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.

Can we all please try to avoid this?

hat tip Jon Haidt

The logic of whining

Victor Davis Hanson notes that the cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous. He gives examples of black athletes making $9 million dollars a year saying the NFL, which is made up of 67% African American players, is racist; Oprah's handbag racism, Jorge Ramos making $75 million dollars a year saying that US citizens are ethnically insensitive toward Latinos who come to America illegally.

In the logic of whining, Michael Brown did not commit a felony or two in the last minutes of his life, from strong-armed robbery to assaulting a police officer, but was instead begging for his life with “hands up” and shouting “don’t shoot.” There is less cause and effect anymore, only someone who must be excused from responsibility and culpability by his own claims on victimhood.

...We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.

On the other end of the social scale is the whining of the established elite, who bitch that the public has forgotten that they must be exempt to cross-examination and therefore must remind us of that by perpetual whining. The Obama administration mastered this natural trait of privileged scapegoating. For the first six years of Obama’s administration, all supposed achievement was Obama’s; every confirmed failure was the legacy of Emmanuel Goldstein, aka ex-President George W. Bush.

So monotonously expressed was Obama’s whine that we came to believe that Iraq was tumultuous rather than quiet and at peace when he came to office [5], that the September 2008 financial crash was exploding on the day of his inauguration rather than four months old [6], contained and addressed, that racial relations were improving rather serving up Fergusons and Baltimores, and that the Middle East and Russia were rather stable rather than imploding from Syria and Yemen to the Crimea and Ukraine. Obama never set a deadline with Syria, much less ignored it. The UN alone did that, not he.

Obama’s doppelganger is Hillary Clinton. Poor Mrs. Clinton. She was misled about her server, or did not want a handful of clumsy duplicative communication devices or did nothing improper or at least nothing illegal, or at least nothing indictable, or at least differently from past secretaries of State, or never sent classified material, or at least never material that was stamped officially confidential. Who then caused this scandal? The New York Times [7], Fox News, the right-wingers, the Republicans, or the Clinton-haters.

Ours is the age of constant whining — and now let me cease whining how wearisome it has all become.

Read more here.

Viewpoint diversity

Jonathan Haidt has a new blog entitled Heterodox Academy. He writes a post here about the victimhood culture infecting our schools. The problem doesn't start in our colleges; it begins in the middle school or perhaps the later elementary school levels in my opinion. Jonathan recently addressed students and faculties at an elite high school on the west coast:

I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier). The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer. And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward.

After my main lecture, the next session involved 60 students who had signed up for further discussion with me. We moved to a large classroom. The last thing I wanted to do was to continue the same fruitless arguing for another 75 minutes, so I decided to take control of the session and reframe the discussion. Here is what happened next:

Me: What kind of intellectual climate do you want here at Centerville? Would you rather have option A: a school where people with views you find offensive keep their mouths shut, or B: a school where everyone feels that they can speak up in class discussions?

Audience: All hands go up for B.

Me: OK, let’s see if you have that. When there is a class discussion about gender issues, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking? Or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the girls in the class, raise your hand if you feel you can speak up? [about 70% said they feel free, vs about 10% who said eggshells ]. Now just the boys? [about 80% said eggshells, nobody said they feel free].

Me: Now let’s try it for race. When a topic related to race comes up in class, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking, or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the non-white students? [the group was around 30% non-white, mostly South and East Asians, and some African Americans. A majority said they felt free to speak, although a large minority said eggshells] Now just the white students? [A large majority said eggshells]

Me: Now lets try it for politics. How many of you would say you are on the right politically, or that you are conservative or Republican? [6 hands went up, out of 60 students]. Just you folks, when politically charged topics come up, can you speak freely? [Only one hand went up, but that student clarified that everyone gets mad at him when he speaks up, but he does it anyway. The other 5 said eggshells.] How many of you are on the left, liberal, or democrat? [Most hands go up] Can you speak freely, or is it eggshells? [Almost all said they can speak freely.]

