How to stop bullying — part 1 — the correct, but politically incorrect way

The victim, the bully, the animal

Here’s a hard fact - bullying destroys lives.

But here’s an even harder fact — the power to stop bullying lies in the hands of the victims.

Conventional, or politically correct, thinking on bullying assumes people who are bullied are innocent victims, and that the responsibility to prevent bullying lies anywhere but with the victim, that it’s the responsibility of parents, teachers, schools, society, the legal system, to create safe environments for kids, that it’s all down to education and communication to help children understand that bullying is a bad thing and how we should treat everyone with respect and compassion. How we can’t treat violence with violence, and how we should learn to turn the other cheek. All these things sound perfectly reasonable.

But bullying hasn’t got much to do with what we would conventionally regard as reasonable or unreasonable.

Bullying, I’ll reiterate, destroys lives. I’ve seen it first hand. It’s brutal, horrible, and painful. One of the reasons for sharing these insights and ruminations is due to my own experience helping youngsters, as a teacher and boxing trainer, to overcome bullying, and the horrific effects I witnessed growing up on young people due to their lack of mentoring and training in how to deal with their tormentors.

Empowering the victim

The hardest pill to swallow about bullying is that the best cure lies with the victim themselves. Specifically, the idea that most victims do not realise that the power to change dominance dynamics (essentially what bullying amounts to), indeed, lies with them. Most apporaches are careful not to incorporate such dynamics, as it opens the victim-blaming can of worms. However, to say the power to change dominace dynamics lies with victims, is meant absoultely in the spirit of empowerment. The key is to ensure those dynamics, strategies, and behaviours are well taught and young people trained in them (I will use the term boys a lot for convenience, but all this applies just as well to girls).

Of course, the substance of any message is very much dependent on how it's delivered. One of the reasons for avoiding this victim empowering approach is that it's counterintuitive for parents, educators, and adults in general. Apart from the odd father or mother that tells their children to give as good as you get, and fight back, if and only if attacked, most parents have been socialised to tow the school line, or policy. They are often unknowingly sold to the politically correct mantra that schools must do more to tackle bullying, while avoiding the thorny problem of victims and what could be done to empower them.

We assume that since the victim is innocent and unfairly suffering (which of course they are), we must conclude they’re not in a position to prevent the bullying.

To lay all the onus at the victim's feet, it is thought, would only add to the suffering and injustice being experienced by them — in short, it's perceived as perverse. Or, to act to empower the victim is to glorify or resort to aggression and violence to resolve conflicts — and surely, it's thought, educated and civilised people shouldn't do that. Thus, it's concluded, the victim must be protected and shielded. Yet, most often, attempts to protect and shield victims in this way are counterproductive, or outright fail, or even exacerbate the bullying in question.

I’ve seen and experienced bullying in many guises and forms. Myself as a youngster at primary and secondary school, and later as a teacher and boxing trainer. I was one of the lucky ones. While I did personally experience bullying, it was never to the extent I saw others being bullied. I somehow through hap and circumstance never became that hapless victim. I often fought back, stood my ground, and apart from the odd case, came out the other side mostly unscathed. This would have been even easier and more effective, I argue, if educators, parents, and society, had sent a clearer message that served to empower the victims and not the bullies.

Thus, in what follows I argue for the onus to be put on the victim, with the proviso that the onus is also on parents, institutions, and society at large to empower victims and not the bullies — to support the victim in their battle, rather than appease the bullies. Appeasement just plays into the hands of the bullies and bullying behaviour at large. This does not exclude the possibility of empathy and opportunities for reform on the side of bullies — but none of this should be at the expense of the victim's suffering and the harm to their future life prospects.

This is not a popular opinion and doesn’t align well with the way people have come to be socialised regarding aggression, fighting, and violence, and their counterparts meekness, pacifism, and peace. These qualities must coexist, in fact they only make any sense when they do. We can see this when we delve into the roots of bullying as a behaviour.

The skins of our animal past - the paradox of human nature

Bullying stems from the remnants of our animal past and — very much alive — animal instincts. People understandably retort that we’ve long shed our animal skins and adorned the trappings of reasoned, civilised beings. This certainly is the case. One only has to look at all the wonderful achievements of advanced societies. From complex institutions to advanced technologies, to mass cooperation and highly complex socities that would be impossible without peaceful coexistence. There is an abundance of evidence spelling out how humans have transcended their brute animal predicament. This is not to be disputed. It’s a fact to be cherished.

