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A few days ago, I attended a talk on emotional intelligence given by members of Tec’s RULER program. One of the topics that inspired me to reflect on several things is how the science of psychology helps us understand what is happening behind people’s behavior, that is, inside; when it is not revealed to us immediately, intuitively, it generates confusion. For example, when we face what we consider someone’s impolite treatment, the theory reminds us not to jump to conclusions but to open ourselves to interpreting their behavior differently: Perhaps the person is distracted, focused on another topic, or annoyed with someone other than us. Considering that possibility can prevent an undesirable reaction on our part.
This simple approach, which we all know but struggle to practice, unleashed a multitude of ideas in me about the various resources that human beings have to discern the true intentions of others.
Why are we so paranoid? Well, simple survival: “A single traitor can defeat a thousand brave men,” sings Alfredo Zitarrosa. We have to be on guard against people like this to stop them. But we also must know how to distinguish the innocent. I recall what historian Yuval Noah Harari tells us about how, in the past, when we still formed relatively small, primitive communities, the way to get to know each other was through something he calls chismorreo (gossip). Hordes of more than a hundred people maintained their community cohesion by talking to one another and warning each other about the behavior of various members. The people themselves exposed to others what one did or did not do, allowing at least conjecture about what was behind the appearance.
I imagine that the larger the group grew, the more detailed the descriptions must be; these would now not be limited to mentioning “general” behaviors (theft, aggression, cooperation, healing) but more subtle, personalized details that would help to better distinguish some members from others, developing more effective coexistence tactics.
Before gossip, Harari says, there were no proper human groups (so gossip is at least one of our origins). The communication by gestures and noises of our non-human ancestors allowed them to remain alert to external predators. Still, it did not attain the subtlety necessary to describe members of their group. To trust or not to trust someone in our pack, we had to testify to their behavior ourselves. This “having to see to know” meant that the groups could not be too large: no one should lose sight of the other. On the other hand, the appearance of language made it possible to begin to “tertiar”, that is, to gossip about others, to talk about them (for the good or bad) behind their backs, making them known even to those who had never met them. (This has made me think that proper names would have arisen, above all, to refer to that third party who suddenly appeared in the conversation without being present; in other words, our names serve not so much to introduce or address us as to talk about us when we are not there.)
Gossip was essential to the growth of the horde, resulting in the inter-regulation of a greater number of members (as seen in the current practice of recording people with cell phones to denounce or praise them publicly).
“Teaching needs to return to the ancient practice of education as testimony, one in which our personality is present.”
Additionally, I believe that gossiping was key to another vital aspect: belonging to a community that gossips, for better or worse, about us. Being on everyone’s lips would have led us to conjecture about ourselves. Our cited example is clear: the tragic condition of the concept of a traitor is that anyone, at any time, can become one, including ourselves. Thus, along with interdependence, language will have developed, as well as awareness of our personality. “What am I like?” must have become an increasingly frequent question.
Inter-regulation entails self-regulation. Impelled by it, we are the ones who would end up talking about ourselves, exposing ourselves. I am sure that this was a necessity in the “primitive” era: People were always determined to leave traces of themselves in their wake, in the form of an omnipresent “So-and-so was here.” (One day, I will write a story about how Adam and Eve carved their names on the famous Tree). What is evident is that this remains one of the signs of our times: in addition to selfies, posts in general seem to have been designed to focus on ourselves (even what one has for breakfast!).
Returning to Harari, the emergence of gossip would have created an era full of conflicts. Still, in the end, it would produce a balance and, little by little, a significant advance, as it would have allowed the creation of larger hordes with greater defense and supply capacity for all.
The importance of occurrences such as these is clear; primitive, yes, but contemporary enough to support my idea – expressed in previous articles – that human beings are still, in many ways, a beginner species, one just starting to know itself.
However, Harari explains that gossip was not our only resource in history; at the moment when human groups became too large, it ultimately proved insufficient. Despite our notorious gossiping speed, it obviously was not enough to regulate the complex relationships of ever-growing groups. Fortunately for us, however, our ancestors found a way to solve the problem. Leveraging the quality of language as a tool for abstraction, they developed immense social structures capable of bringing together vast collectives. Such structures had no visible reality, but people believed in them even more than in the tangible ones: the churches, banks, governments, nations, and entities that only exist because we speak of and have confidence in them (Harari calls them “illusory” networks).
Regarding these institutions, I would like to add one consideration. I believe they also arose from the attempt to stop the real revolution that language and gossip brought, which, by illuminating the human interior (that is, to communicate it), gave great power, even to the weakest populations. The institutions would have been a reaction to return to the order and control that existed before, when the group consisted of only a few members.
How to reduce the new crowd to something like the small herd? Once again, we have the perfect example today in the ubiquitous Sociedad Anónima. This institution brings together in a single “legal person” many individuals, who no longer have their proper names (hence the insistence that it be anonymous, which is not always a moral stance).
