
The Bully’s Pulpit (2015) - musha68k
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit
======
jackcosgrove
I like the thrust of this essay that we allow bullying and violence
hierarchies to persist because we tacitly approve of them.

I would introduce an economic angle to this. Some people are dependent on
patronage networks for their standard of living. Whether that person is a
pliant corporate functionary, a public sector union member, a corporate
executive lobbying the government, or a recipient of direct transfer payments,
they are rewarded for loyalty rather than productivity.

The pot of money that is used to reward this loyalty need not be gained by
coercive extraction, but it tends to be. Those who are rewarded for their
loyalty also tend to be more supportive of hierarchical institutions. This
patron-client relationship binds the client to the patron, even if the patron
is a bully.

~~~
RedBeetDeadpool
In my times of being bullied, it wasn't the bullying that angered me the most.
With a lot of self education there's enough to understand bully psychology and
how they work - bully minds are very solved at this point.

What really astonishes and angers me is the entire crowd too cowardly to even
admit something happened. I believe a big part of reducing the bullying that
happens is correcting the enablers and getting them the ability to stand up
for what they believe is right.

Bullies really will be bullies and in my experience have no capacity to think
outside of their thought patterns. You have to treat them as mechanical alpha-
males and "kite" them appropriately. But their supporters do the real work and
go very far to protect the bully so that in many cases make it next to
impossible to take the bullies down. Why is it that we can't seem to do
anything about Trump? I think its time we start placing responsibility on the
supporters for the actions they support and attack them with near equal
retribution as we would the bully lest we find ourselves in a world where cult
leaders and abusers consistently bubble up the top of our social hierarchy.

------
Hokusai
Interesting read, even that it is just opinion and little fact beyond the
writer experience.

My personal opinion, in line with some ideas in the article, is that the
school structure is the one that increases the possibility of abuse.

> Even more, bullies are usually aware that the system is likely to punish any
> victim who strikes back more harshly.

Humans accumulate angriness when things get out of our control and may react
violently as a result.

I think that it is good to remove the violent response of the victim that
reaches the too-much-bullshit level. But, something else needs to be put in
place to replace it.

For adults that is law, police and judges. In the world of school there is no
such civilized structure and it is a failure. Remove judges and laws and
people will resort to vendettas and violent crimes more often as they lose all
recourse.

Related to this: [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-
lord-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-
flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months)

One problem with many narratives is to believe that the "law of the jungle" is
the stronger rules (Or even worse to define evolution as the nonsense
"survival of the strongest"). When reality is that collaboration is they key
for survival for any social animals including humans.

------
PaulHoule
I like the "school does not let you escape" point.

In nature, animal aggression usually results in one animal chasing another
animal out of its territory.

Deny an escape route, and violence is likely to result -- one of the surest
ways to get bit by a dog is to compress it into a corner.

~~~
082349872349872
Orwell mentions the lack of escape at an edwardian boarding school: "That bump
on the hard mattress, on the first night of term, used to give me a feeling of
abrupt awakening, a feeling of: 'This is reality, this is what you are up
against.' Your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place
ruled by love rather than by fear, where you did not have to be perpetually on
your guard against the people surrounding you. ... Against no matter what
degree of bullying you had no redress. You could only have defended yourself
by sneaking, which, except in a few rigidly defined circumstances, was the
unforgivable sin. To write home and ask your parent to take you away would
have been even less thinkable ... It might perhaps have been considered
permissible to complain to your parents about bad food, or an unjustified
caning, or some other ill-treatment inflicted by masters and not by boys. The
fact that Sambo never beat the richer boys suggests that such complaints were
made occasionally."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457)

BR sneaking == US snitching

Orwell's descriptions of second-rate squalor in both his boarding school
memoir and in 1984 are astonishingly parallel.