However, the fact that humans are advanced, rational, and civilised, isn’t mutually exclusive from the fact that humans still have deeply ingrained primitive drives and instincts, animal-type hierarchical behaviour, and brute animal emotions. All these things still have their place in the vibrant tapestry of human behaviour. This is also a fact hard to dispute. Yet, it’s far harder to embrace. But, it’s a fact we ignore at our own peril. We do best when we heed this aspect of human nature with open arms. To suppress this aspect of our nature (the conscious act of ignoring), results in the repression (the unconscious act of ignoring) of our true natures. Overtime this (ignoring) can result in dissonance and a lack of harmony between what we proclaim and try to be as humans and what we actually are.

To be clear on this point, it’s a fact that these two states — of humans being both highly rational, civilised, and advanced  and humans being primitive, instinctive, and base — coexist. The evidence is everywhere to see. Individuals can lead a civilised life one moment and yet commit the most heinous crimes and acts the next. The point is not to glorify these darker aspects of human nature. The point is that we must be taught from childhood how to live in harmony with these aspects — light and dark. When this opportunity is missed, then we must be aware that the need for these contradications in human nature to be balanced doesn't go away.

We see incontrovertible evidence of this fact in the annals of modern human history. Modern history is splattered with the bloody events that mark the bubbling over of human animal savagery, from the wars and colonialism of the 19th century, to the wars and massacres of the 20th century. Just think of the mass scale atrocities of The Rape of Nanking (1937), the Holocaust (1941-45), innumerable massacres that occurred globally during and at the end of World War Two (Wołyn massacre 1943-44), the mass murders committed during Sovietism numbering tens of millions, or the Bangladesh massacre (1971 est. dead 3 million), I could go on and on.

These are just glimpses and preludes to the mass potential of humans to behave in the most grotesque of ways. In fact, this behaviour transcends animal brutality, as it’s often premeditated mass murder. This invites the argument that humans paradoxically have the capacity for even more deeply egregious behaviour than any animal that has ever walked this planet.

The truth is often paradoxical, illusive, and inconvenient.

The truths of human nature would appear to be no less paradoxical. Yet the truth is also interminably illusive. Even awkward, inconvenient, and oft times unfathomable. Thus, any truths we arrive at and proclaim, must be served and treated with caution.

Humans have evolved to become civilised, advanced, reasoned, and have these capacities in abundance, yet it’s only thanks to simultaneously having the capacity for animal like behaviour, having instinctive, primitive drives and wants, in abundance too. All this seems to be true, but what we make of all this is much harder to grasp. Any conclusions we do entertain could have far-reaching consequences. Though there is ample evidence to suggest that we have not completely left off our animal past. And that that isn't always a bad thing either.

We still, it would seem, very much walk this earth with the our animal skins.

Why the politically correct approach is misguided - yet understandable

Let me be clear — I’m sympathetic to people who holdfast to the politically correct notion that bullying must be confronted through dialogue, education, or peer intervention. That the victim should be protected and shielded. Violence and aggression shouldn't be mindelessly resorted to. After all, it’s not a crime to be reasonable, or desire the less jagged path.

In fact, it must be said that the evidence from global-meta data suggests, many initiatives that seek to prevent or limit bullying in ways that are not deemed politically "incorrect", for example the KiVa Anti-Bullying Program (Finland) and Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP/Global), have been very effective. This is of course fantastic. However, I would argue it doesn't obviate the need for a broad canvas of appraoches, and deep awareness, to tackle all kinds of bullying in all kinds of contexts.

Sometimes a different remedy or tonic is also needed. Often these remedies become available simply through making dialogue open and removing taboo. For decades depression was taboo, or hardly talked about. These days, most people have a modest set of self-help tools with how to deal with depression. Stay active. Embed yourself in community. Participate in group sport. Sleep well. Share your burdens with trusted friends and mental health professionals. These things sound obvious now. A few decades ago they weren't. In a similar vein, aggression, violence, dominance, are still taboo. Most of us deny their healthy role in daily life, barring people who deal with these things on a daily basis, the military, martial arts and combat trainers, and a sizeable portion of academics and psychologists who are committed to getting at the truth of human nature.

