Bart Henderson is a leading forensic auditor and CEO of Henderson Solutions, an enterprise risk management firm.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The heartache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? – Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Travelling extensively again, I find myself communicating with my 17 year old son by BBM or WhatsApp, or any other available and fully functioning social network medium.

This time, we are debating a school exercise: defining “disgrace”.

My son asked me what disgrace meant to me, to explain what my views were on what constituted disgrace. This is a tall order for someone at my age, who thinks in words and for whom words are everything.

It’s an impossibility to comment on a word without internalising the meaning. Whether I have been disgraced or have disgraced myself is moot. It’s impossible in a lifetime not to.

We have all, and will all, at one point act in a manner, or not act for that matter, that will bring disgrace upon ourselves.

Suffice it to say, it’s a challenge to answer your own child when posed with this question, especially when you aspire to your own strict sense or brand of honesty.

It struck me, as I contemplated disgrace, how many words that described a disgraceful act started with “dis-”, like dishonesty, disrespect, disregard and disassociation.

I suggested to my son that, in modern colloquial terms, this is where “don’t ‘dis’ me” stems from.

As I struggled to be as truthful as possible and mulled the word “disgrace”, it occurred to me, and I explained to him that, in the greater scheme of things, to me in any event, the biggest disgrace of all was probably betrayal.

It occurred to me that betrayal was the one disgrace that – given the right set of circumstances – could lead people to kill.

Disgrace transcends culture, religion or dogma. Disgrace is both objective and subjective at once for the disgraced or the disgraceful.

The power of disgrace is so overwhelming that for even the stoutest heart, denial more often than not overrides mea culpa (“my guilt, my fault, my bad”).

As a consequence, in this denial lies the cause that ferments the sense of injustice that festers and tortures and drives the perception of betrayal to the darkness in our deepest consciousness where thoughts and sometimes acts of murder are harboured.

It is not betrayal, real or perceived that drives us to darkness. It is our sense of being betrayed, and our betrayal being denied, that drives us to acts of unspeakable evil. It is our sense of injustice.

There is only one remedy open to the perceived betrayer and betrayed and that is contrition.

But even then, this might not be enough as contrition must be met with a generosity and kindness of spirit far too few seem capable of.

“Contrition” or “contriteness” (from the Latin contritus –“ground to pieces”, or crushed by guilt) is sincere and complete remorse.

Its elements comprise hatred and regret for one’s sin or indiscretion (Luke, 15:11-32): “Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee: I am not worthy to be called thy son”.

It is in the juxtaposition of myself and my own son in the role of Luke and his plea to God, that it tears at the depths of my soul to even contemplate such a statement of contrition from my son, who is much more than my son, he is my very sun.

In the absence of contrition, of guilt grinding the betrayer to pieces with remorse, the betrayed can never forgive, or forget.

Herein lays the ultimate betrayal in betrayal, the inability to find the courage or strength in vulnerability that empowers humility that is the enabler of contrition.

It is this inability to find in the seemingly contrite a sense of humility that more often than not leads to our inability to forgive a disgrace.

It is in our inability to act in the interest of a common humanity that we allow disgraceful acts to grow into the type of hate that leads to acts of unspeakable inhumanity.

It is why Marikana was allowed to happen. It is why we are polarised as a society.

We are not contrite, we have no humility. We are a nation betraying ourselves and that is a disgrace.