Dramatism Theory

When I was in high school, everyday at the lunch table, my friends and I would always try to find failures about people walking past so that we could make fun of the person. But if we couldn’t find things wrong, we would pick on our friends, two friends in particular. For example, we would call my friend Brian, “Black” because he was as black as night. We called my other friend Fats (a type of identification method), even though is real name was Mo. Everything we said about each other were more devil terms, or that summed up everything we said as evil, instead of god terms that is more positive. My friend Leonard would always go overboard when it came to talking about people, causing the person he was talking about to feel bad about himself, and very embarrassed. As soon as Mo would sit down with his lunch Leonard would immediately call Mo a “fat ass” and criticize Mo by saying things like, “Don’t Mo look like one of the gorillas from Planet of the Apes eating a bushel of bananas?” Mo would respond by saying, “That’s why I have more money then you.” Mo’s response is an example of substance, a term that is used to encompass a person’s personal characteristics. In this case, it was Mo having money, which to Mo, was a type of value. Even though we all made fun of each other, (something behavioral scientists call homophily because there was a perceived similarity between all of us at the lunch table no matter who was the speaker or listener at that time. In this case the similarity was us all talking about each other.) I think the ringleader of it all, Leonard was going through something called the Guilt Redemption Cycle, or a method that when a person strives for perfection, ends up hurting themselves and others.