(In)Credible
(In)credible
July 2021 entry
Anthropologists tell us: people gossip. They spread rumors. It’s really common, in some form or another, across place and time. That isn’t a good thing or bad thing in itself; people are storytelling critters, and social critters, and it’s a way to make sense of the world we live in and find out things about each other. Thinking of sociologists like G.H. Mead, people also develop a sense of self, and of others, through ongoing interactions, verbal and nonverbal, with each other. I mean, what is a relationship, if not the product of repeated interactions with another person? Making friends, making enemies, falling in or out of love. Emotions are shaped by interactions and relationships that can be so deep and complex that people can be friends, enemies, lovers, and more with the same person over time, or even all at once. Maybe that’s why people (including me) are drawn to drama and get wrapped up in soap operas.
Gossip and rumors are a kind of interaction, one that can make—and break—relationships, whether true or not. I think back to youth, to days on the playground, before social media, when we first started learning what rumors were and how they were spread. People liked to start and spread rumors because it made them feel important, like they were a part of something, even if that sense of belonging came at a cost to others. People can bond over shared likes, and shared dislikes.
When people spread rumors that both harmful and false, after a while, others began to not trust them. Maybe not right away, because rumors and gossip can be used as weapons against people you or others don’t like. Believing she had cooties let you bond in mutual fear and loathing—until the day they decided that you have cooties too. Like any other weapon, gossip and rumors can be used for, as well as against, those who weaponize them. Sooner or later, a person who keeps spreading false and damaging information will stop being credible; relationships with others are (sometimes permanently) damaged by spreading untrue and harmful things. If you have a lot of power or social status or have created an in-group that buys your lies for a while, then it might take a long time to happen, but sooner or later, the things you say are put to the test. Maybe most of us have learned this lesson the hard way at some point in our lives.
We hold people responsible for their actions, and their interactions, because we’re individuals who make choices. In his work Existentialism and Human Emotions, philosopher Jean Paul Sartre warned of the “terrible freedom” that comes with making choices, and offers an important moral lesson in context:
“…there are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibilities are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it.”
Believing in personal responsibility means being first and foremost responsible for our own interactions. We are each faced with a choice every single time we decide what to say, and to whom. We are faced with this choice when we decide whether to share a piece of information, and whether to make sure it is true or false, to think about whether it might have good or ill consequences, before and after doing so. To bring it all together, with a nod to Sartre: If I spread a lie, this lie is my lie; it is in my image; I am responsible for the harms of this lie, and I deserve any damage to my credibility that results from it. I could always get out of spreading the lie by double-checking the information, learning more, consulting credible sources, or simply saying nothing. But if I say nothing in the face of a lie, this is also a choice, and a choice I must live with.
Sources:
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sartre, Jean Paul. 1957. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical Library.
Stewart, Pamela J. and Andrew J. Strathern. 2020. “Gossip—A Thing Humans Do.” Anthropology News, February 20. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/gossip-a-thing-humans-do/
image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eugene_de_Blaas_The_Friendly_Gossips.jpg
