WTF is social? Gossip

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective. 

Gossip 

It is hard to keep quiet for a group of people. We even have an expression for when that doesn't happen. It is called awkward silence. Put some people who know each other in a room and it will be full of whispers and whooshing and swishing and laughter. People love to talk and especially talk about other people. That talk is called Gossip.  Ask people to talk about climate change or economic policy and we can hear yawning. You may notice above average urge to urinate among the participants. Some will just start feeling unquenchably thirsty. 

Why do we love gossip? We love it so much that we are willing to skip most parts of lectures and meetings. Why do employees who will normally keep quiet in company all hands, all of a sudden become vocal by the time they reach the water cooler. The evolutionary answers always have to do something with survival. Somehow people who gossip survived and not those who didn't. How can gossip help is survive?  In a fair, equal, caring world gossip doesn't help. If you don't know something, people will just point it out to you. Gossip helps when knowing small things can make a big difference. And that happens when social interactions are complicated, full on land mines and thorny issues, which if touched or not properly conducted can lead to lots of unfavourable outcomes. 

Social is full of power difference and inequality and the willingness to use it effectively to maintain it. Without gossip we have no way to know how to deal with new people or adjust our behaviour with people we already know to better match our behaviour with what is going on with other peoples lives. Gossip is essential to survival, to maintain relationships. Gossiping not only strengthens the relationships between those who gossip, but also keeps us aware of other things that we must know, the ones that are not written in the manual.  

Information has a way of disseminating. Say it loud and no one listens. Paste it on notice boards, send emails and no one reads. Not everything is discussable in every group but the dynamics will change in even sub group of the same group. If you can't tell it to your best friend, then you will not discuss it in any group of size greater than two. As we add more people to any group, the number of things that can be discussed decreases. We call it word of mouth, but sharing of WhatsApp in a 180 member group is not a word of mouth. May be one to one or perhaps one to two or three or four. After that we don't really need to listen to whatever is being said. The stakes get so large after that group size that most communication needs to be meticulously calculated.  Gossip happens to people in groups where trust exists. It is not that people don't have opinions, they inherently know with whom to share and when. Gossip is an act of trust and friendship. For information to become widely shared and become credible it needs to pass through the many such gossip groups at different trust levels before it will become widely known. Gossip is where information is dissected and assimilated by social animal. 

We are supposed to gossip and it is good for us. At least that is what evolution wanted us to do.  Gossip is the lifeblood of social fabric and definitely not a waste of time. Gossip takes you more places than whatever else you might think is more important.

Call it bitching or doging, gossip thou must!

Next: Stories

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WTF is social? Human Completeness

This blog is the first part of a series. Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

What do we mean by "man is a social animal"? May be we mean cooperation as the first sign of being a social animal, but in that case we are not alone. Monkeys live in groups and so do Elephants. Ants and Bees are social genetically, we are social by necessity and perhaps now by choice. When we say social, we mean something positive, something good. This article explores the dark side of social and how the scale of human societies makes it impossible to comprehend it. 

Human Completeness 

Social is everywhere and it might not be an overstatement to say that social is all we have as a species. One way to understand the “social” is to think about it as the special ability of the human brain to understand other humans. Our brains are hard wired to know and anticipate what others are going to say, going to do. Judging comes naturally to us. Just like we have Turing completeness for automata (Turing machine can simulate every computer and any Turning machine can simulate any other Turing machine), we can think of this ability, faculty as a way for one human to simulate a different person and predict behaviour, actions, thoughts, feelings, motives, etc. Let’s call this Human Completeness. I don’t want to use the term empathy here because it has moral connotations. This ability is as useful to deal with friends as it is for dealing with enemies. 

Note that this ability is not necessarily post language (point in time in evolution when humans started using language ) in fact I will argue that this ability was prerequisite for the language to emerge in the first place. Humans must have lived without language and still be able to understand and communicate with each other in their own groups for a long time before language emerged. Many other species apart from humans are social without having language. Was it “social” that caused our brains to grow larger? R.I.M. Dunbar has done some excellent research on this subject, famous for Dunbar’s Number (150), the limit of human mind to maintain social relationships. The research investigates the brain sizes to body ratio for human ancestors from 7 million years ago, till the emergence of Homo Sapiens. Humans are different from other primates because they have unusual capacity to be social and maintain large number of relationships compared to any other species, thanks to our large brains.  

