slander, community, and empathy
Nov. 8th, 2005 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonI found out earlier today that someone I had once considered a friend had chosen to slander me ("slander," in this case meaning choosing to spread information to others containing half-truths, insinuations, selective choice of facts, misrepresentations, and/or pure lies in an attempt to hurt someone or attack their character). I think I get why this happened, but really, the reasons why are largely irrelevant.
So heck, what a bummer. This kind of thing has happened to me once in my life before, about a decade ago, by a real pro with a long history and much skill and experience, so by comparison, this situation is real small-time stuff. Some of the people on my friends list remember that last time -- in fact, a number of us met and became long and fast friends because of our shared experiences around it. Anyhow, I learned some things from both occurrences, general patterns that I've seen and figured I'd share. Note that I'm not getting into any specifics here -- personal privacy and integrity are important to me, so no matter what I thought of someone personally, I wouldn't choose to drag their name through the mud in an open forum. It's just not necessary, compassionate or wise. Those most of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it -- it's really not a big deal.
Some generalizations:
1. Friends ask for clarification and more information if they hear something that worries or concerns them. Friends don't take any story on faith one-sided -- if they truly care about the situation and the people involved, they get real information, directly from the source(s), and make their own judgments. This is especially true when things don't quite make sense, when there is dissonance between what is said and one's own experience of people. Times of stress are often when one finds out more about the character of oneself, and of friends.
2. Truth does out, sooner or later, it really does. I don't mean just the narrow personal truth particular to the inside of one person's own individual head. Sure, there are many sides to every story, we all have our own perspectives and truths, but there are also cases of clear misrepresentation and untruth which usually come out somewhere along the way. This is equally true whether someone is intentionally misrepresenting things, or genuinely believes things to be other than they are.
3. Like gossip, slander almost always harms the community into which it is released. People who go on crusades are dangerous -- regardless of the stated goal for spreading stories, my experience is that those who do so are usually operating from an underlying need for vengeance or a desire to harm or demonize someone, and are typically heedless of the real damage they are doing to those around them, because it's not about community, it's not really about truth, it's about someone's ego. It's about embarrassing, or hurting someone, pushing people into taking sides, fighting a war to prove a point or taking one's own internal demons and inflicting them onto the outside world. Or, more mundanely, it's about garnering sympathy, support, justification, and being the focus of attention. It's always a valid question to ask: "but really, what was the need to broadcast this particular information, in this forum and at this time, what was the actual intent?"
That's one way slander differs from healthy discussion, discourse and debate. In slander, usually what is being set up is a scripted scene, a public morality play. Characters and roles are written up, and people are cast into them, regardless of whether they actually fit -- it has little to do with actual truth, or actual events, or actual people, and more about the internal scenes played out inside someone's head, now projected large for the world to see. Maybe it's entertaining, maybe of prurient interest, but it always says more about what the internal landscape of the playwright looks like than anything real in the outside world. It's not about truth, it's about using the external world to play out one's inner dramas, and also about manipulating the court of public opinion for personal attention or gain.
In genuine, honest communication, people who have difficulties make efforts to communicate directly, openly, without using proxies, intermediaries or putting innocent people in the middle of their issues. That's been one of my main measures of character over the years -- how willing is someone to let people get hurt, and on the flip side, how much genuine concern is expressed around one's words and actions, and what actual care is taken to minimize damage to others? In other words, where is the big ego found, and how much genuine empathy is evident? Where a trail of hurt and damaged people is found, particularly among people who were once friends, there's usually a person at the center who is more concerned about ego validation than truth, more interested in winning a war or scoring a point than building and strengthening community.
I've been living in and creating intentional group housing and communities for about 19 years now, and I've seen a lot of patterns, and noted what kinds of people can and cannot successfully be in a real full-time community. In all of that time, we've only had to have one person leave, and that was more about his personal growth at the time than any serious problems. Some of that is luck, but a big part of that is picking the right people.
Currently the person with the least number of years together in this community is my son, and that's because he's only 6 years old -- he was born into an intentional community (which technically means it's not an intentional community, since he didn't have a choice about that ;>) Everyone else has been together longer than that.
If you're in it for the long haul, to build a community where people stay because they want to, not because they have to (like a nuclear family), the number one most important characteristic is empathy. Shortly following that is honesty. And yes, everyone falls short sometimes, and the important thing is to genuinely make amends for whatever harm you've caused, do whatever you have to do to clean up your mess, even if it's damn hard and takes a long time, and try to do better next time.
