that you and the other person can bear. In ancient Athens, during the Eleusinian mysteries, when the procession crossed the bridge of Kifissos, there were masked “bridgemen” who shamelessly shot at the officials following the procession. Daily gossip is also a very serious game necessary for democracy. However, lying to destroy another person you envy is dishonest. Racism, bullying those you think are weak is dishonest, paranoid and ridiculous.

They cause a split in the cohesion of society. They need adjustment. They can become places of public broadcasting.

In adolescence, a person determines who he is in relation to society. He goes out into the world. He has the ability to be. And let it be only in the presence of another. His true self is deeply lonely. We need favorable conditions to dare to go out into the world, to start making spontaneous gestures, to make a creative contribution to society. His spontaneous gestures, his true self in action, arouse deep envy and fear among local tyrants. They intimidate him into conforming, living in fear, becoming a false self like themselves. Those who resort to violence are those who have suffered from this violence in the past. The concern of the person being bullied is that the other person respects their narcissism. Not to have an answer – to remain silent – to his need for meaning. Don’t be surrounded by the world. The universe that surrounds you has not become a world, a meaningful order, a law. A person who has gone astray can be caught in a net of slander by a “flock”, which will drag him away, deprive him of morality, morally destroy him, dress him in poison-soaked clothes that eat flesh (this is what Dejanira gave to the unfaithful Hercules to avenge him), gives him pain like the last skin. Pulling and dragging are etymologically related to dragging and skinning (they also mean peeling). Our soul is born from our body and resides in it. The skin that protects us is created by our first “nos” that establish our identity, which is confirmed by the answer, the gaze of the object, the other that matters to us, inside and out. This makes us thinking subjects.

Today attacks on the bonds of thought make the work of culture insufficient. The word ethos is associated with morality, law, morality, character, habits. For Homer, the word ethos meant habitat, habitual residence, places visited by animals and people to hide from predators. We are born with an innate need, similar to hunger and thirst, to seek out another who makes sense and gives it meaning. Our true selves are based on primal loneliness and intimacy. It is born in the original matrix of intersubjectivity. It’s not for communication. It is the secret source of our life. Not for show.

* Mr Sotiris Manolopoulos is a child psychoanalyst.