Obviously, people who meet in these types of collectives must have more or less standard behaviors (that is, to act as close as possible to a single individual). According to the myths, one of the first significant steps in this direction was to reduce our actions to two clearly defined categories: good and evil. This not only allowed good and bad acts to be more easily rewarded or punished by the institutions that emerged for them (religious/juridical) but also entailed something more general and profound: the restriction of gossip through its moralization. Yes, now we could not gossip freely, but focused on everything as “good” and “bad.” This delimited language and produced instances to monitor its use; an example in modernity is the Language Academies. (In opposition to this, we know that the silent pantomime was born in ancient Rome to circumvent the control exercised by the government over what could and could not be said on stage.)
The examples continue. In his book, “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the great anthropologist David Graeber argues that economic institutions – always sheltered by governments (call them republics, monarchies, or empires) – arose to regularize the tremendous variety of mercantile exchanges through the invention and imposition of money.
Other examples: Health and sports institutions (read “ancient and modern Olympics”) standardized the opinion we could have about our bodies. Artistic institutions, of course, contributed their concepts of beauty. The family institution became a spokesperson for the laws of coexistence, and the school institution supported, amplified, and improved them, while generating standards of knowledge.
Order returned, pushing personal expression into the background and, along with it, the knowledge and recognition of the individuality of others. The separation between the public and the private prevailed, making our social relations increasingly based on convention (formulas of coexistence, simulation, concealment), limiting the expression of our inner selves to the family environment and, when they became very conflictive, to the therapeutic field.
I now turn to hope.
Against all this pressure to disappear as people, we human beings continue to insist on putting part of our personality into what we do. We still privilege the artisanal and the personalized; we are even discussing writing by hand and restoring authenticity to our texts (much as a reaction to AI).
We insist on exercising our instinct to intuit that behind the expressionless faces we see on the street and in the neighborhood are human beings as complex, thinking, sentient, and even funny as we are. We continually remind ourselves that others are people. We recognize the soul again through the stare, constantly reminding ourselves of the complexity of everyone we call similar. And yet, from time to time, as if by accident, we immerse ourselves in the world of another human being.
“Standardizations reach their limit, people are cut from the same cloth, and the red carpet – where we force ourselves to move forward – is too narrow.”
In our immediate environment, we invariably find traces of others, traces of their spontaneity, struggling against increasing standardization. In our homes, some objects still retain the traits of those who made them. Perhaps there is the original painting of a friend, a bookcase that our cousin built for us, or the nail that was left behind by the man who came to lay the carpet.
Thus, we still resort to strategies to sustain the vitality (if I may say “revolutionary” vitality) of gossip, including using academic resources. This is where we return to the RULER conversation with which I began this article. I believe that we must strive to ensure that the science of psychology moves as far away as possible from the schematic and assumes the risk of the spontaneous, authentically helping us to know from the inside those many “someones” that we meet daily in everyday life.
Social networks, based on gossip, must also be agents of liberation, creating bridges —virtual or otherwise— between our complex and agitated internal worlds.
We must also give precedence to art, a magical space where it is possible to receive a sound bath of otherness. The music around us speaks to us of the depths of the beings composing it. A painting does the same thing. A novel allows us to meet all types of people. A film has the virtue of exposing the whole being to us. When, instead of a movie, we see a good play, with live actors, the effect is even more powerful. The scene places us at the center of a world of gossip, and through it, we are taken deeper: we start by listening to dialogues and end up discovering great abysses that reveal the dark (or luminous) intentions that motivate human acts (again, including our own, of course).
If art revives us, friendship goes a step further. So many things can be said about it! However, now that I am approaching the end of this article and must abbreviate, I fortunately find an ace up my sleeve: a phrase that completely summarizes what I want to explain. Although it says nothing, everyone will understand it: friendship is otherness personified.
It would be time to talk about love, but beyond glimpsing its sacred gaze, I go off on a tangent, only quoting Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
I conclude with the issue of education. I think that in this field things can be summed up in the need to resume the ancient practice of education as testimony, that is, that our personality is present behind the knowledge we share; that of letting our private lives sneak in there, even discreetly but significantly; that of seeking authenticity even in the face of norms and normalities, and that nothing hides what we are.
Social schemes are already very painful. Standardizations reach the limit, people are cut with the same scissors, and the red carpet – where we force ourselves to move forward – is too narrow, too restrictive, and above all too straight for everything it means to be a human being.
Fortunately, in many ways, school remains a place of refuge. Even in the corridors of some universities, you see living faces, and you can hear laughter. Today, being a teacher is not only about going beyond what students can find on the internet; it is not even about teaching them to think and have their own criteria. It is to make the school a space of authentic coexistence, where we can meet again and get to know each other directly.
It is to go more here, exploring what the teacher aspires for their students to learn. It is leaving to artificial intelligence everything that involves objective and technical information, everything that requires simulation and testing, and taking up for us the human, the innovative and unexpected, the spontaneous and irreplaceable.
It is to return to that kind of primitive spirit that introduces our whole being into everything we do, which, in the end, is the part of us that has been kept safe for the longest time.
It is to be the “gossipiest,” to dare to walk on everyone’s lips and learn from them. It is simply to show ourselves as witnesses of life.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
