The Good of Bullying
The corruptions of bullying are too well known to all of use from media and personal experience to need elaborating. Yet bullying as we know it seems first to be a product of the grade-segregated public schools, which many have suggested have highly artificial social characteristics, and second to be a product of social media, which we also know well to be unnaturally distorted social environments.
Is bullying merely a product of damaged environments as with hens in too confined spaces? Or is there a natural form of bullying that potentially has a genuine social role? The second option, as foreign as it is to our own experience and preconception, deserves consideration.
History has too many examples of of hostility to outsiders to excite our wonder, and when bullying is just hostility to outsiders it would not be unusual. More interesting is bullying within the group. Bullying within the group could sometimes be a competition for resources internally, just as bullying outside the group can probably be explained as driven at some psychological level as a competition for resources. Within the group, the competition could be directly over actual resources or over social status.
Against that form of bullying we can contrast bullying that is meant to strengthen the group. Let us continue to call it bullying though a better term should exist. In conditions of competition, a weak member of the group weakens the group. Bullying would then either strengthen the group in a ruthless way by driving the weak member out or strengthen the group in a positive way by spurring the weak member on to self improvement. Historically Anglo literature had a trope where eventually the bullied person turns on the bully and either earns either the respect of the bully himself or of the larger group of whom the bully is a lower-status member. This trope appears to be a form of group-strengthening bullying.
This illustration comes from the book Farmer Boy, where the teacher has to prove himself against bullies.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
G.
January 3, 2023
Interesting. No real practical application since we aren’t calling for more bullying, but interesting to think about.
I see a possible virtue chart here.
PUSHING PEOPLE TO GET BETTER would be the virtue. The distortion of that virtue would be the one where you are pushing them out of the group or else where your pushing is counterproductive.
The opposing virtue would be I guess TOLERANCE or MAKING ALLOWANCE FOR WEAKNESSES and the vice would be the super common modern vice of you are perfect just the way you are. George Bush’s bigotry of soft expectations.
funny how the vice synthesis is so common these days, bullying poeple destructively because they don’t subscribe to ‘you are perfect just the way you are’
Don
January 3, 2023
Bad language warnings, but Trevor Moore has a pretty funny song about bullies roll in the ecosystem:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iy8SIWTyJNs
Rozy
January 3, 2023
Is teasing the same as, or similar to, bullying? When I was in YW’s (we called it Mutual in the olden days) I was constantly teased about being “too righteous” by both girls and boys. It was hard to take and caused me to question whether I was indeed too righteous, like the Pharisees or something. It weakened my resolves and eventually led to some wrong choices as a young adult. We get enough trouble from the world; our families and church groups should be supportive and encouraging as we seek to follow the Savior.
I love the story from Farmer Boy! My husband has a similar one from when he was the new kid in school in 7th grade.
Zen
January 4, 2023
Definitely bullying, Rozy. Don’t think it isn’t just because it isn’t male-typical or it isn’t physical.
William James Tychonievich
January 4, 2023
These days, “bullying” is usually code for opposition to the LPGABBQ agenda.