------
082349872349872
Much schoolyard bullying goes under the name of "monkey dance" in the
"patterns of violence" section of
[https://archive.org/stream/Sgt.RoryMillerMeditationsOnViolen...](https://archive.org/stream/Sgt.RoryMillerMeditationsOnViolenceAComparisonOfMartialArtsTrainingRealWorldViolence/Sgt.%20Rory%20Miller%20-%20Meditations%20On%20Violence%3B%20A%20Comparison%20of%20Martial%20Arts%20Training%20%26%20Real%20World%20Violence_djvu.txt)

(and somewhere, in some other book or blogpost, he discusses the role of
retributive violence for actual or perceived social norm violation)

For the boarding school equivalent of the spartan Krypteia, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283085)

------
Doxin
As a serial victim of bullying I can wholeheartedly say this article hits the
nail on the head with respect to the dynamics of bullying.

Bullying is a stage play orchestrated by the bully, reserving the role of
crazy unreasonable person for the victim. No bully is daft enough to punch a
victim when the teacher is watching -- unless of course they can make it seem
like the victim is the cause.

I've had one teacher respond to my bullying with "but you act so weird". This
is of course the arbor on which bullying hinges. Most adults have enough sense
to not say it out loud even if it _is_ how they feel.

I'm glad to have found this article, it has allowed me to give behaviour of
past bullies a place. It's rare to find media which does that. The only other
example I have run into is the "to this day project" by Shane Koyczan[1] which
I feel should be obligatory watching for everyone.

Kudos to the author.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY)

------
dilaudibble
I see this is by David Graeber who recently died. My respects to him, his
family and his work.

However I disagree with the article. I am also someone who has been on the
receiving end of bullying and (rarely) on the dispensing end, but I feel that
the premise of this article is wrong. The reason why people did not care about
the highway of death is because 1) it happened a long way away 2) people like
us, from our side, did it 3) very few popular faces said it was wrong and 4)
it happened to people we don't care about very much. These views can be summed
up as parochialism, and they are usually the reason that we allow evil to be
perpetrated against the innocent.

It's also the reason we allow the poor of the world to starve (c.f. Living
High and Letting Die, Peter Unger) which I don't feel can be construed as
bullying. A similar example is the behavior of the allies immediately after
the second world war, who apparently did little to acknowledge the Holocaust.

My view differs from David's in that I don't think we seek to justify bullies
because we think they are better than their victims - I think we seek to
justify bullies because we don't care very much about other people, due to
lack of time and energy. I find it difficult to parse his whole argument but
David appears to be suggesting that it is much more complicated and to do with
our participation in bullying and our institutions. Fair dos, but I feel my
explanation is simpler and better.

~~~
DFHippie
I don't think your explanations are really in conflict. His point is that
cowardice keeps third parties from intervening and then ego defense in the
face of their own cowardice gets them to denigrate the victim. Yours is that
it's just sociopathic indifference. But people do feel guilt at their inaction
and they do blame the victims. And most likely David Graeber would have agreed
that people are more likely to step in to defend people closer to them -- kin,
friends, members of their religion or ethnic group. So apathy does have a role
to play in his model as well. If you have a lot of apathy you need little
cowardice + projection to preserve bullying. If you don't, you need more.

Another neglected factor is how convincingly one can tell oneself preventing
the bullying is somebody else's responsibility. If the crowd of witnesses is
large or there is someone else nominally in charge, you can have empathy and
inaction without any recourse to victim blaming or other self-deceptions.

------
glitchc
This is a fascinating read about bullies and bullying, calling into question
the toxic culture around manliness and cruelty. The desire for the “law of the
jungle”, where the man most appropriate to lead is determined by his ability
to crush those who contest his right to rule, this predates American society.

While America is one of the few modern nations that still glorifies it, the
form and shape is considerably weaker to past societies and the power of the
bully diminishes daily. Champions of industry are now the bookish sort,
something that would be unthinkable a half-century ago. I am hopeful that the
trend will continue as society evolves.