The drive to be politically correct, I argue, is a response to avoid and ward off the very types of behaviour — aggression, violence, dominance — that enables bullying to begin with. Doing so completely misses the opportunity to nurture a healthy relationship with those behaviours —  aggression, violence, and dominance — that can conversely serve as the remedial balm to treat bullying. Victims when they develop a healthy relationship to aggression, violence, and dominance, can learn to un-become victims. To be steadfast politically correct with regards to bullying, by demonising these behaviours, only serves to deprive victims of the very traits and qualities of character that would rescue the victims from their ordeals. I say demonise, as in my interactions with educators and parents, it's still the case that empowering the idea of empowering victims is still taboo. It's still conflated with the idea that empowering victims only means teaching young people to be violent, and fight fire with fire. As you will see in part 2., it's doesn't mean these things in the way most people think.

Aggression, violence, and dominance are not bad per se, but the acts commited no thanks to them are. Correctly channelled aggression, violence, and dominace, are no less harmful or useful, than correctly channelled compassion, kindness, or love.

The roots of bullying

Bullying at its root is a dominating behaviour performed through emotional, mental, or physical aggression or violence. It’s structured by physical size, height-to-weight ratio, actual or perceived strength, tolerance to violence and emotions connected to aggression, social status, peer alliances, and popularity. Its origin is the same as dominance behaviour used to establish order in a dominance hierarchy. A bully, usually, leverages their greater physical, emotional, or mental dominance to assert oppresive or abusive power.

The function or purpose of this behaviour is to have or assert control, achieve and maintain dominance and status, to achieve emotional gratification through inducing physical suffering and the submission of others. Sometimes this can manifest in behaviours such as bullying a child for being different, weaker, or somehow disadvantaged. Asserting dominance over a child in this way makes little sense to a mature adults, or most healthy functioning people. However, children who do this have as yet undeveloped, or a slowly maturing sense of how to exercise their strength, dominance, or emotions maturely.

Bullies, it must also be said, mostly tend to originate in households with a high level of dysfunctionality. This is usually the result of poor discipline, guidance, and structure in the familial home. Or the result of bullying behaviour from parents, sibilings, or relatives, that is then, simply imitated, or cathartically released, by the bully.

All this adds up to individuals who — due to their dysfunctional home environments and upbringing, their size or strength, emotional and mental resilience to suffering, pain, or inducing the latter in others with little or no empathy — use their power to dominate over others for their own cathartic purposes.

The act of producing fear, intimidation, and submission in others, is something both cathartic and familiar to the bully.

Bullying is corrupted and unhealthy dominance behaviour

Why so?

Dominance behaviour is what we find in most animal group dynamics. As mentioned above, it serves many functions. In strict animal groupings it is also used to assert and maintain territorial control, control over resources, or mating access. Dominance behaviour in groups is usually structured through a dominant member to assume leadership in a given power hierarchy — from this fact alone many rewards can be accrued. In primates, and other animals, we often find this ordering based varying forms of power hierarchies. In this type of reality, healthy dominating behaviour while on the surface brutal and primitive, must also be deemed fair and just by group members. This is the crux. Fair and just. If a dominant group leader’s power and rule is deemed tyrannical and unfair, overtime or even rapidly, their authority and position can come under threat, and even violently usurped.

Bullying behaviour by contrast, it could be argued, is dominating behaviour gone wrong.

Dominating behaviour that has not yet developed into the mature use of strength and dominance is simply corrupt power. Also, when group power dynamics become dysfunctional or corrupted, it can lead to corrupted dominance behaviour. Bullying behaviour can be regarded as dominance behaviour performed out of context (the context being group power hierarchy dynamics).

When clear group hierarchies exist, group members acknowledge or accept a group leader due to their dominance and competence in leading, and in outperforming others mentally, physically, or emotionally. In healthy group hierarchies, power is challenged when it becomes unfair or unjustified, since power can only be consistently maintained through alliances or ties of loyalty. Otherwise, there would be constant challenges, or attempts against a leader’s rule. Thus control through dominance is not just a product and outcome of brute violence, fear, and threat, but an equilibrium maintained by the most dominant or strong. This equilibrium can only be maintained if group members deem the most dominant member suitable and fair.

