This morning, as I was making my usual breakfast fare of bean-mush and egg, one of my housemates came in to make her usual eggs and oatmeal. We talked, as housemates will, about our other housemates. Onions frying, she told me that the night before she had heard the names of her and her boyfriend float into her room from the common-space. She was being gossiped about! It had taken her by surprise, and made her wonder: Did our housemates often talk about her behind her back? I said I supposed our housemates talked about everybody.
The problem with gossip isn’t that it causes furtive whispers and sneaky glances, per se. It wouldn’t cause any harm to be talked about, if talking was all it was. If spreading a rumor was nothing but sharing information, gossip would be totally innocuous. The danger of gossip comes from our human tendency to build stories, to create fictions which envelop the person we’re gossiping about.
Our brains are really good at constructing wholes out of parts. When talking about how Ananda is a slob, we’re expert at recalling every interaction and impression we’ve had of Ananda, picking out the moments that reinforce our notion of her as a slob and discarding everything else. Gossip, like an enzyme, breaks down the shards of the Ananda we know and re-synthesizes her into the shape of our notions. In so doing we obscure other legitimate pieces of evidence, rewriting those experiences with new subtexts. We distort the actual person and flatten them into a pancake. We mentally redraw them, as devoid of nuance as a caricature is of dignity.
This still doesn’t harm them. What harms them is that when you interact with that person afterward, you’ll treat them as your internal narrative instructs you to. You have blinded yourself to their true identity. You have robbed them of their ability to surprise you; whatever they do only reinforces your notions, your caricature. That is the harm of gossip. These distortions may be inevitable, they certainly are a natural part of the way humans process information and of course it is not possible to really know a person.
Our human tendency to narrativize can also affect us internally. I have decisions to make. I have to decide whether or not to renew my lease; I have to decide if I’m studying abroad or dropping out, or transferring to MATC, or sticking through another few years at UW. But all I’m really choosing between are internally fabricated outcomes. Noah’s dropping-out experience and studying-abroad experience are both products of my brain’s capacity to build fictional narratives, this time not about my housemates but about myself and my future. The problem is, having never lived these possibilities, the illusions are all I have to choose from. Understanding that every road before you is nothing but your own mind is paralyzing.
In a column a few weeks ago about economic democracy, I mentioned a man named Bill Ayers. This man, labeled a “murdering terrorist” in a comment on the online posting of the column, was and is much more than that. When we simplify people and their actions to such binary polemics we can never learn from them and often they are worth learning from. Bill Ayers, when discussing ethics and social justice, once said “we need to figure out how to become the people we have been waiting for.” In other words, our fabricated ideals —the imaginary containers of values and complexes we internally create and maintain—can serve us.
Instead of flattening our friends with our unreasonable expectations, instead of projecting our idealized imaginings onto others, we should sift through these constructed identities for what we want to see in ourselves.
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