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Bullying and ‘Social Justice’
I was never bullied. Somehow, I survived thirteen years of public schooling without suffering that particular indignity — despite being, in some ways, a prime target. Over the years, I’ve developed a theory about why I managed to avoid the usual adolescent social drama, and I think it has some relevance to the current political situation.
My first realization: Bullying almost always occurs within cliques. Inter-clique bullying is rare, but intra-clique bullying is universal. At my school, the greatest victims and victimizers alike were the “popular” kids — the cheerleaders and athletes — who treated each other like animals while the rest of us looked on in disgust. Other cliques had similar (though less dramatic) dynamics. But I, curmudgeon that I am, made my radical indifference to the high-school social scene known to all, and it worked. I didn’t care about belonging, and that made me all but immune to the harms which proceed from the desire to fit in.
The most valuable item in the bully’s toolkit is the ability to offer and withdraw membership. Bullies invite a would-be victim into a group, then expel her in a fit of taunting and rage. She comes groveling back, and the process repeats itself — expulsion, followed by groveling, followed by expulsion, followed by groveling, and on and on. So it is with abusive partners and cults, and so it is with the priggish hyenas who frequent Twitter, Facebook, universities, newspapers, and corporate HR departments. Bullying of this kind* requires a willing victim. Stopping it is as simple as saying, “Pound sand!” But, of course, you can’t expect an invertebrate to grow a spine, and we’ve raised several generations of them.
C.S. Lewis, wise as always, saw this dynamic at work in the world (though even he couldn’t have foreseen the way it would overtake all of politics . . . and perhaps the way it undergirded the political revolutions of his own lifetime):
[Y]ou will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment . . . you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel. . . . Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
It’s not surprising that an ideology which conceives of human society as nothing more than a set of zero-sum power relations should transform the whole world into a middle-school cafeteria, but that’s where we are. Thanks, Foucault. And thanks, social media, for making it all so easy. And thanks, modernity, for eroding and invalidating all the healthy ways that men can belong.
* As opposed to the male-dominated “Give me your lunch money!” style of bullying, which seems to be a Hollywood staple, but which I never actually witnessed in my childhood.
Published in Culture
See, now that’s the only kind I ever knew.
This has not been my own experience. Bullies target those too who have no protective cliques at all – those who lack all protection. Yes, in-group bullying is a frequent occurrence, as in-group hierarchies are maintained with some degree of violence, but when it comes to the generally friendless, the out-group, bullies will often single them out and be quite merciless either out of general malice, or because it builds their egos and reputations with their in-groups. Trying to lay low and avoid any group associations is no protection for such targets, and in fact intensifies their hatred and dehumanization because it is such group slavishness that they are trying to instill.
I bore the brunt of this crap for a good part of middle and high school. I had no cliques. I had few friends. I played no sports of note. I was in no clubs. And I put up with no attempts to go-along with whatever the in-groups wanted. So I was, for a number of them, an object of contempt, and thus a target. About all that protected me was that the worst of the bullies were also physical cowards when alone, and I set a couple to rights. But physical bullying is not the only form.
Interesting. My experience was precisely the inverse.
Maybe times really have changed.
Here’s a thought: The introduction of complex video games (and especially first-person shooters) quelled the animal spirits of adolescent males and transformed high-school social dynamics.
Yes. I hesitate to possibly distract from a fine post, but there are lots of people–a bit older to be sure–for whom bullying was only physical intimidation and violence.
The present use of the term is in the category of changes in the language to serve the desire for a more gentle populace.
They didn’t ‘pants’ (wedgie) the freshmen walking home in your high school? Lucky you.
But yeah, I agree with your description of modern America, with one caveat; for most, its only ‘voluntary’ to the extent that one wants to have a career and for they and their family to be left alone and simply ignored. The true volunteers are the identity progressives (ranging from true believing woke cultists to status-obsessed suburban wine moms and Bernie Bro sports enthusiasts). The first group is kept submissive and afraid through the threat of low-key lunching, the latter group is kept in line through the threat of purges.
Hmmm….maybe you looked something like this?
I agree with this. The problem is less the die-hard cultist than the hiring manager who desperately wants to please the die-hard cultist, and is therefore willing to fire an unwoke employee.
Twitter witch hunts only work because people in positions of power want to placate the witch-hunters.
Heh. Not even close.
Remember the “Pajama Boy” flap from a few years ago . . . ?
My own experiences were well before the rise of the FPS. The most advanced games out by the time I finished high school were for the Super Nintendo.
We had sticks and marbles…and peashooters.
Well, two-and-a-half cheers for violent video games, I guess. Could it be that, contra Tipper Gore, they’ve made us less violent?
This is our culture. I’m thinking we are in a giant food fight, with much more at stake.
I’ve been saying a long time that the left is adolescent.
Is there a better example than DeBlasio painting BLM on the street in front of Trump Tower?
Ah, so you had advanced beyond the atlatl?
My lucky dad got to play with radioactive toys:
That was @percival.
We all did. Some just knew it.
Exactly. If that were two children in a family, it would be cause for parents to say “Go to your room.”
