Real bullying: the manipulation of those in power or who know how to game the system

At a website called Quora, Jon Davis, who is a Marine Corps weapons instructor, has some things to say about our victimhood culture and its effect on boys in particular. Remember Columbine? After Columbine, the meme that developed was that the killers, Klebold and Harris, had been victims of bullying by jocks at the school. So, anti-bullying programs proliferated.

Victimhood culture is when a culture evolves to handle slights against them through responding to each of them, not directly, but leverage third-party intervention. These third parties could be parents, school authority, police, voters, or political donors. What makes victimhood cultures dangerous was that it incentivized “victims” to catalog and broadcast every conceivable slight against them, no matter how trivial or unintentional the insult. They need to build cases and this encouraged to exaggerating or falsify harm they received to create a case against the accused satisfactory enough to warrant some desired or demanded action. That said, I sympathize with schools. To stand up to a mob and say, “You don’t have all the facts,” is hard. So I understand why schools gravitated in this direction.

But victimhood culture does something else to the character of its members. It causes them to value victimhood as a form of virtue itself. That means that those within such cultures seek to gain the short-term benefits of being perceived as a victim, such as pity or advocacy, but at the cost of long-term appreciation from the culture, as classic (and more healthy) character traits, such as self-reliance and self-respect are ignored and allowed to atrophy.

This matters to those concerned about the development of boys. The reason that victimhood culture is dangerous is because it short-circuits natural boyhood development by specifically contradicting with the nature of boys. Boys align themselves in the same way as anyone else, through dominance hierarchies. The adolescent male dominance hierarchy is one which is attempting to collectively define what being a man should look like, and it socializes its members to this archetypal masculinity identity. Every group of boys is different, but usually the character of this archetypal male is one who is self-reliant, can defend himself, is attractive to girls (women if you prefer, but we are talking about adolescents here), is trustworthy, and loyal to his friends. Likewise, they’re reactionary, and will attempt to challenge even the slightest attempts to shame themselves, their family, or other groups they are loyal to.

Victimhood culture disrupts this process and is contrary to honor cultures. Both are reactionary when slighted, but honor cultures seek to handle matters personally without intervention of third-party authority. With victimhood culture, third-party intervention is the goal. In this way, one playing by the rules of a victimhood culture can undermine the entire adolescent male dominance hierarchy, disrupting its ability to socialize males, preventing the establishment of positive male ideals, and removing a means for the boys at the bottom to rise to a healthy middle.

...To prevent “bullying” we have prevented this necessary outlet for boyhood socialization and replaced it with one where real bullying, the manipulation of those in power or who know how to game the system, continues to take place. Without the outlet, the means to settle the score, the tyrants have no means of being humbled, as the only power they respect is prevented from reaching them. By that, I mean a truly self-righteous boy. But worse, those who are their victims have literally no means of recourse… unless of course they want to tattle and increase their suffering tenfold in the days to come.

...I say this is worse because we believe we have protected the boy who is being bullied by preventing only one form of conflict - physical violence. Because we have conflated a schoolyard tussle with a school shooting, we’ve made all forms of violence evil. I’ll say this to make it clear, there is a need for the Marines to kill people. There is a need for the justice system to sometimes take a life in defense of others. Sometimes, violence is necessary, but in making the idea of violence taboo — “there’s never a reason for violence” — we’ve short-circuited that all-important understanding of the world where we teach kids what kinds of violence are acceptable, what kind is not, and what kind is necessary. Yet we tell ourselves we have prevented bullying, but if we look at all evidence, this child — the victim — is far more likely to become not just a bully, but a repressed monster. By removing the most observable conflict method, we removed from him the ability to rectify his own situation through that ancient of means, and I’ll add, the means most common and most widely respected among boys. At the same time, we interfered in socialization through friends and peers, a form of solidifying social norms which the data is clear on, is far more powerful than teachers and schools. And worst of all, we never taught him about violence, so he’s teaching himself.

You start taking influences from irrational sources and coming to dangerous conclusions. To them, it isn’t just the individual bullies who are at fault. It is all the bystanders who do nothing. It is an authority that does nothing. It is even a God who does nothing or who would be so cruel as to create a world with such suffering as theirs. We can look at the Columbine Shooters to understand that much. One of the shooters left us a great deal of evidence about what was going on in his mind before the massacre. He communicated visions of the world that was corrupted and evil, where he was a victim of a flawed creation, and his self righteousness was such that he placed himself in the role of the judge for all of that flawed creation. This meant that he had lost complete hope in the world and was justified in lashing out against not only his aggressors, but the whole system on an existential level. He wasn’t just out to punish his aggressors, but even God for creating something so terrible as creation.

He said all these things, placing himself in the position of arbiter of cosmic justice, even as he failed to correct the problems in his own life that held him back. Perhaps he wasn’t able to recognize what his own problems were. Perhaps he was told too often that he was fine just the way he was when the world communicated to him a very different message. Regardless, this kid lacked hope for climbing out of his hole, so he wanted to drag everyone and everything into his hole with him. I don’t think his story is in any way unique to just his case.

Put all this together, and I think we have a much better understanding of what makes a school shooter. They aren’t just bullied kids. Everyone faces some degree of meanness from time to time, but they are kids who absolutely cannot escape the bottom rungs of the adolescent social structure. Over a period of years they absorb abuse by other kids using them to climb their own dominance structures. They never develop strategies to deal with this, but instead, attempt and fail at other strategies which exacerbate their position, such as retreating into isolation or seeking to accentuate their own victimhood to the revulsion of everyone else around them, even adults. Given all of this, claims that they are suffering from mental disorder due to long-term sustained trauma seem warranted, however, as these symptoms are only beginning to manifest, it’s doubtful there would be much of a record for anyone to know to watch their behavior. Finally, they absorb some negative influences that begin to place a predictable set of ideas in their head about the nature of people, the nature of the universe, and their role within it. Then the final evolution is to embrace that hatred for the world, hatred for themselves, and sense of meaninglessness to the point of suicide. Many simply stop at that tragedy, but some take it even further, wanting to take as much with them before they go. Maybe they’ll use a gun, maybe arson, maybe a bomb, but those few will stop at nothing to express their resentment of Creation.

Read more here.