One of the most interesting things a writer can look into is the evolution of the social contract. Put at its simplest (though it can be a very complex subject indeed) we agree to live, if not in harmony, at least without harming one another. I won’t throw my garbage into your space, and you won’t enter my house and help yourself to my things.
Then there is the matter of social control.
I’ve long felt that obligation, when defined as expectation of gratitude is one of the most pernicious weapons of social control. (The worst, I think, is the use of pain.) This is not the obligation you freely agree to as part of a contract.
With regard to family life as well as life among those one knows, for a very long time, women were denied power and had to use every weapon they had, and obligation/gratitude was one, by being teamed up with shame. “Look what I did for you! You owe me!”
This isn’t just historical. I knew someone who felt that friends should keep careful tabs on who owed what to whom.
The most extreme case I came across was a person who made a big thing about how she martyred herself in service to her friends, even though she didn’t particularly like them. Whether they wanted it or not, she was going to tell them what was wrong with their lives, and because (she felt) her motives were pure, and because (she felt) her insights were better than anyone else’s, her recipients were (she felt) obligated to listen.
When they inched away from this toxic form of emotional and social control, she criticized these decamping ex-friends as superficial, undiscerning, and selfish.
What a terrible thing when gratitude, which can be such a powerful, wonderful rush of emotion, becomes a weapon! But some social groups are tightly wired together by built-in reins of gratitude and obligation…and the emotional fallout of people straining against those reins can be sad, and terrifying when it builds decades of repressed anger.
In real life, I’ve seen the tension when people talk about how to deal with the overlapping of professional and friendship roles online. How to handle it when your family decides to helpfully mix it up with your professional colleagues, because though people can create filters, no one can control what gets linked or retweeted? Or you end up in a situation where your new boss is your ex, or your significant other ends up on the other side of the bargaining table?
The inner and outer details of guilt and gratitude can infuse novels with the horrible fascination of a trainwreck. We want to see transgressors get what they deserve, and while in real life, that so seldom happens, the desire for emotional or social justice can be the stronger. That is, if we understand the invisible rules.
In older books, the obligation, the guilt and gratitude, are so much a part of the social fabric that no one is aware of them—and modern audiences need a historical perspective in order to understand the dynamics.
Books that examine the to-us-moderns hidden layers of expectation, obligation, and gratitude can be fascinating. But they can also be opaque, or read entirely differently than the writer intended, out of ignorance of cultural mores of the time.
Readers of historical novels who know period history roll their eyes at the errors of usage that modern writers not as well versed in history are unaware of. These hidden layers can extend to any period of history, or layer of society or profession: the labyrinthine layers of legal custom between solicitors and barristers; the intricacies of Church of England politics in Anthony Trollope’s novels; the fascinating glimpses of vast change gotten from the Russian novelists before the Revolution and after, just to point out a few.
We think we understand layers of cultural obligation in history, at least in countries where our home language is spoken, but we can be vastly mistaken.
Ah yes. Creating obligation as a weapon.
One individual I know hates gifts because this person only gives them as a means control and one-upmanship to demonstrate superiority. The person can’t see giving in any other way, so feels diminished by presents.
Doing something kind or generous does create good feeling for the doer. I sure do like being acknowledged, but demanding acknowledgment? Ugh! Saying a person OWES me? Double Ugh!!
Attempting to control people through the giving of gifts is really insidious. I’ve heard of a few situations where it becomes downright creepy.
I follow a lot of social experiments, and there are several fascinating ones about the power of gratitude and the implied social contract. The only one I remember off the top of my head is one where the experimenters had 3groups: one was asked to perform a mundane task (dragging an object across a screen to a box on the computer) for five minutes as a favor, one was paid cheaply for the same task, and the last was payed well for the same task. Amazingly, the ones who were doing it as a favor preformed the best.
This confirmed my thoughts about the great power of gratitude, especially in comparison to other incentives. Which might perhaps explain the resentment people feel when they do such a favor, and the gratitude is not returned, or the guilt people feel that makes them do things they wouldn’t usually do out of gratitude.
That is fascinating. I do think that gratitude–if permitted to be freely given–is one of the strongest bonds we have. But the moment someone tries to leash it as a method of control it starts becoming toxic.
