Snitching is Bad

And no amount of social conditioning will make me believe otherwise

Snitch. Grass. Tattletale. Telltale. Informant. Whatever word you prefer to use, we all know who they are. From the perspective of someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, snitching was really bad. In fact, in my school, it was almost the worst thing that you could do to someone. It was seen as cowardly and sneaky. Kids who ran off to tell the teacher if someone had even moderately wronged them were socially ostracised and seen as “not to be trusted”. There are complex reasons for this, but in a school setting, it was understood that “us”, i.e. “the pupils”, were separate from “the teachers”. We had our own social order. Our own codes and rules. In order to forge our independence away from authority figures, a separation was necessary. The snitch breaks this social code.

Instead of standing up for themselves in the moment with bravery and honour, the snitch will sneak off quietly to an authority figure to spill the beans and get the person in trouble. In the most egregious cases, the snitch will weave an elaborate tale and distort the reality of what actually happened, exaggerating the situation and painting themselves purely as the righteous victim, to receive maximum sympathy and inflict maximum damage on the so-called “perpetrator”. Yet snitches will avoid, at all costs, having to defend themselves directly, face-to-face with anyone. Dealing with something head-on is too difficult. Too scary. It’s much easier to snide off and tell someone who will not challenge them in any way or make them feel uncomfortable. It’s a safe space for cowardly and calculated revenge.

Tediously, I will issue some obvious caveats here for the hard of thinking. I am a Mum. If something serious and prolonged was going on, like some kind of proper bullying, I absolutely would want my daughter to tell me. Of course! But I have taught her as best as I can to navigate normal interpersonal squabbles and socially awkward or uncomfortable interactions with her peers on her own, and to also stand up for herself. Which she does. I am not talking about very serious issues. There are lines. Generally speaking, there used to be a shared, unspoken consensus of roughly where those lines were. A kind of reasonable, common-sense approach. But not anymore.

The 1990s saw significant shifts in parenting and teaching styles. A sharp increase in parental supervision, softer approaches to discipline, more encouragement and support, bullying awareness, more of an emphasis on teamwork and group cohesion, more prizes, more safety, more social learning, a flattening out of hierarchies and a blurring of lines between adults and children. (see my previous piece: “This is Mental”).

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the previous social codes started to fade away, and a new social order emerged. Adults started to become far more involved in the emotional well-being of children and were fearful of being perceived as too rigid or in charge. They wanted to be seen as “cool”. To be “friends” with the kids rather than responsible, supervising grown-ups. It became therapeutic. Children were no longer left to their own devices to deal with normal day-to-day scrapes and disagreements themselves, but were encouraged to seek out adult intervention for any slight difficulty or discomfort. The irony of all this is, there’s an illusion of less adult control, less authority, but in fact, there’s more control. Giving kids space and freedom to learn to figure things out themselves got swapped out for a soft, smiling, intrusive control. An ever-present “kind” adult interference in all aspects of children's lives. But most overbearingly, into their heads.

Thankfully, I left school in 1987 and entered the workforce just in time! So I managed to avoid this shift. Part of me wonders how my life would have gone if I had been born a couple of decades later. Perhaps I could have done with a bit more support. Some more sympathy. Some more guidance. Less judgment. There’s no doubt that my tumultuous young teens would have been way easier for me, but would I still be “me”? I can only conclude that I wouldn’t be the same version of myself that I am now. I didn’t run to the teacher or my parents at the slightest problem. I dealt with problems myself. I made mistakes. Dumb and embarrassing ones. I messed up. I needed the space to fall as I did, so I understood what it feels like to hit rock bottom and to climb up again on my terms. I learned that there are consequences to my own stupid actions. I then had the satisfaction of knowing that I am capable of dealing with my problems, on my own and learning from them. There’s strength in that, but we have been robbing a generation of earning this valuable insight.

I remember a time when compulsory HR style workplace training was rare and seen as a complete drag. I worked in many offices where people would try and get out of these training sessions. Normally, the person coming in from some outside organisation to deliver this “training” would be the most unbearable kind of phoney. Full of banal and meaningless slogans, treated everyone like children, and mostly, there was a healthy scepticism and ridicule of such training.

