Social Tribology

Why Every Human Interaction Needs Lube

And why the ones who refuse to provide it are the actual sadists

“Without friction there is no grip. Without lube there is no motion. The engineer who cannot tell the difference destroys the machine.” — Nobody famous. But somebody should have said it by now.

“In Which We Discover That Physics Was Doing Relationship Therapy Before Freud Was Born”

Tribology is the science of friction, lubrication, and wear between surfaces in relative motion. It is why your engine doesn’t seize, why your joints don’t grind to powder, and why the wheels on your car turn without welding themselves to the axle.

It is also, it turns out, an almost perfect model for human communication.

Consider what happens when two surfaces make contact without adequate lubrication. The technical term is galling: the surfaces weld microscopically together, then tear apart as they continue to move. Each cycle deposits debris — metallic shards, heat, damage — that contaminates every subsequent contact. If uncorrected, the system seizes entirely.

You have seen this happen at a dinner table. You have seen it in a comment thread. You may have lived inside it for years.

The proposition is not subtle: every interaction between two human beings requires a medium of sufficient viscosity to prevent the heat of direct contact from destroying the machinery. Call it empathy, call it manners, call it shared syntax, call it whatever your particular Noddy Badge of a tradition prefers. The physics doesn’t care what you call it. Remove it, and you get galling. Enough galling, and you get seizure. Enough seizure, and you get the comment section of any major news website after 9 pm.

“A Taxonomy of Lube, for the Mechanically Minded”

Not all lubrication is the same. The engineering distinction between endogenous (generated within the system) and exogenous (supplied from outside) maps onto human interaction with uncomfortable precision.

The critical observation is that endogenous lube is always superior to exogenous. A system that generates its own lubrication — a relationship founded on genuine curiosity, a workplace where people actually want to solve the problem — runs cooler, lasts longer, and handles stress without seizing. A system dependent entirely on exogenous lube — rules, enforced politeness, the fear of HR — is one power cut away from galling.

This is why purely procedural civility fails. You cannot lube a fundamentally dry system from the outside indefinitely. Eventually the supply runs out, or the supply chain is disrupted, and you discover that the “civil” interaction was never civil at all. It was just adequately lubricated until it wasn’t.

“The Slug Knew This Before Aristotle Did”

Nature, as is its habit, solved this problem millions of years before humans started writing think-pieces about it.

The gastropod — your common garden slug — produces a non-Newtonian mucus of extraordinary sophistication. It behaves as a glue when the slug needs to adhere to a vertical surface, and as a lubricant when the slug needs to glide. The same substance, controlled by shear force, does both jobs (Loudon & McCay, 2000). The slug does not require a rule book, a code of conduct, or a six-week communication skills course. It has internalised the physics.

The spider provides a complementary lesson. The structural threads of a web are coated with a lubricating film — not to catch prey, but to ensure the web itself doesn’t snap under the constant friction of wind (Opell & Hendricks, 2010). The lube is what allows the structure to survive long enough to do its actual job. Without it, the architecture that took all morning to build tears itself apart by afternoon.

The human social web is no different. The “threads” — shared institutions, professional norms, family bonds, democratic conventions — require continuous lubrication to survive the friction of disagreement, change, and competing interests. A society that decides lubrication is weakness, or performative, or unnecessary, is a spider that has stopped coating its web. It will hold for a while. Then it will not.

“When the Victorians Got It Exactly Right (Yes, Really)”

The 19th century had many problems, several of which it exported enthusiastically to the rest of the world. But on the specific question of exogenous social lubrication, the Victorians produced a masterwork that has never been adequately appreciated.

Their mourning rituals — the precise grades of black fabric, the black-edged stationery, the formally specified periods of withdrawal from society — look, from the outside, like obsessive performative theatre. From the inside, they were engineering. They gave everyone in the social system an exact protocol for interacting with someone in grief. You knew what to say, what to wear, what to send, and how long to wait before resuming normal contact. The friction of not-knowing-what-to-do — which is what actually makes most people avoid the bereaved — was removed by the system.

The lube, in this case, was etiquette. Externally supplied, yes. Somewhat ridiculous in its specificity, yes. But functional in precisely the way that a synthetic lubricant is functional: it kept the social machinery moving at a moment when endogenous lube — spontaneous warmth, natural ease — was in desperately short supply.

