We Are All Bullies

I learned the concept of bullying first-hand but not as a target, not as a victim. I was in fourth grade in elementary school. I had just moved to this new middle-class neighborhood, knowing no one in my class. It was a math period. We were all quietly working at our desks. A late morning sun trans-illuminated the drawn window shades. The stillness in the room suddenly turned ominous. One of the classmates was having a petit mal seizure. Silently, cautiously we all left our seats and formed a line along the window ledges. All but the one of us: her name was Louise. She had dark wavy hair that hung loosely on her cheeks. She remained at her desk, not moving, staring straight ahead. Her eyes did not blink. They looked unfocused as if seeing nothing. She held that dead stare for a long time. Our teacher, a middle-aged woman, waved at us signaling us to remain quiet and wait and simply stand still.Suddenly Louise shook her head, looked around, blushed vividly and began to cry. Some of the girls giggled, pointing to the puddle of urine that had collected under Louise’s seat.But from that moment forward she was shunned by all her classmates like a leper. She was called names, what exactly I don’t recall. Over the following days Louise was ostracized so cruelly that by the next Monday she was gone from school forever. From that moment on I felt as though a black sin had crossed my soul. And I knew it was a collective guilt.Over the following weeks I became friends and acquaintances with most of the other children in my class. Not one stood out as a bully. But we had all formed a collective group bully around Louise. And I can still shudder at the feeling of being swept into it.Then I remembered the suicide in 2011 of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer in response to years of ever-mounting bullying by fellow classmates, even despite this last effort to soothe himself and others like him:The last one hundred twenty years of psychoanalysis has not solved the ubiquity and inequity of bullying, not even in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, or Jung's genetically impressed archetypes, or Lacan's linguistic and philosophical fractures. Bullying is a permanent genetic feature of human beings (and other animals as well)..

"...the dominance/submission hierarchy explains how a bully emerges and how the submissives around him/her attend, witness, facilitate, and otherwise join in bullying."

.We are pack animals and are wired for tribalism: we care for, protect, worry about those who we perceive as part of our intimate group, or kin even when defined not by birth lineage but by close, long association. Those outside our territory we ignore or tolerate or view with suspicion or hatred. When outsiders threaten our contiguity or our very existence, sometimes just by their proximity, we may wipe them out. We invented genocide for that. Native Americans, Blacks, Jews — do you need reminding?It's also possible to be expelled from one's tribe by defying boundaries. LBTGQ people are insipiently at risk. (See Jamey Rodemeyer above.) So, partializing of tribal membership is always occurring. Humans are complex beings, personally and socially.When the scope of tribal membership is narrowly focused to smaller groups such as peers, another heritable trait surfaces: the dominance/submission hierarchy. Like many other species, that hierarchy in humans serves both to form solid coherence in a group, rendering it combat ready. And that hierarchy also assures that the more physically powerful and/or more cognitively capable have access to the most desirable, most fecund females in the greatest numbers.Despite modifications created by our complex societies, the dominance/submission hierarchy explains how a bully emerges and how the submissives around him/her attend, witness, facilitate, and otherwise join in bullying. Like I did when I stood with all the other children silently watching Louise enter into her victim-of-bullying position.In the last century, and especially since the advent of the internet, bullying can get amplified by depersonalization.  Nazi propaganda—via newspapers and devious films—was able to align the entire German nation against the entire world population of Jews, most of whom they had never seen. But it was the Nazi effort to capture and enslave all the world's non-Germans that ultimately brought down their entire agenda.The internet and especially the social media that abides there allows for the creation of platforms for bullying. The impersonal engagement with such platforms allows participants not to see the faces of those they are attacking, not therefore to engage their innate empathic apparatus. Such platforms have the innate capacity to turn lovely people into site-specific psychopaths. And these platforms can commit murder.We must be careful to know ourselves and to watch over the ramparts we tend to neglect. Now—before it's too late!