~~~
scandox
> Champions of industry are now the bookish sort

You may have missed the last 20 years in which it was conclusively proved that
more cerebral leaders can be dominating bullies also. Just replace muscles
with whiteboard pens.

~~~
082349872349872
Is Science Fiction (at least the less cynical descendants of _Connecticut
Yankee..._ ) the bookish sort's version of fanfic?

[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Rckye2aV_ZM/S7Mm16X-JUI/AAAAAAAAB...](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Rckye2aV_ZM/S7Mm16X-JUI/AAAAAAAABQI/5lnZMPRuYdc/w1200-h630-p-k-
no-nu/Валерий+Барыкин.bmp)

("Eve" has a fashion mag under her apple, "Adam" is looking in a collection of
SF stories instead of his bookmarked text. The title doesn't translate well
into english, which doesn't gender inanimate objects, but ends something like:
"books - [the] best [girl]friends")

------
qubex
As the son of a narcissist who let himself be abducted into the family firm
run by the aforementioned, I can only sigh with self-pity. The man had
surrounded himself with sycophants who aggrandised his ego by playing as hard
and fast with the facts as he did—and when fifteen years ago I began to
dissent, I was subjected to every humiliation under the sky. Now he’s an old
man on the verge of bankruptcy and had been ushered out of the room with all
the levers of power, and I’m being courted back by some cohorts who’ve tried
to curtail him but also have let the silverback out of his cage.

Yearight.

~~~
082349872349872
In bocca al lupo! At least you already know all about the factions in the
firm, and aren't being courted as an _ingenuo_.

~~~
qubex
Thanks.

------
rgblambda
>even those societies whose men refuse to organize themselves effectively for
war also do, in the overwhelming majority of cases, insist that women should
not fight at all. This is hardly very efficient.

Reason for this is that if a society loses half its men, the population will
bounce back in a single generation. If a society loses half its women
though...

------
dusted
This frames situations in an interesting light and asks some provoking
questions and it's easy to see how someone would get pissed off or offended by
reading it, which in and of itself is an excellent quality in any article.

------
e40
By the recently deceased David Graber.

------
booleandilemma
_Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts._

Or maybe they were just crazy, troubled people.

~~~
Doxin
The two aren't mutually exclusive.

------
barrenko
Pretty naive to write US off as militaristic.

~~~
Pfhreak
Maybe you could expand on your point, because it's not so clear to be that
calling the US militaristic is incorrect.

~~~
PaulHoule
The list of U.S. Wars is long

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States)

but so is this one

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_France)

even if you start counting at the revolution.

The military culture of the U.S. is an interesting question. Our volunteer
military is small relative to the population; we invest in quality over
quantity and spend upwards of $1 million to train a foot solider. Compared to
the population, few people seriously consider a military career.

In the solar economy, wealth came predominantly from the land, and being an
officer had to do with your status in the feudal system -- it was automatic
that the "power elite" was represented in the officer corps. We have some
remnants of that system, but large sectors of the current "power elite" would
not even think of commissioning, there is no ROTC at Harvard or most of the
ivies. Certain right-leaning Christian groups work hard to pack the officer
corps with their own.

Yeah, we make movies like "Starship Trooper" and "Saving Private Ryan". Only
inside subcultures, however, do boys grow up with the expectation that
military service is fundamental to being a man. (Oddly, in those subcultures,
girls seem to be developing the same expectations today.)

~~~
rsynnott
> Our volunteer military is small relative to the population

Eh? No it isn't. The US has 4.2 active military personnel per thousand. This
is higher than almost any developed country (only exceptions are Singapore,
Taiwan and South Korea, who all have special concerns). Large European
countries are mostly in the 2-3 per thousand range. China is 1.5.

------
remote_phone
This is a terrible article, and written like someone ranting almost randomly
over his bullying experience as a kid.

Does the author really believe that bystanders don’t join in because “comic
books“ propagate the notion that people who step in will get bullied? If
anything, comics encourage the opposite, that good people stand up for those
that can’t. Or that kids noticed that no one wanted to step in for Edward
Snowden and that’s why they don’t help bullying victims?

That is literally the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long time. It’s literally
animal instinct not to get involved unless there is some edge. It even happens
in the animal kingdom, when lions attack Cape buffalo. Even though the lions
are outnumbered 100:1, it’s the Cape buffalo that area afraid. Fear is an easy
way to control large swaths of people. Just look at China. How else can a
government keep almost 2 billion people in line?

