Shifgrethor
A primer
A small number of terms are elevated from the pages of literature, up to the Mount Olympus of blog post vernacular. Moloch, as the dark god of failed coordination problems. The Dark Forest, as domains where there’s active incentive not to be noticed. And from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Omelas child, a person whose suffering is a counterweight to the joys of others.1
This post is an attempt to elevate another of Le Guin’s terms to the blog post realm. That term is shifgrethor.
Definition
Shifgrethor hails from The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin’s most celebrated standalone novel. In the novel, it’s an untranslatable alien concept, the sense of honor on the planet Gethen.
But basically, it boils down to an injunction against advice.
In the book, “shifgrethor” comes from “an old word for shadow”. Individuals have shifgrethor, and various slights can offend it. It’s everyone’s responsibility to respect everyone else’s shifgrethor, even that of enemies. And the main way to violate shifgrethor is to give advice.
Shifgrethor can be waived. But it’s not something you’d ask someone else to do. For example, when politicians get together in a smoke filled room, one fat cat, seeking another’s honest opinion, might say “What do you think I should do? I waive shifgrethor.” But you wouldn’t say “Senator, would you waive shifgrethor? I have an opinion on this matter.” That itself would be a (lesser) violation.
Examples
Shifgrethor is useful surprisingly often.
While human adults sometimes welcome advice, children have a strong sense of shifgrethor; parenting advice says it’s important to let them figure things out for themselves when possible. Shifgrethor is also famously present when people vent.
Offering a solution when someone just wants to be heard? Classic shifgrethor blunder.
Or take the case of a micromanager. When one person has professional authority over another, advice often feels belittling. Managers would do well to heed shifgrethor, and avoid advising their reports when it isn’t necessary.
Shifgrethor also appears in competitive gaming contexts; few things are as infuriating after a close tournament loss as your buddy telling you, on your way back to the spectator zone, what you should have done differently. Would you like to know it eventually? Sure. But you need a minute before you’re ready to waive shifgrethor.
These cases have all been about emotions. Employees often feel vulnerable to their bosses, children have big emotions more generally, and a venting person or defeated gamer is almost definitionally displeased. But shifgrethor has other applications, too.
If you want someone to really learn something, it’s a common practice to help them figure it out themselves, rather than giving them the solution. A math textbook leaving certain results as an exercise for the reader? That’s respecting shifgrethor. Shifgrethor also comes up in domains where people have radically different experiences from each other: you must take care not to violate shifgrethor when talking about a diet that worked for you, since metabolisms vary.
Why a new term?
Well, technically it’s a pretty old term. The Left Hand of Darkness came out in 1969. But why do I want to introduce it to the vernacular?
Mainly, because advice is fraught in general, and we don’t have a word for that fact. Once you have the term, it’s obvious that parenting, being cool about dietary stuff, math textbook exercises, being a supportive romantic partner, handling gamer rage, and being a good manager all have this throughline. They’re all cases where you should be careful with advice, and treat your counterparty as allergic to it.
More generally, I think the notion of “advice” is a little too benign. Remembering that it can be experienced as a violation, or can cheat people out of doing their own reasoning, strikes me as a valuable correction. The planet Gethen does take it too far; there aren’t literally zero situations where unsolicited feedback is appropriate. But it should probably be rarer than it is!
There isn’t one canonical blog post about the Omelas child, maybe in part because The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is already a short and philosophical story that speaks for itself. But I think many across the blogosphere would recognize the term (and if you wouldn’t, read the story).