Gossips Are A Great Litmus
It Means You're Doing Things That Are Interesting and Perhaps Important
Gossips and Trash Talkers are your friends. They help to define where the focus of your interpersonal attention should be. This is one of those pieces where we break people down into categories. There are three categories.
A. Gossips
B. Repeaters
C. Valuable People
What happens with Group A is they immediately identify themselves as people who aren’t worth being around. Now you can just remove that entire group of people out of your mind and there are that many less terrible people for you to have in your life. That self-identification is the biggest favor they can give you.
People who fall into the category of Group A are the mean kids in school, the adults with arrested development that they become, the political class, and the corporate media. These are the most obvious modern people in that group. These are people who create problems with their tongues. Where there is no crisis, they create them. They require crises to exist. Some call it disaster capitalism, or crises capitalism. Where there is no problem, that in itself is a crisis for Group A. They MUST have antipathy. There can be zero nice days. It is an affectation that our species has not shaken. It has been normalized by Western Civilization. It’s a mental illness.
Group B is a harder one to swallow, because these are people who believe things without doing any research and who are often more concerned with their reputations than they are with observable reality. This can be heartbreaking because sometimes these are people you thought were valuable. They are often people you care for and you hate it when you see them embracing such shallowness. They may just be a lot less bright than you thought. They may be more concerned with not being the next person to be slandered and don’t want to effect their social or economic status. Regardless, this is the largest percentage of the population. This group is the most responsible for maintaining the unearned positions of the people in Group A.
Again, an example of how the people in Group A are valuable to you, because they have helped you to identify an entire range of people, Group B, who are unworthy of any real attention. That’s a pretty tough decision, but it’s the best one you can make.
Any type of person can fall into this Group B. You could put TV watchers into this Group. They have a difficult time dissecting information. They need their thoughts inserted. It’s easier for them to just go along to get along. It can also be the case that they don’t know the difference between the appliance in their living room and the window in their wall.
Plato wrote a lot about these people. Not just the cave watchers. The Republic is a book he wrote that describes the importance that Group A have to society, due to the intelligence level of Group B. He wrote these things because he didn’t want to be destroyed by Group A the way that his mentor Socrates was. He succumbed to the pressure of the brutal class. He was kind of like an Anchorman of his day. He not only repeated whatever Group A decided was necessary to rule society, but he asked leading questions in order to virtue signal that he was playing ball. He betrayed the Socratic Method of his mentor.
Group C are the interesting bunch. They don’t listen to Group A, and they are aware of and are ultimately annoyed terribly by Group B. When they hear the gossip, they figure the person being slandered is probably doing something interesting and important. They may or may not have time to find out the facts, because they’re too busy doing the interesting and important things themselves. They do a lot of brow furrowing and have very inquisitive facial expressions when they’re working. These are the people who create things. They make things. They create and produce value for the world. The people in the other two groups live off of them, in one way or another. Even if it’s just gossiping about them.
When they hear the gossip from the people in the other two groups they know it’s probably bullshit and just keep working on their interesting things. They can certainly be destroyed by Group A. They can have the values they create stolen from them, or they can simply be destroyed as people, because they refuse to play ball.
Group C are the people you want in your life. This is the best bunch. They see through nonsense. They have an interest in empiricism. They are able to distinguish reality from perception. They don’t need a lot of friends, they need a few high quality friends.
People who you might think are in Group C, who seem to also be in group B, are actually in Group A. If someone you think is in Group C wants to benefit from the ignorance of Group B, that makes them a part of Group A. They were never valuable, and there’s no way of knowing what, if any value they’ve produced. Thomas Edison was someone perceived as being in Group C, but the facts are that he usurped almost everything he claims to have invented from others. That puts him into Group A. Group B believe the bullshit that he was a creator. He was an organizer, and a manipulator of business machinations, 100% Group A. Henry Ford, Group A. The only thing Bill Gates ever invented was a hyper-turbo version of a person from Group A. He actually has Group B accepting his health advice, by simply paying Group A to say ridiculous things that get people killed with funds he never earned honestly in the first place.
Be like a duck, let it roll off your back. Keep your head down and your nose to the grind stone. Keep working on your important things.
Be interesting. Be honest. Be Socratic, not Platonist.
Use your window, not your TV.
Don’t see humans as opportunities.
For Real,
Herschel (Commercial Herschel) Sterling