We should seek out good intelligent friends who we can talk to about anything. Once we have them we should not let gossip get to us. Victims of gossip must do good works to counteract gossip and treat the gossip as a joke and it will soon stop and will fade into insignificance. Enjoying gossip is incompatible with egoism because you enjoy it because you have been bad yourself and want others distracted from your own faults. To enjoy going behind the back of another to listen to evil gossip and what does not concern you is incompatible with real self-esteem which celebrates and tries to learn from the good in people and with trying to cause the fear that there are so many people around you who might harm you to lose its grip on you. When somebody is so silly and malicious that they will gossip and degrade themselves they make a show of themselves and really only hurt themselves so do not worry about them. The person who uses some terrible information to get a gossipy kick from what somebody did is really as bad as that person for taking advantage of the offence. The egoist should have better self-confidence than that. Gossip breeds gossip and gossip breeds suffering. Tell nothing bad about anybody except for the greater good of another or themselves or yourself and reading gossip in newspapers is wrong except when you know you won't take what you read too earnestly. We all have defects and many of them amount up gradually to making a lot of harm. We forbid backbiting for we all have weaknesses and have done terrible things or would have done them given the chance.