What a great topic. I used to work with a woman who claimed there were no good people, that nobody did anything out of selflessness, and always expected something in return…even if what they expected was only that they felt good about what they did. (She considered that selfish.)
Since then, I’ve decided that there really are good people who are happy doing good, though I don’t see many any more. I think most people I see either do something for someone because they’re already obligated or because the other person makes them feel guilty if they don’t.
I see a lot of people barter socially for what they want. “If you do this for me, I’ll do that for you,” or, “If you do this for me, I’ll owe you one.”
Food for thought, definitely.
I think it can be harder to do good for strangers–those of us who live in big cities feel the pressure of the crowd. Though people can be marvelous in leaping to the aid in emergencies. (And they can be indifferent, a la Kitty Genovese case of our youth.)
We are social beings–I do think it might be easier to reach out that helping hand to those whose names we know.
A thought experiment — would the people have dropped what they were doing and taken a drug instead, if the drug gave them the same good feeling?
Like anything else, it surely depends on the person.
I don’t think a drug could simulate it. At least, not for all of us. When I feel good after doing something for a friend, it’s because the thing I did made that person happy, or prevented them from feeling unhappy. (I’ve noticed that I’m much happier doing tasks I find moderately unpleasant if I can torque either the situation or my perception of the situation so that I’m doing it for someone else, or that so someone else doesn’t have to. So doing dishes when I’m babysitting my cousins, or at the house of my hostess, is preferable to doing my own dishes, unless, say, I know that my mother is planning to attack that pile of dishes in the morning but doesn’t have energy to right now.) The person doesn’t have to be grateful; sometimes they don’t even have to notice. It’s possible for me to pick these unasked-for favors wrong, of course, but usually I know the people and situations well enough that I can know I made life better for someone I care about, whether or not they’re aware of it. If they do notice and thank me, that’s a bonus, but certainly not required, and isn’t as strong a motivation.
To duplicate that, a drug would have to alter my basic perceptions of reality, which seems excessive and a bit creepy to emulate something I can manage myself by a little bit of work.
Similar to what I was thinking. (And people do things for others without expecting recompense–random acts of kindness. Cleaning the house for a friend who is coming home from the hospital. The friend might not even know who did it, but the doer gets the pleasure of imagining the sick friend coming home to a sparkling clean place.)
I would almost automatically distrust such a drug; to me the feeling is the reward for having done something; getting the reward without the effort, while not actually wrong in the way harming someone is wrong, seems … inappropriate? Improper? What’s a good word for socially wrong that doesn’t also require it be ethically wrong?
I know others would choose differently (both ways; some would consider it outright unethical), but it’s one data point.
But also I would feel it doesn’t actually achieve the same thing, for all it would look like it did. It’s like losing weight without exercising. You get lighter, but not necessarily *healthier*. If your cardiovascular endurance is no better and you still pant climbing stairs, the smaller waistline is an illusion.
A good example is when you finish reading a book you loved so much you want your friends to read it and feel the same way. So, maybe you lend it to a friend while singing its praises. Maybe they put it on their reading pile and don’t get to it for months, or they do read it and have a lukewarm response. I imagine most people get disappointed when that person gets back to them and shrugs saying, “I couldn’t really get into it. Sorry.”
That’s when you have to look at yourself and ask what you hoped to get out of it: a shared experience. You wanted your friend to love it, have someone to talk about it with, and ended up smacking against a barrier in personal taste. Your expectations were high, and maybe you built up too much of an expectation on your friend’s part. They wanted to love the book, but it wasn’t all you made it out to be. They didn’t get what you got out of it, hence disappointment on both sides.
I discovered a similar difference in little everyday social situations. A lady in my apartment started inviting me over for coffee, or offering to take me out for lunch. Every time I offered to pay, she’d refuse. Baking cookies with her, chatting the whole time, meant more to her because she had someone to do it with. She’d lend and borrow things to keep the neighbors visiting. Most of all, her whole world revolved around making up conspiracies about the people at her workplace and people living in the apartment. This kind of conversation is completely alien to me. I never know what to say to something like, “I swear the mailman is stealing my letters …” so I just let her talk away.
