What is a clique and why is it bad?

[ciphergoth]

(friends-only, not filtered)

Have you ever been accused of being part of a clique? Were you? Were you or the other "clique" members doing something unethical, and if so what? Have you seen others behave like a clique in a way that was unethical? What was it about their behaviour that was unethical?

Everyone has preferences about what sort of people they want to be friends with. There's a good chance your friends have preferences more similar to yours than a random member of the population. Thus a circle of friends can form of people whose preferences have common elements.

If you'd like to hang out with that circle, but you don't fit the common preferences, you may feel they are excluding you, and behaving like a clique. This isn't necessarily so; it's an inevitable part of friendship groups forming that not everyone can join.

So what makes a clique different from any other circle of friends? I tried the dictionary without much enlightenment.

My first guess is that you become a clique when being part of the circle makes you feel so special that you don't want *anyone* new to join, no matter how close they are to the sort of people you might like to know, because that reduces the feeling of specialness. However, if the membership of your group can grow as well as shrink, it's less likely to be a clique.

My second guess is that if you're in a situation of forced contact with others, such as a school or workplace, a clique is a group within that forced contact group who get daily or near-daily opportunities to make it clear to outsiders, in a way they cannot avoid, that they are not part of the clique. Thus, if we start to see LiveJournal as a forced-contact situation, we will start to perceive every circle of friends as a clique; it's important to remember that there are a million people on LJ and we each have the power to choose whose journals we read.

It's possible I'm missing something. Please enlighten me!

PS first day of work today, I may not get back to this LJ for a while.

Comments

[lilithmagna.livejournal.com]

And how would the answer differ if we were discussing a claque?

[lizw.livejournal.com]

"Claque" is a word I only came across for the first time quite recently, but as I understand it, it means a group that is centred on one person - sort of like a personal fanclub - with the connotation that the "fans" are being paid or doing it for some other personal advantage rather than because they actually like the focal person. For instance, Voltaire used to pay a claque to applaud and shout praise during performances of his plays.

[lilithmagna.livejournal.com]

Yes-have a feeling it may simply be a percursor to clique. It has connotations of a quasi political body or faction though, but in the context of a court setting or similar (i.e. a conmtext where the circle of power implied by a clique really had serious reprecussion- thus being a member of the wrong claque might equate to belonging to a proscribed party if things went pear shaped). Could be qrong though.