On Social Engineering and Being a bastard

I've been thinking recently about social engineering. Not the kinda lame stuff hackers do to get free pizza but real social engineering. Setting up loops in behaviour between groupsof people.
For example , take 3 friends , lets call them person A, B & C
if you set up a dependency relationship between two people, A & C say (e.g. A owes person C money) but also destroy trust between the two parties, lets say B tells A that C did something really bad. You get a cycle of behaviour whereby B is a trusted third party and both A & C. communicated via B. Lets take it further, say there are TWO groups of these 3 friends, (i.e. two intermediary B's and 2 Sets of the A/B distrusting partnership. A person with a little bit of irresponsible money lending and vicious rumour spreading could engineer the situation such that the two B's report all of the information of 6 people to him/her. Taking the two B's as individuals in an A/C relationship.
now,thats engineering, thats being a bastard!

G