The criteria for suitability can vary from environment to environment. In short, a leader must demonstrate their ability to lead courageously, take risks others balk at, and demonstrate their leadership in moments of danger or threat to group safety. A strong dominant leader must show their true colours. This is not the sort of action everyone wants or could even handle. Thus many group members are happy to implicitly, or explicitly, nominate or defer to the most dominant, capable member. This status quo can persist so long as a nominated leader remains tough but fair, and is mostly able to keep group interest above pure self-interest — or at least self-interest and group interest align or do not conflict. However, when their rule descends to tyranny or autocracy, displayed through acts of oppression and over-riding self-interest, rebellion can strike at any moment. Thus group leaders must be deemed fair by some or most of the group members.

Bullies by contrast are rarely fair… they are only motivated by self-interest. They rarely demonstrate an interest in the group. Yet ironically, since the environment stifles a true power hierarchy, the demands and whims of bullies rarely go unchallenged out of fear and intimidation. Again, we can tie this notion in with the dysfunactional family. A tyrannical parent is a dominant leader whose rule goes unchallenged. They rule through fear. For this reason, regardless of how unfair, oppressive, and abusive they maybe, they will rule the roost. Their children will grow up thinking this status quo is the norm.

This comes back full circle to dysfunctional families. In such environments, a tyrranical, abusive, oppresive parent, relative, or guardian, goes unchecked and unchallenged. Thus, a young victim of this treatment, can unknowingly become, but not always, a dominating bully in turn. For them a corrupted hierarchy, tyranny and oppression through physical abuse, are normalised behaviours.

This does not mean, as mentioned earlier, that there is no space for empathy for bullies. That space is just not at the expense of their victims. The time for empathy is when victims free themselves from the bully. And the bully can learn and show remorse and emapthy for their victims.

Empathy happens in the meekness victims show in defeating their bullies, not in the meekness they show in the wishful hope that it will serve save them from becoming a hapless victim to begin with.

Lord of the flies — no picnic

I can’t share the rules and principles of how to deal with bullying — which I'll do in part 2 — without first sharing what I’ve seen with my own eyes. This is a difficult exercise in confronting very uncomfotable truths about my own nature.

This also isn’t a very straightforward story. Hollywood narratives would have us believe that things often happen in a linear, readily explicable way, with simple heros and villains. Anyone, who has even a modicum of honesty concerning their own life knows that life is far more messy and chaotic. It can often take years of introspection, reflection, and discussion with others, to make sense of what we have experienced, or continue to experience, or why something ever happened. And even then, there can be very little hope that we truly understand why something happened. We often need to live in a form of graceful resignation.

At my British all boys’ secondary school (Wheelers Lane Boys School), I saw bullying of every kind. The boys were brutal. They were ruthless. Unforgiving. Primitive. Cruel. Heartless. It made William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies look like a picnic. But here’s the punchline. I know it would be politically correct to say, if I could go back in time, I wish I had done more to stop the bullying. Or I wish I could turn back the hands of time, and ensure no one ever got bullied. However, one of my first feelings I have when I think back is that I loved every minute of it. It was an environment in which I felt viscerally alive. I have often thought I wouldn’t change anything about my time there. Except maybe the fact that I wish we had learnt more.

What all this suggests to me is that human nature is deeply contradictory. How we would like to think of ourselves varies greatly from what we actually are. I know that is true of myself at least. (Unsurprisingly my school doesn’t exist anymore. Along with a string of other failed schools of that era, which were just as ruthless.)

Boys in my school would physically, verbally, emotionally brutalise each other, and predominantly weaker boys, they would make their lives an absolute misery. I saw boys pulled, punched, dragged, kicked, stamped on, spat on, slapped, scratched, literally anything that could be done was done. I saw a boy with glasses, whose only crime was that he was trying to be friendly, being punched so hard in the face that his glasses smashed and his face gushed with blood. I saw boys have their heads smashed off tables, off walls, doors, like it was child’s play. I witnessed saw and heard such prolonged verbal assaults over the years that boys became traumatised impotent shells of themselves. There was an amputee boy at our school who had lost his leg, and moved with the aid of crutches. He experienced the most shocking and sustained bullying I have ever witnessed in my life.

