Thingomy.co.uk

First non travel realted post in ages…

I have come to the conclusion after much deliberation that every action has an equal but opposite reaction.

I hear many people say that this isn’t exactly the most original statment I’ve ever made, but I’m not talking about physics, I’m talking about social interaction.

The idea is that anything that makes a person (call him Adam) feel better than somone else (say Bob), will conversely make Bob feel worse than Adam.

This can be observed in union politics (if you don’t know exactly what I’m speaking about don’t bother) where a group of people feel good about themselves because they are part of the group, the oursiders on the other hand feel like exactly that, outsiders. This has been refered to as cleek culture. This of course happens virtually everywhere, but the most prominent example I’ve seen is in the union, where it is effectivly tearing appart the whole building.

This can also be seen when people educate others, by teaching a new skill or fact to someone, Bob once again feels inferior to Adam, because Adam looks more knowlagable than Bob, if handled incorrectly (or milked by Adam) this can develope into Bob being dependent on Adam for a stream of information, or bob being socially in debt to Adam for this social favour.

I believe that people can often be blind to the fact that they are are inadvertantly milking situations Either because of overwhelming arrogence, insecurities, straigt up force of habit, or social ignorance, and one of the above will affect most people.

I believe that all of these things can be handled correctly, so as not to hurt people, but may be very dificult in some cases, this may be where direct paralels with physics concepts fall down.

Taking pleasure from somone else’s apparent inferiority should imediatly ring alarms however.

I am not going to disown myself from this effect, I first noticed the concept when taking pleasure from superiority. It could also be said that this post is actually an attept to be superior than the people reading it, it certainly is not conciusly so, but subconciusly, nobody knows.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 1822 and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.