Even without a degree in one of the social sciences, you can learn a lot from simply observing people. One of the earliest examples of maneuvering social hierarchies that I can recall hearkens back to when I was a lad of just seven years old, but before I can relate the story, first I must go back even further.
So there I was in my mother’s fallopian tube, gestating and biding my time until I could graduate to a full-fledge fetus. It was during a seemingly normal day when my pre-sentient musings were interrupted by a growling so faint I had initially written it off as a figment of my not-as-of-yet developed imagination. Yet as flogulents turned into suspifferoons (these are all very valid scientific units of time used by all developing fetuses), I came to the pseudo-realization that the growling was not, in fact, a phantom sound, but in reality a tiny pack of womb weasels.
Before I go any further, perhaps I should go into greater detail on the nature of womb weasels so you better understand just how desperate my situation was about to become. Womb weasels are very microscopically tiny omnivores which inhabit the uterus of fertile mammalian females. They resemble, in many ways, a traditional weasel, except they have fins instead of legs, and the characteristic call of the land weasel is replaced with a guttural growl that is as unnerving as it is unnatural. The hair of the womb weasel can be mixed with certain coagulants to form a potent aphrodisiac, but any attempts at extracting a womb weasel from its native habitat have invariably caused the death of not only the womb weasel, but its vessel host as well. Sadly, this only increases the demand for the aphrodisiac, known colloquially as a “Charleston Chew,” and that is why they are almost exclusively found in gas stations of places you visit, but never in ones near your place of residence.
But I digress.
With the womb weasels closing in, I knew I had an undeveloped handful of flogulents, at best, before they descended upon me like the ravenous micro-beasts they are. Reaching for whatever was near at hand, I desperately grabbed for the only thing I could reach; my undeveloped twin brother. In a tragic display of heroism, he gave his potential life to save me from the womb weasels, for having gorged upon his newly formed flesh (such as it was), the womb weasels went into a form of torpor not unlike the sort prone to lizards left too long in the cold. It is common knowledge that a womb weasel cannot awaken from that torpor until you say an anagram of their name, and as I did not yet possess the mental faculties to even spell the word “anagram,” let alone devise one, I nestled deeper into my womb, resting easy knowing that the womb weasels would not awaken before my exodus.
Fast forward seven years, and my family is moving from a small farming town in south-central Illinois to Apple Valley, Minnesota. One month later, we endure what would later be known as the Halloween Blizzard of ’91. I mention this because, as a child, I had heard the same rumors of the Minnesota cold that we all hear. Even as an impressionable youth, however, I had figured these tales to be rooted mostly in hyperbole, yet seeing that first snowstorm incited in me a certain awe-struck and terrifyingly profound respect for the forces of the Minnesota winter. Tales of its ruthlessness, from what I could see, were not exaggerated in the least. In fact, to say that Minnesotan’s are a hearty folk in regards to temperature tolerance is a bit of an understatement. It is not considered unusual for, at some point in the winter, our low on a January or February day to be -30 degrees, Fahrenheit. Conversely, during mid-July or early August, it is pretty standard for us to reach a high of 105 degrees. I am no meteorologist, however, so we will leave it at that for now.
I made a friend through all the adjustments that come with moving into a new state, and despite a few rough patches in the beginning, we managed to cultivate a friendship of fairly mutual trust and respect. He was an under-privileged child who was missing his left ear; his mother had cut it off during a drunken fit of rage many months before I had met him, and the resulting scarring and disfigurement made him something of an outcast. Over the course of half a year, we would run and play and do what to seven year old boys do to pass the time. My acclimation to Minnesota was going fairly smoothly, and I was beginning to branch out and making additional friends.
Then came a day in late April that changed everything I had ever known about people up until that point. This friend of mine, he and three ten year olds came up to me, his hands behind his back. Looking awkwardly at my feet, his voice quivered as though he couldn’t stand to look me in the eye, and he said, “we can’t be friends anymore.”
Puzzled, I simply said, “why not?”
To his credit, he looked genuinely confused, too, but he turned his head to look at one of the older kids, who nodded at him, and he actually met my eyes with his own. “Because you’re different.”
I did not know it at the time, but it was a pretty textbook case of currying favor with another social circle by distancing yourself from social liabilities. In this case, I was the social liability.
Unsure how else to respond, I weakly said, “oh, okay then. Bye,” turned around, and began to walk away. Even with a single ear, he heard the hurt in my voice.
This is the lesson of social hierarchy I learned on that day: never turn your back on someone willing to end your friendship for the sake of initiation.. I did not get three steps before it became painfully clear what he was holding behind his back. The knife was in and out in a fluid motion, as if it was a practiced hand which guided it. Surprisingly, I did not bleed much. He got me just a titch to the left of my spine, but the shock of it all amplified the hurt, the betrayal, to indefinable heights.
Needless to say, we never spoke again.
There were signs, of course. My seven year old eyes missed them all, but they were there. His constant talking of hanging out with “cooler” kids, the growing dissatisfaction with games he used to love to play, the flaky excuses as to why he could not hang out with me. Even without a degree in one of the social sciences, you can learn a lot from simply observing people.
In that case, I learned what it means to be stabbed in the back, both literally and figuratively. It was a painful way to arrive at such understanding, but it is said that the more you pay for a lesson, the better you remember it. I paid in blood, and my blood remembers.
Betrayal can take many forms and not all of them as blatant as the one I highlighted, above. Some cut deeper than steel, and all linger with a dull ache not soon to be forgotten, nor forgiven. The worst part is that the greatest betrayals are all but impossible to predict, for such betrayals come from sources you often trust the most, and that which you know the best you observe the least. We grant a certain power over the familiar without even realizing it. You can see it in the way people take those closest to them for granted, or how expectations cultivate with comfort and complacence.
Even without a degree in one of the social sciences, you can learn a lot from simply observing people.
Whether it is an act of selfless self-sacrifice as exhibited by my unborn brother that fateful day in the womb, or a back-stabbing betrayal from the first friend I had in an unfamiliar land, I learned a lot from the behavior or others. Mostly, I learned that whom you trust is not nearly as important as how you trust; trust blindly, and you are likely to get blind-sided.
The trouble is, until that trust is broken, how do you know you made the right decision?
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