Humiliation as a motivation for people and RPG characters Options

[Wounded Ronin]

So, it turns out there's an actual web site dedicated to the study of humiliation.

http://www.humiliationstudies.org/index.php

After my initial disappointment that it wasn't an S&M site had passed, I realized that it actually seems like a worthy area of study. People seem to have a real mad-on for humiliation. Lots of the big disasters in the world, like World War II, seem to have been humiliation-fueled, i.e. Germans feeling upset about having been pwn't in WWI and having been in dire economic straits for a long time as a direct results.

Why is it that people have to get so bent out of shape over humiliation? Why can't people just say, "Well, I admit that I basically suck in this situation, but for the sake of the greater good I'll just decide not to care, as opposed to getting crazygonuts and trying to take over the whole of Europe."? I feel like percieved humiliation amounts to a political tool that can get people do do things which are against their own best interest and against the greater best interest of the entire world as a whole.

Basically, IMO being preoccupied with humiliation amounts to being extremely self-absorbed.

But, seeing as apparently humiliation does motivate so many people with so much energy, I think that from the standpoint of character development and constructing believable situations in role playing games, humiliation could actually be an important tool in a GM's toolbox. Do you want to make a character sympathetic in his or her quest for vengance? I guess you could work some element of humiliation into that since probably most people would understand that motivation, but at the same time you would have to be careful not to go overboard and make your character an un-sympathetic RPG equivalent of a Goth or Emo kid.

Do you have any thoughts on the role of humiliation as a character motivator, or as motivation for groups of characters? In a situation like the Shadowrun world, where economic disempowerment is part of the setting, do you feel that humiliation felt by certain social classes or groups of people should be a running theme of the game world?