Surviving Social 

Living in groups is a super power but I think that being social is a double edged sword. Ability to coordinate and live in groups gives us a better chance of survival but that same ability makes it dangerous to survive in groups unless we know how to manage our relationships well enough. Others humans in our own groups must have been so dangerous to our survival that evolution had to give us large brains to make and maintain relationships. Nature and evolution waste nothing. Everything has a reason and the reason is mostly survival. Ability and skills matters but it is the understanding of the fabric of relationships which is key to survival in social. Ants and Bees are social, but their social structure is genetic. This lack of flexibility somehow constraints their ability to solve many environment problems. Humans on the other hand have flexible ways to arrange their social structure to solve individual and group survival problems.   To leave everything to the genetically selected Queen doesn't requires workers to have big brains, but the social for humans is a different ball game all together and evolutionary superior. Being in the group is just a start, living in the group is the difficult part. 

Other thing to understand is that social is a winning idea in the story of evolution. People who were not social, not that they hated other people but may be were bad at or ignored spending time in learning about others must have vanished from earth. Either eaten by wild animals or hunted by other humans who were social. Social is necessary for survival. The story of social is simply the story of how to survive it. Surviving against predators and other tribes is important, but that must have been a smaller problem. All we need is the ability to take orders and discipline, just like ants and bees. Social is about challenges we face in peace within our groups. May be our idea of fair come for this stage of evolution when we started to live in groups without any rules. It is the act of defining fair that defeats its purpose and makes it something legal. This was probably a world like Lord of the Flies. A world beyond good and evil, where all that matters is what others think about you and how well you can predict it. How do you fit in and when do you take a stand?  It is a flexible world where some can gang up and kill you while you are alone plucking fruits. A world without rights and wrongs, fickle, unpredictable with nothing to protect you from your fellow humans except how well you understand them. Sounds familiar? Not much has changed. 

States and the rise of Anti-Social 

For anti-social to survive we need state, police, judiciary etc to guaranty safety and equality before law. Social inherently means no equality, because equality simply abuses the most important human faculty and declares it useless. State and its systems are artless, naive. Social means knowing your place in the group, in every subset of your group, exploiting or submitting, fighting or fleeting, knowing well what you must tolerate and what you must not, to ensure survival. Social is surviving other humans because isolated we don't have much chance anyway. It is the lesser of the evils.  May be the answer to the question: "will you jump off the cliff if everyone is doing so" is clearly "yes". Isolation is death for a social animal because it doesn't knows how to survive alone.   

Take a pause and think about your social circle and sub-circles. What is permissible and not permissible to talk about in which circle and what are the consequences? Can you teach your boss? Can you bully your siblings/coworkers? Which ones? Can you cry your way with someone? Congratulations! You have learned well. 

Key things to remember: we are hard wired to understand people and there is a limit on the number of people we can truly understand. The limit is 150 (Dunbar's Number) and that is a maximum limit. The only way to reach this limit is when we spend lots of time with people, talking or doing things together so that we truly understand them. If we don't spend the time, our individual limits will be much smaller. Social is a symbiotic relationship between the individual and the group, made up of the relationships between members of the group. A group without free relationships between its members is not a social group, but organisation. We contribute to social by being social. We survived millions of years without tools, wheel, fire, agriculture, money, language, states etc by just being social. Social "technology" is our mightiest weapon of survival not science or arts or technology.  

Note that this limit is not on number of people we can remember by face. That number is in the range of 1500-2000. So yes we can know probably 10X more people by face, but what we know about them will be very shallow. Even the number 150 is on the higher side and can be subdivided further. The table below is from the Book: Thinking Big - How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Brain by Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar. 

• Close Intimates              5
• Best Friends                   15
• Good Friends                 50
• Friends                           150
• Near Acquaintances  1500

It is easy to see how scale decreases the depth of relationships. It is true, deep relationships take time and perhaps only time. Face saving is important, but only at scale. Your best friends love you inspite of everything. They just happen to know you at far greater granularity than others. 

Social brain has interesting implications on many areas of our lives. So much of what is happening around us can be explained by looking at the size of the societies we live in and inability of the human brain to comprehend it. Communication technologies which increase the size or number of groups we have to deal with, which alter the feedback mechanisms of the group communication, have profound impact on the kind of society it becomes. 

