FOR GOSSIPS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 21, 6 January 1928, Page 8

FOR GOSSIPS

GAG PROPOSED. GERMAN REICHSTAG MOTION. Berlin, December 10. Among the reforms that the Reichstag Judiciary Committee has prepared for submission this winter is one that would make gossiping an offence punishable, in extreme cases, by banishment from the community. The tale-bearing German woman who hereafter can not hold her tongue will run the risk of being peremptorily invited to leave town. One of the framers of the new German code, Judge Schaiffer, is quoted as saying that just as there are prisons for criminals and asylums for the insane, so there should be institutions or colonies to which sorely tried communities could commit their offending gossips. FSiCHOf.OGIISTS UNCONVINCED. Though the efficacy of this treatment has yet to be tested, the plan finds few supporters among the psychologists. It would appear that those who make a study of human frailties are by no means convinced that you can stop gossiping—in Germany or anywhere else—by threatening the offender with prison. Indeed, a reasonably strong case might even be made out in favour of not stopping gossip at all. There are communities in which life would be duller than it is were it not for idle tattle. And though all gossip, so the psychologists hold, is necessarily harmful to someone, it does not follow that the harm done is serious or permanent or that the originator of a false rumour deserves to le treated as an enemy of society. The thing that makes people like to gossip is the Inferiority Complex. Psychologists may differ among themselves as to the appropriateness of that term —some use it sparingly—but in any consideration of the psychology of gossip the inferiority complex seems to be admitted by acclamation. Persons possessing a good inferiority complex make the best gossipers. By spreading reports disparaging to others they somehow lessen the sense of their own inferiority. CRUELTY INSTINCT.

Then, too, there is the almost universal tendency towards sadism, to be cruel. The instinct to torture exists in nearly all men. Gossip cy giving pain to some other individual gratifies this instinct. Psychologically, the situation is the same whether we hold a lynching party or sit in at a ladies’ sewing circle. In either case we art satisfying a desire to inflict suffering. That “No man is a hero to his valet” is very true, but little understood psychologically. It is not because the man is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet. In other words, the valet projects his own failings into his master, and thus persuades himself that he is as good a man as his master. The same thing that accounts for the popularity of gossip may also explain the popularity of the socalled new biography, namely, the sense of enjoyment that comes to the inferior in tearing down and belittling the great one. In pondering the frailties of the great they feel that their own status in the community is raised.