Hi everyone, A thing I started noticing some years ago is that a lot of social groups formed around a core person or small set of people, and that often one or more of that core were just, to put it bluntly, slightly bad people. Not, generally speaking,
A few years ago I made up terms to describe a similar friend dynamic: attractor and attractee. Attractor doesn't presuppose any ethical qualms; it's just a word to describe people who, for one reason or another, have an easy time making friends and making people want to be around them. Attractees are basically everyone else, though an extreme attractee probably comes off as somewhat obsequious (just as an extreme attractor would come off as the bad-at-boundaries person you've described).
This week I started looking into eggs. It used to be easier to find what seemed to be ethical ones. I just looked for the RSPCA Freedom Foods logo. Now either that's no longer a thing, or the supermarkets I have access to aren't interested in that particular certification. Ten minutes of googling later, I'd discovered how much chicken suffering I was responsible for, and ordered some organic eggs but also not been terribly convinced it was a drastically better proposition than the next rung down. It seems to fit into a pattern Rem and I have been discussing for years, where "consumer choice" actually means you just have eight different places to buy almost identical versions of the same product, rather than eight very different versions. And yes, this does feel like a feature of the system rather than a bug.
I also recognise the "mildly bad person is the queen bee of a social system" thing, though I'd never realised exactly how it delivered benefits for those around them.
A few years ago I made up terms to describe a similar friend dynamic: attractor and attractee. Attractor doesn't presuppose any ethical qualms; it's just a word to describe people who, for one reason or another, have an easy time making friends and making people want to be around them. Attractees are basically everyone else, though an extreme attractee probably comes off as somewhat obsequious (just as an extreme attractor would come off as the bad-at-boundaries person you've described).
This is a super interesting piece !!
This week I started looking into eggs. It used to be easier to find what seemed to be ethical ones. I just looked for the RSPCA Freedom Foods logo. Now either that's no longer a thing, or the supermarkets I have access to aren't interested in that particular certification. Ten minutes of googling later, I'd discovered how much chicken suffering I was responsible for, and ordered some organic eggs but also not been terribly convinced it was a drastically better proposition than the next rung down. It seems to fit into a pattern Rem and I have been discussing for years, where "consumer choice" actually means you just have eight different places to buy almost identical versions of the same product, rather than eight very different versions. And yes, this does feel like a feature of the system rather than a bug.
I also recognise the "mildly bad person is the queen bee of a social system" thing, though I'd never realised exactly how it delivered benefits for those around them.