tale-bearing

[cellio]

Suppose you are, say, at a convention in another city. You step into a room to hear someone you know talking with a group of people you don't know. The person you know is griping about his landlord (without naming names). The landlord is a friend of yours and is in a nearby room.

Do you (choose all that apply):
(a) listen in unobtrusively;
(b) fetch the landlord and tell him to listen in;
(c) repeat the tale verbatim to the landlord later;
(d) give the landlord some general feedback (e.g. "have you fixed that roof yet?");
(e) approach the group with some general comment about dealing with landlords;
(f) approach the group and say something like "how dare you talk about Joe Blow like that"; or
(g) shrug it off; it's up to the person to approach the landlord himself if he wants things to change?

It would never occur to me to do (b), (c), or (f); it seems like it can only cause hurt to the landlord. Depending on how close my relationship to the landlord is and what else I know of the situation, I might do (d), (e), and/or (g). I suspect I am not always strong enough to avoid doing (a), though walking away is the correct thing to do most of the time.

I'm sure that at times people say unflattering things about me outside of my hearing. That's a fact of life. In some contexts I am a public figure and have to expect that, and anyway, people talk and rant and gossip and that's just something we all have to live with. I figure that if it's important, the person with a complaint will find some way to let me know about it. And if not, well, I can't address problems I don't know about and the other person just has to realize that. No one told me about any telepathy requirements in human interaction, and I don't buy the approach of "leaking" the gripe to mutual friends and relying on it getting back to the person. That kind of sneakiness bothers me.

I have had an encounter with someone whose beliefs about such situations are very different from my own. I thought that by writing this down I would come to some understanding of why the options I find obviously incorrect might be obviously correct to others, but so far that insight is eluding me.

Comments

[siderea]

I'd like to point that doing (f) is one of the cleverest forms of character assassination I know.

After all, if a person's not named in a gripe, their reputation is uninvolved. If, however, the gripes are already out and then someone identifies the subj ect, they have retroactively made all that went previously personal, and dragged a specific person's reputation into it.

Identifying someone under the guise of "defending" them allows you to stick a knife in their back in broad day light, while pretendi ng to be the "good guy".

You get extra bonus Machiavelli points for hijacking a gripe which was actually about someone else entirely, by naming a person you want to cast aspersions on, instead, and then, if corrected, apologizing and refusing to "say anything further" to fertilize speculation.

[cellio]

I'd like to point that doing (f) is one of the cleverest forms of character assassination I know.

Yes. That someone would do that when the object of the discussion is a friend boggles my mind.