I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes the right-wing conspiracy theorist in me suspects that anti-bullying movements are CIA-funded PSYOPs campaigns to induce passivity and helplessness in the upcoming generation of American men. And then sometimes I don’t think that they’re calculated psychological warfare at all, that they actually haven’t been meticulously planned in the sub-basements of the Pentagon. But it doesn’t matter either way. They don’t have to be planned. They still work.
Consider. What is the takeaway of anti-bullying campaigns for a young boy? The takeaway is that violence in all its permutations is something that is completely and totally and one-hundred percent not OK. It’s off limits to you. Whether it consists of roughing someone up or just saying really mean words. It’s not OK. (This is the favorite phrase of schoolmarms both literal and non: it’s NOT OK to bully.) But you know what else is not OK under a blanket prohibition against violence? Kicking a bully’s ass. Or even just making a good-faith attempt to. Giving a bully a quick one two. Defending yourself. Handling your own goddamn problems.
No. The only appropriate response to bullying is to alert the proper authorities, i.e. your teacher, who in most instances is just some random lady that majored in education and childhood development (and, if we’re speculating here, in all likelihood has never thrown a punch or taken a punch in her whole entire life and so imagines any such encounters as some nigh-apocalyptic, life-altering trauma). You tell her, and then she swoops in to give the bully a good talking to. Maybe they escalate it to the principal and then the principal enrolls the bully in an impromptu one-on-one sensitivity training seminar in the front office. Suspensions might follow; they might not. Maybe detention or a formal, written apology. Lines are added to a couple permanent records in guidance. Closer supervision moving forward.
One problem is that anti-bully advocates conceive of the entire exchange in the same tired, old, watered-down-Marx terms that they conceive of everything else. You have these bullies who are full of “hate” and the innocent, morally superior victims that they target due to ignorance, fear, all that usual litany. Oppressors vs. oppressed. Dominators vs. the dominated. (The variables can be changed out easily because the formula itself is rubber-stamp simple.) This model of the bully-bullied dynamic causes all sorts of problems and half-baked policies down the line, largely because of the utopian fantasy that inheres in Cultural Marxism. This model suggests that the whole problem is solvable. Of course bullies will be with us wherever modern education is absent, but not forever, brothers and sisters! When, at last, at long last, our gospel of tolerance and acceptance finally reaches the ends of the earth, finally sends down its cleansing rays into the last subterranean cavern of agonistic primitivity, then the kingdom of non-religion-specific heaven will come. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the jocks (who by that point will be conscientious vegetarians who don’t let sports distract them from the poignant lessons of their curriculum of social justice) will come to appreciate the diverse perspectives, life experiences, and unique ways-of-being that social pariahs like the nerdy Asians and queers and weird kids bring to the table. They will befriend them as equals. Peace will reign over the lunch room.
Of course, that’s a lie. Even tabling for the time being the fact that a lot of what gets labeled as “bullying” is perfectly normal roughhousing or social maneuvering, the bullies will always be with you. You’re never going to escape them. Your boss will bully you, your coworkers, your family members at times, your duly elected officials. Hell, the bully is you in many instances. To occasionally butt heads is human, and any approach to social dynamics that implies such unpleasantries can be perfected out of humanity is an inadequate one.
But the other problem is the more immediate concern. And it’s one that marks so much of progressive social reprogramming. It’s that anti-bullying programs also operate on the fallacy of governmental omnipotence and benevolence. They operate on the idea of the government-as-non-religion-specific-God-figure. Believers in these programs look at that young child and say, “You, son, you must remember that you’re not equipped to navigate the perils of this world on your own. You need our assistance. You need the guidance of the experts, the guidance of the administrators, the guidance of the guidance counselor (who is no longer really a guide to you at all but actually the ultimate adjudicator and solution). Anyway we will handle it. All you need to do is bring your humble supplications before us.”
In the frame of social justice, there is no problem that can’t be solved by the intervention of the proper authorities, by thoughtful policies, by central planning. A good schoolchild never takes matters into his own hands. Virtue consists instead of informing your teacher. What a toxic message.
As an aside, the conventional wisdom of talking this sort of thing over with your parents is of course the wisest approach. Because the assumption there isn’t that your dad is going to beat the bully up for you. He’s not going to solve everything unless the situation is particularly dire. He’s just going to offer you some perspective gleaned from his greater life experience. And your mom is going to hug you and say she loves you and that you’re worthwhile regardless of what any jerks at school might think. And the instruction of thy father and the law of thy mother shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.
