The Bully’s Pulpit (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Bully’s Pulpit (2015)

thebaffler.com

62 pointsmusha68k27 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

BR sneaking == US snitching

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

Much schoolyard bullying goes under the name of "monkey dance" in the "patterns of violence" section of https://archive.org/stream/Sgt.RoryMillerMeditationsOnViolen...

(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

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

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.

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.

Briefly, this. Condolences to Mr. Graeber's family.

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.

> 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.

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...

("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")

Too true. Intellectual bullying can be insidious and is often overlooked because it doesn’t come with physical scars and bruises. Some of the worst bosses and coworkers I’ve encountered were those whose mentally abusive and toxic behavior was enabled or ignored simply because they were “intelligent” or technically indispensable.

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.

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

Thanks.

>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...

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.

By the recently deceased David Graber.

Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts.

Or maybe they were just crazy, troubled people.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Pretty naive to write US off as militaristic.

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

The list of U.S. Wars is long

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

but so is this one

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.)

> 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.

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?

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