Me: So let me get this straight. You were unanimous in saying that you want your school to be a place where people feel free to speak up, even if you strongly dislike their views. But you don’t have such a school. In fact, you have exactly the sort of “tolerance” that Herbert Marcuse advocated [which I had discussed in my lecture, and which you can read about here]. You have a school in which only people in the preferred groups get to speak, and everyone else is afraid. What are you going to do about this? Let’s talk.

After that, the conversation was extremely civil and constructive. The boys took part just as much as the girls. We talked about what Centerville could do to improve its climate, and I said that the most important single step would be to make viewpoint diversity a priority. On the entire faculty, there was not a single teacher that was known to be conservative or Republican. So if these teenagers are coming into political consciousness inside of a “moral matrix” that is uniformly leftist, there will always be anger directed at those who disrupt that consensus.

That night, after I gave a different talk to an adult audience, there was a reception at which I spoke with some of the parents. Several came up to me to tell me that their sons had told them about the day’s events. The boys finally had a way to express and explain their feelings of discouragement. Their parents were angry to learn about how their sons were being treated and… there’s no other word for it, bullied into submission by the girls.*

And Centerville High is not alone. Last summer I had a conversation with some boys who attend one of the nation’s top prep schools, in New England. They reported the same thing: as white males, they are constantly on eggshells, afraid to speak up on any remotely controversial topic lest they be sent to the “equality police” (that was their term for the multicultural center). I probed to see if their fear extended beyond the classroom. I asked them what they would do if there was a new student at their school, from, say Yemen. Would they feel free to ask the student questions about his or her country? No, they said, it’s too risky, a question could be perceived as offensive.

You might think that this is some sort of justice — white males have enjoyed positions of privilege for centuries, and now they are getting a taste of their own medicine. But these are children. And remember that most students who are in a victim group for one topic are in the “oppressor” group for another. So everyone is on eggshells sometimes; all students at Centerville High learn to engage with books, ideas, and people using the twin habits of defensive self-censorship and vindictive protectiveness.

And then… they go off to college and learn new ways to gain status by expressing collective anger at those who disagree. They curse professors and spit on visiting speakers at Yale. They shut down newspapers at Wesleyan. They torment a dean who was trying to help them at Claremont McKenna. They threaten and torment fellow students at Dartmouth. And in all cases, they demand that adults in power DO SOMETHING to punish those whose words and views offend them. Their high schools have thoroughly socialized them into what sociologists call victimhood culture, which weakens students by turning them into “moral dependents” who cannot deal with problems on their own. They must get adult authorities to validate their victim status.

So they issue ultimatums to college presidents, and, as we saw at Yale, the college presidents meet their deadlines, give them much of what they demanded, commit their schools to an ever tighter embrace of victimhood culture, and say nothing to criticize the bullying, threats, and intimidation tactics that have created a culture of intense fear for anyone who might even consider questioning the prevailing moral matrix. What do you suppose a conversation about race or gender will look like in any Yale classroom ten years from now? Who will dare to challenge the orthodox narrative imposed by victimhood culture? The “Next Yale” that activists are demanding will make today’s Centerville High look like Plato’s Academy by comparison.

The only hope for Centerville High — and for Yale — is to disrupt their repressively uniform moral matrices to make room for dissenting views. High schools and colleges that lack viewpoint diversity should make it their top priority. Race and gender diversity matter too, but if those goals are pursued in the ways that student activists are currently demanding, then political orthodoxy is likely to intensify. Schools that value freedom of thought should therefore actively seek out non-leftist faculty, and they should explicitly include viewpoint diversity and political diversity in all statements about diversity and discrimination.** Parents and students who value freedom of thought should take viewpoint diversity into account when applying to colleges. Alumni should take it into account before writing any more checks.

The Yale problem refers to an unfortunate feedback loop: Once you allow victimhood culture to spread on your campus, you can expect ever more anger from students representing victim groups, coupled with demands for a deeper institutional commitment to victimhood culture, which leads inexorably to more anger, more demands, and more commitment. But the Yale problem didn’t start at Yale. It started in high school. As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimizers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open students’ minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t share their values.