Now that we have some idea of the key principle, let's try to see if this can explain some phenomenon in the real world. I have split this blog into multiple separate sections. They are listed below with their separate links.  Each of the these sections take up some of the things we find in the world and try to analyse it from the point of view of the Human Completeness ability. I will encourage you to read all of them, especially the last one: The conclusion.  

1. Why do we love Gossip?
2. Why is human brain wired to love Stories? 
3. Why Brands matter? Why don't people just sort by price or features? 
4. Subtle art of making you love or hate anyone - Media and Politics
5. Modern Stress and the increasing costs of keeping your shit together 
6. Are Stereotypes a modern phenomenon? Role of broadcasting technologies on relationship quality 
7. Religion is futile. Long live the religion 
8. Sorry Babu. Being human at scale is mostly a scam. 
9. Curse of Specialization or why pursuit of efficiency cannot be only goal for a society 
10. The conclusion: Anti-Social is not anti social 

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The rights of the wrongs

Most of the wrongs of the world are done in the name of right. Be it Islamic terrorism (jihad - fight against the enemies of Islam)  or partition of India when around 2 million people died and 14 million were displaced or dropping atomic bombs on Japan or butchering of Jews by Nazis. Sometimes I feel the idea of right is the wrongest thing ever invented by humanity. Let’s deconstruct the idea of right and wrong and see how far we can go. 

The first thing to acknowledge is the fact that there are many kinds of wrongs. We can start with something we call stupid. What is stupid? Stupid is something logically or rationally wrong. For example, I saw one WhatsApp forward saying Saheen Bagh protesters are being paid Rs 500 per day for protesting. Logically the government can pay them Rs 501 to stay at home. The real number will be actually even lesser than Rs 500 as they can earn something more by working instead of protesting. Plain stupidity is logically wrong. But stupidity is not punishable. Idea is that stupid person harms himself more through his stupidity than others.

The second level of wrong happens at ethical level. Let’s consider ethics at the level of a well knit group. Ethics of cartel involves keeping the prices high so that everyone in the group wins instead of competing and lowering margins for everyone. Other example is omertà - the ethics of keeping quiet when interrogated by police, popular with Italian mafia. Lots of wrong in the world is not possible without excellent work ethics of the community. When talking about ethically wrong we need to question whose ethics and for what purpose. The right judge of ethical wrongs is the community that created that ethic in the first place. The ethic could be morally wrong, but we will come to that a little later. Ethically wrong again may not be punishable. The punishment if any happens in the form of boycott from community itself. 

The third kind of wrong is perhaps legally wrong. Legal is a very nationalistic concept. When countries go to war and kill people, they are doing nothing legally wrong. Legal is the contract between the individual or citizen and the state. Legal is defined by legal code or some set of rules like constitution and laws derived from it. The purpose of judiciary and police is to prevent legal wrongs. Legal is a funny fiction in its own right but the alternative (whim of someone) is even worse. Consider IPC 429: “Whoever commits mischief by killing, poisoning, maiming or rendering useless, any elephant, camel, horse, mule, buffalo, bull, cow or ox, whatever may be the value thereof, of any other animal of the value of fifty rupees or upwards, shall be punished with imprisonment or either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both.” By the Rs 50 standard anyone eating fish or chicken should go to jail for five years. This makes almost all the meat eating people of India criminals. What does rendering useless means? If we kill and eat a chicken was it useless or useful? Does the Rs 50 limit applies to just one animal as individual or total worth of all animals combined more than Rs 50? If someone is willing to buy Rs 250 spray can for mosquitoes or cockroaches, then they do have value more than Rs 50. What about hit and run of animals on the roads, especially dogs and cats? They also render the animals useless (read dead). 

What Bhagat Singh did was legally wrong but morally correct. And he was legally punished. Legally wrong depends on the kind of government. Dictatorial governments make many more things illegal than democratic governments. Legal wrongs make a man criminal and punishable, but not really morally wrong, not at least all the time. As we saw in the case of IPC 429, legally wrong can be stupid as well. More examples: traffic fines are for not for pollution but for not having pollution certificate. Most people are actually fined for forgetting and not polluting. Another example is using phone while driving. The whole app based taxi industry works by using phone while driving. Almost every taxi driver is breaking this law about 10 times a day. Not sure how many arrests happen. Either the law should be abolished or the industry. The point really is that there is nothing sacred about being legally right. It is punishable doesn’t really means it is just. The good part is that in a democratic country, legal is updatable. If governments want they can bring legal closer to just. 