But the bottom line is empathy. If someone can't actually feel for other people, if they can't regularly base their actions on how those actions will make those around them feel, they're not going to make it in a healthy community.
So heck, what a bummer. This kind of thing has happened to me once in my life before, about a decade ago, by a real pro with a long history and much skill and experience, so by comparison, this situation is real small-time stuff. Some of the people on my friends list remember that last time -- in fact, a number of us met and became long and fast friends because of our shared experiences around it. Anyhow, I learned some things from both occurrences, general patterns that I've seen and figured I'd share. Note that I'm not getting into any specifics here -- personal privacy and integrity are important to me, so no matter what I thought of someone personally, I wouldn't choose to drag their name through the mud in an open forum. It's just not necessary, compassionate or wise. Those most of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it -- it's really not a big deal.
Some generalizations:
1. Friends ask for clarification and more information if they hear something that worries or concerns them. Friends don't take any story on faith one-sided -- if they truly care about the situation and the people involved, they get real information, directly from the source(s), and make their own judgments. This is especially true when things don't quite make sense, when there is dissonance between what is said and one's own experience of people. Times of stress are often when one finds out more about the character of oneself, and of friends.
2. Truth does out, sooner or later, it really does. I don't mean just the narrow personal truth particular to the inside of one person's own individual head. Sure, there are many sides to every story, we all have our own perspectives and truths, but there are also cases of clear misrepresentation and untruth which usually come out somewhere along the way. This is equally true whether someone is intentionally misrepresenting things, or genuinely believes things to be other than they are.
3. Like gossip, slander almost always harms the community into which it is released. People who go on crusades are dangerous -- regardless of the stated goal for spreading stories, my experience is that those who do so are usually operating from an underlying need for vengeance or a desire to harm or demonize someone, and are typically heedless of the real damage they are doing to those around them, because it's not about community, it's not really about truth, it's about someone's ego. It's about embarrassing, or hurting someone, pushing people into taking sides, fighting a war to prove a point or taking one's own internal demons and inflicting them onto the outside world. Or, more mundanely, it's about garnering sympathy, support, justification, and being the focus of attention. It's always a valid question to ask: "but really, what was the need to broadcast this particular information, in this forum and at this time, what was the actual intent?"
That's one way slander differs from healthy discussion, discourse and debate. In slander, usually what is being set up is a scripted scene, a public morality play. Characters and roles are written up, and people are cast into them, regardless of whether they actually fit -- it has little to do with actual truth, or actual events, or actual people, and more about the internal scenes played out inside someone's head, now projected large for the world to see. Maybe it's entertaining, maybe of prurient interest, but it always says more about what the internal landscape of the playwright looks like than anything real in the outside world. It's not about truth, it's about using the external world to play out one's inner dramas, and also about manipulating the court of public opinion for personal attention or gain.
In genuine, honest communication, people who have difficulties make efforts to communicate directly, openly, without using proxies, intermediaries or putting innocent people in the middle of their issues. That's been one of my main measures of character over the years -- how willing is someone to let people get hurt, and on the flip side, how much genuine concern is expressed around one's words and actions, and what actual care is taken to minimize damage to others? In other words, where is the big ego found, and how much genuine empathy is evident? Where a trail of hurt and damaged people is found, particularly among people who were once friends, there's usually a person at the center who is more concerned about ego validation than truth, more interested in winning a war or scoring a point than building and strengthening community.
I've been living in and creating intentional group housing and communities for about 19 years now, and I've seen a lot of patterns, and noted what kinds of people can and cannot successfully be in a real full-time community. In all of that time, we've only had to have one person leave, and that was more about his personal growth at the time than any serious problems. Some of that is luck, but a big part of that is picking the right people.
Currently the person with the least number of years together in this community is my son, and that's because he's only 6 years old -- he was born into an intentional community (which technically means it's not an intentional community, since he didn't have a choice about that ;>) Everyone else has been together longer than that.
If you're in it for the long haul, to build a community where people stay because they want to, not because they have to (like a nuclear family), the number one most important characteristic is empathy. Shortly following that is honesty. And yes, everyone falls short sometimes, and the important thing is to genuinely make amends for whatever harm you've caused, do whatever you have to do to clean up your mess, even if it's damn hard and takes a long time, and try to do better next time.
But the bottom line is empathy. If someone can't actually feel for other people, if they can't regularly base their actions on how those actions will make those around them feel, they're not going to make it in a healthy community.