As the decades rolled on and the next generation started coming up into the workforce, I noticed a shift. To my horror, they seemed to actually enjoy this rubbish. They lapped it up. I would occasionally make jokes about not wanting to go along to these training “workshops”, and the younger staff members would look at me like I was a weirdo for not wanting to go. I couldn’t imagine that people were seriously swallowing this patronising waffle. A lot of this training involved actively encouraging staff to snitch on their colleagues, which, at the time, I didn’t take much notice of, because I assumed that it was a given that nobody really took that bit seriously. Who in their right mind would want to work in an environment where people would run off to the manager every time there was a slight interpersonal problem with a colleague or somebody made them feel a little bit uncomfortable?

Call me old-fashioned, but why can’t we behave like adults and talk it through over a coffee and a sandwich at lunchtime? Or say privately to someone, “You know that thing you said? That really wasn’t cool”. Or just do what normal, sane people do and agree to disagree and move on? Do we really need to bring in the weight of an HR manager and huge wafty paragraphs of company policies into a personal disagreement to solve this stuff? Are we that desperately inept at dealing with some slightly tricky human interactions?

I guess if you’ve never had the opportunity to learn to navigate any awkward interpersonal terrain, and you’ve been taught to “snitch to teacher”, then it becomes second nature.

Now the snitch is celebrated and rewarded. It’s not just seen as “ok” to be a snitch. It is positively encouraged. The snitches are in charge. They’ve won. They’re now the “cool kids”. There’s a whole structure in place to reward them. A highly lucrative industry of endless training and ever-expanding company policies that incentivise this behaviour in workplaces. While this type of training used to be rare, it seems to be a constantly churning mega machine now. All in the name of making our world nicer, kinder, more inclusive, more tolerant and more friendly. But it’s not kinder. It’s suffocating, cringeworthy and inauthentic. It’s not more “inclusive”. It’s actually “exclusionary” to anyone who is honest and speaks their mind. Anyone with a slightly edgy sense of humour, or anyone who has even remotely “problematic” opinions (which is most sane and normal people now).

Watch your back! The snitches are taking notes. They are the eyes and ears of workplaces. They are the walls that talk, and they are weaponised like brainwashed Stasi sleeper cells to spring into action if you dare step out of line. They will play the game of quietly pretending to ignore hearing words they don’t like to your face, only to scurry away to the manager sneakily behind your back, after the fact, to make a formal complaint. They will plan this by meticulously going through the company policies to back up their claim. Who does that? In this new distorted paradigm, they are right. They’re behaving exactly as they have been programmed to behave. They have the whole rotten system on their side. The manager has to take this seriously, regardless of the intent. Regardless of context. The person who makes the claim (the snitch) is holding all the power. The only way to outmanoeuvre this insanity is to play the same retarded little back-stabbing game back and make your own petty complaint against the snitch. Play dirty. Become them. But if you were raised in a time when being a snitch was just about the lowest, most undignified, cowardly and pathetic way to deal with these things, you're in a quandary.

The reason I know all this is because this exact situation happened to me recently. I won’t go into the full details. I don’t want to name names, or be specific because, guess what? I am not a bloody snitch! I also don’t want my Substack to be a place for me to air detailed personal grievances against anyone specific in my private life. It won’t help me in any way. It won’t make me feel better. But I do think that it’s a topic worthy of writing about.

I resigned from that job. With my dignity intact. It certainly wasn’t my dream job to be fair, and I was fed up there. But it raised some serious questions for me. In my next job, how will I survive this? How long can I pretend to be someone I am not? Nod along to views that I don’t agree with? How long can I keep my mouth shut? How long before I come across another snitch?

In today’s climate and given the decades of social conditioning and incentives, I get the sinking feeling that this issue isn’t going away. I wonder how many other people of my generation who grew up with a natural, justified disgust of snitches are now finding themselves surrounded by them?

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