3.3 Born to gossip
Go out on the street and ask random people if they think gossip is good or bad. The great majority will say…
It’s bad.
Then ask, “Do you like it when people gossip about you?” The answer will almost universally be…
No!
But then look at our news media and what do we see…
A nonstop gossip fest.
Pundits, reporters, and anchors like talking about people far more than they like talking about issues.
What kind of people do they like best? The colorful characters, the more controversial and bizarre the better. They like the ones who are angry and attacking and acting out and making an uproar. They like the attention junkies and the drama queens. They’re thrilled to cover mainstream politicians who are psychologically disturbed.
And why? Because these news folk want to rile themselves up and huff and puff as they relieve themselves emotionally over the airwaves.
Sometimes groups of citizens will protest. They demand that the news organizations cover the serious topics which have serious consequences for human life on this planet. Things like climate change, nuclear weapons, and major conflicts between nations.
But the news organizations fire back with their own protest…
People don’t watch when we talk only about issues. Our ratings drop. We’re giving our viewers what they want. Not what they say they want, but what their behavior says they want. What they actually watch.
The news media make big money from programs that are mostly gossip.
How did this happen?
Given there’s a broad consensus that gossip is bad, why do our news programs consist mostly of gossip? And why are we viewers so obsessed with gossip? Why does it have such a grip on us?
If we look at human history, the millennia when we were living in relatively small hunter-gatherer tribes, the answer is simple…
We were a gossipy species.
For most of our time on earth…
Gossip was a necessity.
In his book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar says our ancestors did not consider gossip a petty vice, because it was our gift of gab which gave us the ability to weave ourselves into stable, enduring groups. Gossip was a fundamental instrument of human togetherness
Originally gossip simply meant…
Talking about people.
And as a social group species we needed to do a l0t of that, really a lot. Not just in negative terms. We needed to talk about the positive things people were doing.
So if someone was out of line, we’d talk about them and shame them and get them back on track.
But if someone was making an important contribution to the welfare of the tribe, that was just as important if not more so. And we’d want to support them and be there for them and point them out to our children as a role model.
Think about it for a moment. How could human society ever have developed without gossip? If way back when, we had all taken a vow of silence like monks in a monastery we couldn’t have advanced like we did.
We were social animals living in a social web, so we needed every bit of social information we could get our hands on to help us make smart decisions about who to trust and who to watch out for. We talked about our neighbors and our relationships constantly so we’d know where we stood in our tribe. And so we could pull our tribe together in cooperative projects.
Gossip in this context is not a flighty waste of time, it was…
Serious survival business.
But in our current era, we’ve degraded our talking about people, our gossip….
We use it to hurt people we don’t like.
We use it to distract ourselves from the bigger, more urgent issues we’d need to take on if we were to have a chance to save ourselves. But those issues are too big for most of us and too painful and too depressing, and…
Meanwhile gossip is great entertainment.
So just like tribalism, gossip which once helped to make us, is now breaking us…
Gossip once enhanced our survival but now undercuts our chance at surviving.
Instead of obsessing over sad, sick people who are dragging all of us down, it would be a very, very good thing for us as a species to start talking nonstop about the people who are taking on the big issues, and doing so forthrightly, and with deep understanding, and with a fierce commitment to smart and strategic action.
