Why we ostracise - the failing Cat’s Cradle

How many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry.

Anyone who has been a leader, who has tried to make large workplace changes, who doesn’t speak English, who has a mental illness or is a teenage girl, knows the power of ostracism.

The social webs of friends, of clubs, community and in the workplace are becoming stretched for a variety of complex reasons. One of the perverse by-products of living in a post industrial society is the frequent use of ostracism, especially among the middle class, as a form of punishment.

I first became interested in ostracisation in the early 1980s while reading Colin Turnbull’s book, The Mountain People. It’s a harrowing anthropological study of the Ik people of northern Kenya.

They suffered (and still are suffering) terrible famines. Their life is brutish and the fit and strong survive at the cost of their social structure and friendship groups.

The Ik ostracise each other to survive. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, except the dogs were eaten long ago. Everyday, because the tribe is totally atomised, every member sneaks off alone (the children hunt in packs) to catch quarry that they greedily covert. There’s not much caring or sharing with the Ik.

We like to be liked. It’s nice to be part of a group. It’s comforting when people call us and enquire about our health or invite us out. We’re not like the Ik - or are we?

As a kid I played a string game called Cat’s Cradle. The object of the game was to form a geometric pattern using string held taut between your two hands. The object was to pass the Cat’s Cradle to another, where it would be remade and passed on again. I suggest that the social webs of friends, like the strings of a child’s hand game, are slackening. We are becoming more isolated and for some, not only more alone but more lonely.

The reason is - to paraphrase a famous line from the film Cool Hand Luke - what we have here is a failure to reciprocate. People are failing to understand the basic rules of reciprocity in human communication. A failure to reciprocate leads to a lack of compassion. To be uncompassionate means to lack empathy and once you’re at that stage, any form of aberrant behaviour is possible.

Each individual act in a system of reciprocity is usually characterised by a combination of short-term altruism and long term self interest: I help you out in the (possibly vague, uncertain, and uncalculating) expectation that you help me out in the future.

The American mathematician John Nash worked out that while Adam Smith was right to suggest that it was in an individuals best interest to maximise his or her welfare, the real stuff of “welfare”, whether it be economic or social capital was best created when people work together in pursuit of a common goal. And to do that you need reciprocity. You don’t need to reciprocate all of the time but you do need to reciprocate some of the time.

“Reciprocity is made up of a series of acts each of which is short term altruistic, benefiting others at the cost of the altruist, but which together typically make every participant better off," said the philosopher Michael Taylor.

Individuals may be reasonable and caring citizens but due to the cult of the individual, the fall of the notion of a common good, of highly individualised communication technology and the creation of the 24-hour workday, there has been a fall in positive regard and empathy for our friends and workmates.

We have become like atomic clocks divorced from the sun and moon; divorced from the land and the tides. And when we feel slighted or angry, when someone rejects our belief systems and we can’t defeat their arguments through emotive appeals, we resort directly to the howitzer of the homo sapiens world - ostracisation.

Ostracisation is a complex process. The famous ancient Greeks Thermistocles and Pericles were ostracised - and Thermistocles saved Greece against the Persians. The Roman poet Ovid was banished for life by Augustus Caesar because he had had a gut full of his licentious poetry about his daughter, Julia. There are some things a father and Roman Emperor won’t tolerate.

Kipling Williams says in his book, Ostracism - the Power of Silence, that the simple act of being ignored simultaneously attacks four fundamental human needs.

“Our sense of connection and belonging is severed; the control we desire between our actions and outcomes is uncoupled; our self-esteem is shaken by feelings of shame, guilt or inferiority; and we feel like a ghost, observing what life would be like if we did not exist,” Williams says.

“Most people claim the act is empowering. It gives them a sense of control over their targets - control they may not otherwise experience. But there’s an ironic twist to these feelings of ‘control’. Some say that at some point they themselves are controlled by the ostracism and find it difficult to stop using it. The use of the silent treatment becomes self-perpetuating,” Williams says.

One person I interviewed was ostracised by his “friends” after the drug overdose of a mutual friend at a Bali beach party. He was blamed for not keeping an eye on him. He had fallen asleep while his friend overdosed on alcohol and heroin. He said it took the death to make him realise his friends were simply acquaintances or to quote Malcolm Lowry “wolves at our heels”.

“They smiled and smiled but once the going got tough, they took off like Double Bay housewives who’d found a Prada garage sale around the corner. The phone stopped ringing.”

He in turn cut them dead. That’s a rare case of double ostracisation, from which there is no return.

It is a unique form of bullying. Williams says that unlike other forms of aversive interpersonal behaviours, for example, physical or verbal abuse, ostracism can be characterised as a non-behaviour. So it’s enveloped in several layers of ambiguity.

For instance, targets may notice that they are being ignored and think to themselves “It is actually happening to me or is it my imagination?” And it’s precisely this ambiguity that makes ostracism uniquely powerful.

One could conceivably ostracise another without having to admit doing it or having to apologise for it.

The Amish practice of meidung (translated as shunning) is used to discipline members of the faith. The Amish view meidung as being a “slow death” because it demands that friends, community members, and even close family cannot speak to the perpetrator at the risk of being similarly ostracised.

Adolescent girls operate on a level of factionalism, craft and guile that make the Australian Labor Party look like a Sunday picnic. Type “school girl bullying” into the Google search engine and you’ll get more than 20,000 hits. Young teenage girls use ostracisation to exclude members who no longer adopt their secret “in codes” of dress, mien or behaviour.

It's a paradox that one of the effects of ostracism in groups is to make the group tighter and stronger. The very act of excluding a person thereby adds a twisted form of social cohesion. Ostracism reinforces the notion of “us and them”.

Ostracisation is also used to terminate relationships. The failure to return phone calls or emails may be a legitimate tactic to end the hopes of an ardent suitor or even the affections of a long time partner.

This is a delicate matter and does not necessarily lead to total disengagement. But as one woman said of her former romances, “I wipe them completely off the face of the earth. I don’t speak to them. I don’t acknowledge them.”

We learn the techniques of ostracism, of silent or slow death, at an early age.

Yet normally the tendency to check its use is the centripetal force of peer pressure and society at large. One has to, in some shape or form, get on with his or her neighbours.  Yet when this force starts to fail and becomes desiccated by our desire to “live within ourselves” then ostracism goes unchecked.

A 65-year-old woman said: “I used the silent treatment whenever there may be a fight or confrontation. The silent treatment accomplishes for me all the things that fighting does for other people: control, power, and punishment. It gives me pleasure, and I’m in control. I also think it is funny how people grovel. I never feel guilty or ashamed, because it’s always justifiable.”

But ostracism did not always have its intended outcome. One woman said “One day I decided that I wouldn’t bother to speak to my husband at all. I managed to keep this up for three weeks but finally he did something that really annoyed me so I yelled at him. He was taken aback and said “But you’ve been so happy lately.”