I started getting annoyed when she started knocking on my door daily, because most often it was during writing time. I managed to impress on her just how busy I was in my hobbit hole, so we started setting up visiting hours. Lunch once a week, she pulls me out of my cave, and I take the time to pull my head out of my own little world and get to know people—with widely different interests from my own—in the world around me.
Good observations. I once knew a couple way back when who broke up eventually–and one of the reasons was that she expected him to watch TV with her every night, and he hated TV. He felt that TV watching was an entirely passive experience, so why did he have to sit at her side, bored stiff? But for her, TV watching was a couple activity.
I knew a woman once who used gratitude and shame as a weapon of passive-agression. She had a habit of taking on more than she could handle, insisting that she’d do this or that, and then dropping it without notice, leaving others to scramble to pick up the pieces, while she cried about her health and her family and whatever else, playing the pity-poor-me game. She did this several times in the group we were both members of.
One time two people in that group were getting married. They didn’t want anything fancy; they were planning to “elope,” and just go see a judge. Ms. P-A refused to consider it, and insisted that they had to have a big wedding with all the trimmings. (Why she thought she had any say in this, I leave as an exercise for the audience.) She kept at them, nagging and insisting, and finally they said, “Fine, but if you want to throw a big wedding, you’re doing it.” She agreed, and started rushing around to make all the arrangements, along with a couple of other people who agreed to help her.
A while later, she flaked, of course. She didn’t get a lot of sympathy from said larger realspace social circle, so she went to her online friends, who didn’t know any of the people involved except her, to cry about how ill-used she was. Those mean, selfish people! They’d expected her to do this and that and the other thing for their wedding, all this work, and she’d tried, she really had, but her health wasn’t good, and she had to think of her family, and boo-hoo-sniffle-poor-me. And of course, from a lot of nice people who just didn’t know the facts, she got all kinds of pats and hugs and cookies, and folks were all, “Those horrible people! How dare they expect you to do all the work for their wedding! You poor, abused person!”
So she affectively abused two sets of people — the folks in realspace whom she nagged into having a big wedding and then flaked on, and her online friends, who were manipulated into giving her the commisseration and reinforcement she was looking for, for something that was completely her own fault.
Of course, everyone who ever gave in to her, once she’d demonstrated her flaking-off habit, was guilty of enabling her. Part of the social contract, though, is not being seriously mean to someone who’s trying to be helpful, even if you know they’re going to screw up, because the other half of that clause in the contract is that you offer to help once, and if you’re thanked and assured it’s not necessary, you go away graciously. Ms. P-A never went away, much less graciously. For someone with this kind of personality, it would’ve taken serious, eye-to-eye barking, from more than one person, with probably some bad words and insults, to get her to go away and stop insisting that she could help. And under the circumstances, going far enough to actually shut her down would’ve made whoever did it the bad guy, like using a bazooka on a Disney bunny. Except this bunny is particularly noisy and persistent, and possibly rabid. And the bunny would definitely have gone around crying to anyone who would listen about what a horrible, mean person you were, and cetera, back to where we started.
A masterful manipulation of the rules, if you think about it. :/
Angie
Yeah–that kind of narcissist is never going to get enough attention, ever, and will do anything to get it.
Part of the time I was in college, my father had a boarder who lived by a different set of gratitude-obligation rules than I did. In his world, he treated me . . . I guess the word is chivalrously, holding doors for me, and rushing back upstairs to put a shirt on if he ever wandered around shirtless while I was visiting, little stuff like that that he wouldn’t ever have dreamed of with my father and brother, because I’m female. And in exchange, I was expected to be . . . a traditional-50′s-housewife sort of feminine, caring more about the piles of junk and the dirty dishes and little homey touches than any of the guys in my family did.
Whereas from my perspective, I only lived there a couple weeks out of the year, had not asked to be treated any differently because of my gender, and had no intention of being oughted into doing things I didn’t want to do in exchange. (He was staying with my father because his fiancée had broken up with him and kicked him out of the house. My only surprise was that she’d put up with him long enough to get engaged, though perhaps his expectation of that contract was only obvious when you lived in the same house with him.)
On the subject of ‘oughting,’ Diana Wynne Jone’s Aunt Maria is an excellent example of someone who uses the rules of social interaction to force other people to do things for her.