Oddly, DeBlasio is defacing and destroying his city, out of spite. Trump will not be the only victim of that ill-advised act.
Childish.
We must let them continue to show their colors. Sort the wheat from the chaffe.
Ditto. I was / am obese. I was a target for ridicule all my life. Been in my share of beating and bar fights by groups of men that want to show how tough they are. You can’t win those, they are set up so you can only lose.
Good post. See my related piece, Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism.
As I said in that post:
I have no doubt that many of these ‘Social Justice Warriors’ are people who, had they lived in earlier times, have eagerly participated in the burning of witches, the accusation of innocent people as Communists, or the mocking and humiliation of any woman who dared deviate from her prescribed gender roles. For a lot of people, the ability to combine submission (to the group) with aggression (toward the designated targets of the group) is very attractive.
Atlatls? Feh. Why would you wanna throw away a perfectly good spear?
I wasn’t really in any cliques until I joined Cadet Band in fourth grade. No bullying there. I did attract one anyway. He kept it up until I got fed up one day, bounced him off the wall, and caught him with a punch … just as Mr. M came out of the gym.
Mr. M was the gym teacher. He was a black man, about 8′ tall. He pointed at me, called me by name, and said “My office. Now.”
So I stood in his office looking at the Board of Education, a paddle with holes cut in the blade to reduce air resistance, pondering my fate for about five minutes. He walked in, dropped his clipboard on his desk, and said “When you make a fist, don’t tuck your thumb into it. It’s a good way to break your own thumb. Now go to class.”
I didn’t get a punishment. I got a critique. That was it.
Had one of those in junior high. It was in the rest room. Some kid reached into my left front pocket where I kept my wallet in order to help himself. This allowed me to use my left arm to lock up his right, and left my right hand free.
I hit him once to get his attention. I hit him again, in case he was a little slow. I was winding up to hit him again when Mr. A, one of the shop teachers, came into the room. He saw the other kid’s hand in my pocket and hauled him off to the principal. I didn’t hear anything more about it.
I didn’t tuck in my thumb.
I agree with every single word in this post.
I wish everyone understood this. I read a great book a few years ago that explains this step-by-step dynamic from a different angle–Matt Lieberman’s, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Lieberman was one of the neurologists who discovered through the use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology that the part of the brain that processes social rejection is the same one that processes physical pain.
I read another book more recently about stress in the workplace, written by a doctor who actually studied the physiology of stress. He found that the only really damaging stress in terms of the release of too much cortisol for the body’s own good came about from one source only: painful social interactions that people “ruminated” on (his word) afterward.
These two findings work together in my mind. It’s rejection that causes psychological pain. So the order of events the post describes is absolutely accurate–it’s a person inside a clique who is rejected that is the source of bullying.
I read third great book on this subject by Peter J. Dean: The Bully-Proof Workplace. All common sense in this book, and it basically says what we have all come to realize: you have to walk away sometimes.
All abuse derives from the same social equation: unequal power.
And these days it is more important to say that without the unequal power relationship, there is no abuse. If everyone is free to walk away, there is no abuse.
Interesting to read of the different types of bullying, and especially the male/female differences, as I do see much of today’s “social justice” activity as a form of bullying. Bullying now seems to be considered a social good to be applauded. Yet for so many years bullying was considered bad behavior that was to be discouraged.
I am a 64 year old guy, so I was in elementary school in the mid 1960s and middle school in the late 1960s. I have always been a nerd – and my school years were long before being a nerd had even a glimmer of “cool” to it.
As a nerd who was not athletic, I occasionally was the target of a male “give me your lunch money” bully, but rarely.
For reasons I never figured out, in middle school a group of girls made me a frequent target of their taunts. They seemed to take pleasure in getting me to look embarrassed, as I would turn beet red as they made fun of my name and my nerdiness, making fun of my non-resemblance to a macho television character of the time who had a name similar to mine. I would not talk back, both because I was intimidated and I had been taught by my parents and my church that a boy should not say mean things to or about girls. And I certainly shouldn’t even think about physically engaging them. My mother thought a couple of the girls in the group might actually have liked me and were trying to get my attention. If so it was way beyond my comprehension at the time.
I’m 64 and grew up in the days of physical bullying. Today’s psychological bullying may take a heavier toll.
Man, they don’t make gym teachers like that anymore, do they?
This was my experience as well. I never saw any of the”give me your lunch money” kind of bullying, but boy howdy the cool kids’ lunch table could be brutal. In 8th grade, a new girl came to our school. Pat was very cute and the boys took an instant liking. The Queen Bee of the in-crowd, Sally, declared her to be in the group. Pat was in the popular group all year, until one morning Sally inexplicably announced that Pat was Out. Pat had cooties all of a sudden. I never knew why. But from that day on, Pat was an outlier with no group and no friends. It was like Lord of the Flies. The power wielded by that one 13-year-old girl (who went on to be a high school cheerleader and on Homecoming Court of course).
My experience was the opposite. I went to, I think, eight different schools. I was never around long enough to be accepted into a clique. But I don’t remember ever being bullied.