We abolished Victorian mourning etiquette in the name of authenticity. We replaced it with nothing. The result is a culture where most people have no idea what to say to the dying or the grieving, so they say nothing, and the bereaved are left to wonder whether they have become socially invisible.

Removing the exogenous lube without replacing it with endogenous lube is not liberation. It is just a dry system with better PR.

“The High-Friction Enthusiast, and Why They Are Telling You Something Important”

There is, it must be acknowledged, a camp that actively seeks the unlubricated interaction. They prefer the heat. The grinding. The rapid depletion of the other party’s resources. They find the seizure interesting, or gratifying, or at minimum preferable to the effort of providing anything viscous.

This camp has a technical profile:

What they claim to achieve:

• Rapid deconstruction — if the goal is to break something quickly, removing the lube is efficient. Galling works.
• Pain as diagnostic — in some limited contexts, the friction itself reveals where the connection is structurally failing. The discomfort is data.

What they actually produce:

• Galling and seizure — the interaction stops working as the parts fuse in mutual contempt.
• Catastrophic energy waste — enormous psychological fuel is burned simply to overcome resistance that did not need to exist.
• Permanent debris — unlike a lubricated exchange, a dry one leaves material (resentment, trauma, the ruined professional relationship) that contaminates every future contact, sometimes permanently.

The high-friction enthusiast is not, as they generally present themselves, a brave truth-teller cutting through social niceties. They are, in the engineering sense, a sadist: someone who seeks the heat of direct contact and ignores the wear on the machinery. The machine in this case is frequently another person.

The divergent mind — particularly the AuDHD processor who cannot ignore data — notices this dynamic with uncomfortable clarity. The “brave contrarian” who is perpetually causing friction is usually protecting a very fragile internal mechanism that cannot survive honest contact. The noise is the tell.

“The One Question That Would Stop Most Arguments in Their Tracks”

If we were to design a social interstitial — a deliberate moment of friction before one is permitted to label another person a problem — the most effective single question the system could ask would be this:

“What medium are you providing to make this interaction possible?”

Not: “Are you being respectful?” (too easily gamed). Not: “Have you considered the other perspective?” (too easily performed). But: “What are you bringing to reduce the heat?”

The misogynist has no answer. The radical feminist has no answer. The authoritarian, the troll, the person who has decided that their certainty exempts them from the mechanics of contact — none of them have an answer.

The divergent, meanwhile — the one with the diagnosis — has been asking themselves this question for decades. Not because anyone told them to. Because a mind that reads every granule of an interaction before forming a conclusion notices, very quickly, that most seizures were preventable. And that the person who notices the seizure is coming is rarely the one who caused it.

“The Canary Brings Its Own Lube. You’re Welcome.”

The bottom-up processor — the one this culture keeps trying to fix — is, almost by definition, a natural tribologist. The same processing style that makes social navigation exhausting makes the divergent mind acutely aware of friction states, lubrication failures, and the precise moment a system is about to seize.

This is not a superpower in the comic-book sense. It is frequently a source of significant personal cost. But it is, in the engineering sense, a critical diagnostic capability that monocular systems consistently destroy precisely because they cannot recognise it as useful.

A society running dry — and the evidence suggests that is an accurate description of most contemporary democracies — does not need more heat. It does not need louder voices, more extreme positions, or faster algorithms for sorting humans into opposing camps.

It needs people who know where the friction is, what kind of lube the situation requires, and how to apply it without making it worse.

The divergent mind, properly understood, is not the problem with the machine.

It is the only one still carrying a grease gun.

Next in this series: “Bottom-Up is Not a Bug: Why the ‘Slow’ Thinker Sees What the Fast One Misses”

Previously: “If You Meet a Misogynist and a Feminist on the Road, Kill Them Both”

References

• Hutter, S. (2025). Coping with affective polarisation: A research program. *Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung*
• Kamp, D. (2025). Understanding and explaining differences across minds in social interaction. *PMC*
• Loudon, C. & McCay, M. G. (2000). Slug tribology. Cited in Denny, M., *The intrinsic rate of natural increase*
• Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(3), 883–887
• Opell, B. D. & Hendricks, M. L. (2010). The role of granules within viscid capture threads of orb-weaving spiders. *Journal of Experimental Biology*
• Sharma, P., et al. (2025). Lived experience response to disinformation campaigns. PLOS Mental Health, 2(10)
• Swanepoel, A. (2025). ADHD and ASD are normal biological variations as part of human evolution. *PMC*