Some thoughts from a different aspect of Hufflepuff-ness (the “niceness” aspect)
There’s a kind of midwestern person who grows up in a small town where everyone is nice all the time. The Being Nice provides a clear benefit in the form of, well, the place is nice. It provides a less legible benefit of “the process of everyone being nice to each other builds group cohesion.”
And that person comes to the big city. And being “nice” is no longer adaptive. And the people of the city also haven’t quite figured out how to adapt to it. (Something from Vaniver’s recent post feels relevant here. The Tao of being in a midwestern town is not the same as the Tao of being in a big city. But also, big cities are full of people who came from places with oddly specific Tao, and they haven’t all figured out the Big City Tao, which often means the whole thing is afflicted by a vague pathology)
The Nice person starts out by trying to be nice.
Alas: “A Hufflepuff surrounded by Slytherins will surely wither and die as if they were surrounded by vampires.”
The Nice person helps the people around them, at first hoping/assuming that they will be helped in turn, which never happens. Eventually the Nice person becomes a burnt out version of themselves, unhappy. And maybe they leave the Big City, or maybe they stay and are unhappy, or maybe eventually they find a small enclave of Nice people, or maybe they stop being Nice, or maybe they manage to keep being nice and just sort of accept that others won’t be nice back.
But, the thing that would have been particularly valuable is if the Nice person had realized, and internalized, that Being Nice in the big city needs to look quite different from Being Nice in the midwestern town.
Being Nice in the big city requires backbone, in a way that Being Nice in the midwestern town was fundamentally about notneeding backbone. [Maybe. I haven’t actually lived in a midwestern town so I’m not sure I grok it]. My sense is that in the small town, the fact that everyone can trust each other without having to have their guard up is part of the magic that is going on.
In any case, in the big city, you need your guard up. And you need backbone to enforce your boundaries to avoid getting consumed. But more interestingly, you need backbone to be nice.
There’s an important skill, early on in the Hufflepuff Skill Tree, which is something like “Collaborative Leadership.”
The Hufflepuff strategy of “everyone pitching in to keep things nice” requires a mechanism to cause there to be a lot of people pitching in. If you’re going to attempt to keep a place nice this way, you need such a mechanism. This requires a certain kind of leadership.
It doesn’t need to feel like bossing people around – it can feel like “people making friends and helping each other out”. But it does require a certain kind of assertiveness.
If you’re pitching in and helping out just because you like to and okay with the notion that others might not do so, coolio. But if your goal is to keep a place nice, instead of making it nice for this particular afternoon, this skill is really important.
With followup:
If you’re the sort of person in space where people come-and-go a lot, and as such, it’s continuously important to be building Fight Entropy Capacity...
...and you have a natural impulse to, say, see that the garbage needs taking out and then Do So...
...then whenever possible, you should try replacing that impulse with something like the following:
— Find another person who can see the garbage from where they’re sitting
— Say “Hey, want to help me take out the garbage?” (this works best if there’s multiple bins, recycling, etc, so you legitimately could use some help)
— Show them how to actually do so (since it’s often not clear what to do with a full garbage bag), and then where to get a new bag for the newly empty bin.
— End the interaction, not with a pitch for them to help takeout the garbage themselves in the future, but to ask other people for help the way you just asked them, and show them how to do it, so that the body of people who’ve ever thought about how to keep the space clean can grow.
I’m not sure that description actually quite works (and in any case it requires a number of social skills). It also applies differently in domains other than “take out the garbage.”
But the core idea is that, in the big city, or anywhere that doesn’t have a preexisting, self-propagating Niceness Meme, Being Nice requires leadership. Leadership requires agency, and willingness to deal with conflict, and the ability to actually figure out what’s right for yourself.
And there’s an important move people need to learn (not just for “being nice”), which is to backpropagate the awareness that “In this environment, niceness requires leadership” into their aesthetic of why Being Nice is good and beautiful and right.
Being Nice in the big city is still good and beautiful and right. But it’s a different kind of good-and-beautiful-and-right.
I think there’s something similar going on with loyalty. (I think the discussion in the other comment threads here are already roughly grappling with the right questions here)
Oh hey, that small midwestern town where everyone is nice to each other is where I grew up. And basically that exact thing happened to me in the Big City. Interesting to read this comment.
Some thoughts from a different aspect of Hufflepuff-ness (the “niceness” aspect)
There’s a kind of midwestern person who grows up in a small town where everyone is nice all the time. The Being Nice provides a clear benefit in the form of, well, the place is nice. It provides a less legible benefit of “the process of everyone being nice to each other builds group cohesion.”
And that person comes to the big city. And being “nice” is no longer adaptive. And the people of the city also haven’t quite figured out how to adapt to it. (Something from Vaniver’s recent post feels relevant here. The Tao of being in a midwestern town is not the same as the Tao of being in a big city. But also, big cities are full of people who came from places with oddly specific Tao, and they haven’t all figured out the Big City Tao, which often means the whole thing is afflicted by a vague pathology)
The Nice person starts out by trying to be nice.
Alas: “A Hufflepuff surrounded by Slytherins will surely wither and die as if they were surrounded by vampires.”
The Nice person helps the people around them, at first hoping/assuming that they will be helped in turn, which never happens. Eventually the Nice person becomes a burnt out version of themselves, unhappy. And maybe they leave the Big City, or maybe they stay and are unhappy, or maybe eventually they find a small enclave of Nice people, or maybe they stop being Nice, or maybe they manage to keep being nice and just sort of accept that others won’t be nice back.
But, the thing that would have been particularly valuable is if the Nice person had realized, and internalized, that Being Nice in the big city needs to look quite different from Being Nice in the midwestern town.
Being Nice in the big city requires backbone, in a way that Being Nice in the midwestern town was fundamentally about not needing backbone. [Maybe. I haven’t actually lived in a midwestern town so I’m not sure I grok it]. My sense is that in the small town, the fact that everyone can trust each other without having to have their guard up is part of the magic that is going on.
In any case, in the big city, you need your guard up. And you need backbone to enforce your boundaries to avoid getting consumed. But more interestingly, you need backbone to be nice.
Hufflepuff Leadership, I described this as:
With followup:
I’m not sure that description actually quite works (and in any case it requires a number of social skills). It also applies differently in domains other than “take out the garbage.”
But the core idea is that, in the big city, or anywhere that doesn’t have a preexisting, self-propagating Niceness Meme, Being Nice requires leadership. Leadership requires agency, and willingness to deal with conflict, and the ability to actually figure out what’s right for yourself.
And there’s an important move people need to learn (not just for “being nice”), which is to backpropagate the awareness that “In this environment, niceness requires leadership” into their aesthetic of why Being Nice is good and beautiful and right.
Being Nice in the big city is still good and beautiful and right. But it’s a different kind of good-and-beautiful-and-right.
I think there’s something similar going on with loyalty. (I think the discussion in the other comment threads here are already roughly grappling with the right questions here)
Oh hey, that small midwestern town where everyone is nice to each other is where I grew up. And basically that exact thing happened to me in the Big City. Interesting to read this comment.
Hurray, my first principle models based on vague anecdata turned out to be true (at least once).