But the tell-teacher tactic places educators and school administrators in loco parentis, and they proceed to behave like the rankest helicopter parents imaginable. Micromanaging. Lecturing. Rubberizing the world. And that’s where the dependence comes in. That’s where helpless, gold-star-for-good-citizenship passivity is conditioned. Then you have a child that will report. You have a child that cannot handle adversity on his own. You have a child that requires direction. This child grows up to be an adult similarly incapacitated. And then he is conveniently ill-equipped to resist when it inevitably becomes socially or financially profitable for you or your governmental administrators to bully him.
This whole issue is not unrelated to gun control, and it’s not surprising that these two initiatives are somewhat simultaneously reaching fever pitches in the public discourse.
Maybe, like me, you voted at the local school? I must have seen a dozen or more “no bullying” signs just in and around the gym. There couldn’t be a correlation with something else? Namely, in a bygone era where bullying was taken for granted as a normal part of growing up for boys – you better sit down for this – there were no school guards. Yes friends, no guards even in high school. If suggested it would have been incomprehensible 50 years ago. No drugs either. Impossible, you say. I’m here to tell you its true. Also, believe it or not, there was once upon a time a clear distinction between “nice girls” and “bad girls”. Girls were expected to behave in a way that indicated “good breeding.” Oh, the horror. Way too square, no doubt, but that’s the way it was.
It also induces the smarter and more sociopathic members of the protected classes to manipulate the system into bullying the alleged bullies. You want to get somebody in trouble? Just tell teacher he called you some name, or better, goad him into actually calling you some name in front of witnesses, and he’s the one who gets stepped on by the helicopter-parent school bureaucracy.
Result, men without honor, women without virtue, and government by smarmy effeminate sociopaths.
In Canada, standard policy was to suspend all participants in a physical altercation. On one occasion, my friend was punched in the face. I exchanged a few blows with his attacker and we separated. All three of us were suspended, including the original victim. He had done nothing. I was also suspended on a few occasions for throwing snowbals, which was considered aggressive behavior.
I had another friend who was psychologically and physically tortured by the majority of the class’s boys from about grade three to seven; nothing could be done by teachers to stop it. The truth is that administrators do not see half of what really occurs and they cannot trust any of the children to tell the truth, so in exasperation they will either take a scorched earth tactic or simply resign themselves to inaction. Sometimes vengeance really is the Lord’s, though: the worst of the class’s villains died horrifically before adulthood and all the others have become inconsequential; my old friend prospers.
It is principal, not principle.
Hahahahaha. Good catch.
Nice try but the evidence provides the opposite conclusion.
The males with the largest frontal lobes and brains are already self-policing. They don’t bully and they are often too thoughtful to constantly contend with other males to avoid bullying. This is not a sign of their inferiority. It is a sign of their general superiority in almost any metric you could apply to them. For example, did you know that bullies invariably have lower muscle mass, lighter bones and smaller brains than the people they bully? Does a better male really have to concern himself with 24/7 guard against a male bully who is 80% more likely to turn out to be a repressed homosexual later in life?
The real problem is egalitarianism. Mixing high IQ kids with low IQ kids is cultural and social suicide. Pretending that segregation doesn’t work is suicide.
If you mix bright children with monkeys in manpants, the chimpmanzees will win and anybody with IQs above room temperature loses. The answer is not in these pathetic government initiatives, it is to acknowledge that the genetic spectrum of mankind covers a very wide area and putting german shepard puppies into a cage to be raised alongside hyenas is a huge mistake. After all, the hyenas mature much faster and don’t have far to go, being mostly a biological support system for a pair of testicles and not much else. A german shepard puppy should not have to live and develop in terror alongside a hyena. It is simple enough to understand. It is simple to understand. The former grows into a grand, noble and useful dog but the latter grows up to be a hyena.
I don’t really follow your point. A lot of the stuff that currently falls under the heading of bullying is just normal social behavior, regardless of the IQs or the “genetic spectrum” of the children involved.
In upper elementary school, my nephew asked to join some kids who were playing. They said no. He tattled, and got a prize from the principal for “bravery”.
As a former high school jock, I will tell you that we didn’t really pick on the nerds. Most of them were a little awkward but generally cool.
It was mainly the weird kids and the queers we would make fun of.
Nerds aren’t lambs, they are like foxes. Weirdos and queers aren’t lambs they’re more like monkey-toads.
The anti-bullying movement is mostly a homosexual propaganda campaign.