From Merton’s personal journal in 1940:
What (besides making lists of the vices of our age) are some of the greatest vices of our age?
To begin with, people began to get self-conscious about the fact that their misconducted lies were going to pieces: so, instead of ceasing to do thing things that made them ashamed and unhappy, they made it a new rule that they must never be ashamed of the things they did. There was only to be only once capital sin: to be ashamed. That was how they through they could solve the problem of sin, by abolishing the term.