Good analysis. This post is mostly about the reaction of others to your actions (or rather, the pain and demotivation you feel in response) rather than your action’s impact. I add a limp note that the two are correlated.
The point is to reset people’s reference class and so salve their excess pain. People start out assuming that innocence (not-being-compromised) is the average state, but this isn’t true, and if you assume this, you suffer excessively when you eventually get shamed / cause harm, and you might even pack it in.
“Bite it” = “everyone eventually does something that attracts criticism, rightly or wrongly”
You’ve persuaded me that I should have used two words:
benign compromise: “Part of this normality comes from shame usually being a common sense matter—and common sense morals correlate with actual harm, but are often wrong in the precise ways this movement is devoted to countering!”
deserved compromise: “all action incurs risk, including moral risk. We do our best to avoid them (and in my experience grantmakers are vigilant about negative EV things), but you can’t avoid it entirely. (Again: total inaction also does not avoid it.)”
Yeah it’s not fully analysed. See these comments for the point.
The first list of examples is to show that universal shame is a common feature of ideologies (descriptive).
The second list of examples is to show that most very well-regarded things are nonetheless extremely compromised, in a bid to shift your reference class, in a bid to get you to not attack yourself excessively, in a bid to prevent unhelpful pain and overreaction.