Legal has another dark side as well. Blaming legally wrong is easy, but proving it another ball game. India has 3.3 crore cases pending with various courts. Many of the cases literally take lifetime and sometime even more. Courts have now reduced their working speed to that of gods, giving justice only in next birth. Whats the point of having courts if they can’t work faster than god?  The super slow justice system is a boon for real criminals. They know that even if they get caught the punishment will come far late in life and perhaps after death. On the other hand, it is super dangerous for people who are innocent, because they will spend lifetime in proving their innocence. Essentially with a justice system like ours, we can screw peoples life by false accusation. Justice delayed in not justice denied, justice delayed is actually injustice in the name of justice. Such a system makes false reports almost the highest kind of criminal activity. This gives police much greater power than they appear to have on paper. The justice may prevail after life, but injustice can be done here and now and will last a lifetime. 

Another famous kind of wrong is historical wrong. Both caste system and reservation based on caste system come under this category. So does the Ram Mandir issue or article 370. Dead people can’t be legally punished in a system in which the highest form of punishment is death. We need constructs bigger than human to bring about historical justice. We need constructs which stay consistent over generations.  Legal systems have no way of dealing with historical wrongs in a democracy. Legally only two things exist: humans and corporations. Religion, caste, money, land, property, etc all are attributes of humans. They exists through humans. No humans no religion. No humans no caste. No humans no money. No humans no ownership of land or property.  To say the least, historical wrongs are not legal wrongs and hence not punishable or fixable. They probably come in the category of logically wrong. Any fix to historical wrong is yet another historical wrong which will come to haunt the generations yet to come. The only way out of historical wrongs is to pardon and end the cycle. Most humans are just cogs in these systems with very few beneficiaries. These systems are sustained through humans. Eliminating humans don’t kill the system, they are simply replaced. Killing or punishing goons doesn’t eliminate goondagiri. New ones come to replace the old. Killing poor doesn’t eliminate poverty, the system creates new poor. Eating chicken doesn’t eliminate chicken, systems create more chicken. Historical crimes are crimes of systems. Sadly legal does’t see systems. Most systems derive their power from poverty and story of injustice. What they cause is again more injustice and poverty. It is just a game of ping-pong played over generations for the amusement of few and horrors for everyone else. In a fight between individual and system, system always wins. We can find systems only from statistics and the deviations from normal. Language is an inadequate tool for proving or disproving systems. The right choice is not to try hard to win, but to stop playing the game. 

The last kind of wrong I will discuss is what is morally wrong. Again morals are not universal. Different cultures have different sense of morality. Not all moral wrongs are legally wrong and some moral wrongs can be legally right and vice-a-versa. Morality in India is a tricky subject. In my limited experience Indian morality is roughly on the lines of might is right. This makes establishing “might” the most important part of the existence as “right” will follow anyway from the “might”. This creates unique problems for India. The legal right and wrong is applicable to individual but the individual has almost no moral power as he doesn’t heads the moral food chain. The individual doesn’t have the power to decide what is wrong and right, because our morality is always looking for, or at the “might” to decide what is right. Morality is not a choice or a decision, it is inevitable and pre-decided. This sad sense of spineless morality is disturbing. This morality is designed for status quo. The might continues to define what is right and by definition remains the might. I wonder when it started. Was it the religion which took away the rights of people to think? Or was it the division of labour and division of thinking. Or was it the slavery under the Sultanate and then the Mughals and then the Britishers. Did slavery came first or the morality of slavery? Whatever be the answer, this concoction of wrongs is dangerous.

Wrongs are wrong for different reasons. But are we the right judges of wrong? How do we protect wrongs from our stupidity, our legality, our biases and our morality? May be drink a glass of water and talk to someone. May be the largest step we need to take is to go from “might is right” to “you might be right”. 

Representation of truth and justice

Truth and justice are represented through words. No one fights for things that don't have a name. No one can bring to discussion that which doesn't have a name yet. The idea of truth and justice is mostly limited by the seekers vocabulary. 

Not all things worth representing have words for them and not all words represents something worth representing.