One thing I notice after turning forty is that
most of the problems we tend to run into
aren't really about a single act being inherently problematic,
but about an observer's feeling that they can't stand the sight of someone else's behavior.
Usually that "can't stand the sight" comes from simple differences in taste, relative deprivation, unexpected loss of opportunity cost, or anxiety about maintaining one's (or one's organization's) authority and sense of belonging.
But the bigger issue is
that this kind of anxiety is unsettled about its own subjective feelings, too. Individual anxiety can't stay alone.
So it tends to seek agreement about those feelings and their validity.
And in the process of trying to resolve that personal anxiety ("my own choice and action might be wrong," or "measured against the common sense I learned before, my action might deserve criticism"), people try to build a shared view of their subjective feeling within their own group - in other words, they try to prove objective validity.
And the representative output of that is backbiting.
Though it's an older book, Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, explains that "humans were able to cooperate with one another, collectively imagine, and flexibly collaborate through 'gossip'," arguing that in order for many people to cooperate, fiction-telling gossip was necessary. Based on this "gossip theory," he focuses on the idea that humans try to live a "decent life" out of concern for others.
I agree that humans unavoidably end up using rumor as a method for survival, but I don't agree that this rumor is fiction "for cooperation," or that backbiting was needed to "live a decent life."
I do agree that backbiting is a very instinctive behavior Sapiens living together in ancient nature took up as part of the survival process. But if humans living in modern society behave the same way ancient Sapiens did, they deserve - literally - to be called something like "you subhuman-like human" or "hey, you Sapiens-like human."
One's cognitive dissonance begins from the anxiety and guilt of not performing the behavior that the common sense they've learned - in the organization or culture they belong to - expects of them. And to fundamentally block this guilt and anxiety, they come up with a very dramatic - flipping the premise of the common sense - and root-level solution: rumor. From the perspective of a wild Sapiens living in the survival-of-the-fittest era, rumor was a very instinctive and clever method, but from the common sense of modern humans, it's a very cowardly and inhumane behavior.
The more severe an individual's anxiety within a group, the more word-of-mouth and side-taking intensify. This side-taking is also used to strengthen loyalty within an organization, or - between countries (Britain and India, Japan and Korea) - has been used to run colonization efficiently.