One thing I know for sure is that the boys who were bullied in this way, were left scarred for life. I know this having talked to some boys long after such experiences. I would like to think that the amputee boy was tougher and better prepared for life. But a part of me thinks he must have lost his faith and trust in people at a very young age. Anyone can ask a psychologist or psychotherapist that has helped clients and patients overcome the trauma of childhood bullying about how traumatic and devastating these experiences are.

Boys are brutal — and they love it — does that make me a sadist?

So why is it that as a boy I loved every, bloody (often literally), moment of my experience at school even if it meant witnessing some of the most relentless and shocking cases of bullying, and receiving a good many beatings myself?

A very uncomfortable fact here is that as young boys we were sadistic. We were able to take pleasure in the pain and suffering of others. I recall this very well, as I recounted above.

Why is this?

One answer to this, might be, that deep in our psyche our ancestral instincts live on. These make us who we are as humans. It is these ancestral instincts that for the vast majority of human existence enabled us to remain on the right side of survival. They are pivotal to our ability to act and survive. They predate our transition to homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago, by an order of several million years. The origin of our instincts as humans are most likely deep in our animal primate past. Our animal ancestors mostly likely were just as aggressive, violent, and bloody, as other predatory animals that continue to exist on our planet, or some primate groups.

In the case of humans, a clear biological and anthropoligical turning point most likely came when our hominoid ancestors forked away from our primate ancestors millions of years ago. Our hominoid ancetors at some point evolved to be adept at living in small tribal groups or kith-and-kin based societies. That status quo only changed for humans with the advent of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago. However, tribal societies continued in parallel with agricultural societies and the earliest civilizations. At a conservative estimate, if we say tribal societies persisted for 298,000 years, that means for 99% of human history we have lived tribally. If we factor in our hominoid past, pre homo sapiens, then we're looking at 99.9% of our human past being founded on kith-and-kin based tribalism. That's a mind boggling fact. It means our biological instincts and behaviours are heavily programmed and based on algorithms for tribalism and small group dynamics.

This doesn't mean that all our tribal-based instincts are brutal or savage. Certainly not. Tribal life required a great deal of coexistence, balanced power hierarchies, and the need to be reasonable, just, and fair. The ethnographic record — the record of our tribal past, based on the study of existing tribal societies — does much to deepen our understanding. There is a great deal of variation in such societies, from very harmonious and peaceful ones to ones prone to violence. The ethnographic data suggests that 90% of tribal societies were to a greater or lesser degree violent, engaging in intra-group conflicts or warfare. This also means, that the higher order behaviours that we associate with civilised societies represent far less that 0.1% of human history.

The only conservative conclusion here is that our ancestral tribal instincts are not negligible. They live on in us as they are part of our very recent biological, genetic, and anthropological, past. As the human neo-cortex developed in home sapiens we became capable of ever more sophisticated cerebral acts. Yet, ironiocally the human neo-cortex is what also partly enables sadistic and pahthological behaviours. it could be argued that tribalism's cultural norms and practices prevented these sadistic tendencies from proflierating and getting out of control. However, without the communal constraints of tribalism, sadisitc violence could have become far more common in humans.

Thus, when young people find themselves witnessing brutality and savagery, it could be suggested that it ignites and rekindles these primal instincts. But without the tribal constraints their experiences can easily verge on the sadistic, or simply become sadistic. Without any proper guidance and channelling these instincts can run amok. We find ourselves experiencing pleasure when witnessing violence or aggression. This is not because we rationally believe aggression and violence are good per se. But rather, for our ancestral instincts these behaviours are familiar, stimulating, and rewarding.

Where from Sadism?

In our ancestral circumstances and environment, it paid to be comfortable with being aggressive and violent when the need arose. Seeing these behaviours now is in some sense comforting and cathartic, so long as we are not the unwitting victim. Our survival reward mechanism is amply rewarded when we see someone suffer at no expense to our own survival.

However, it is when these behaviours manifest outside of tribal contexts without the norms, practices, and traditions, to harness them, that these behaviours become misguided and sadistic. It can further be suggested that this type of sadistic behaviour is a maladaptive expression of dominance, aggression, and emotional detachment, enabled by various adaptations in the human mind. Sadism, in short, is to all intents and purposes an evolutionary disadvantage in tribal group dynamics, though in some cases it may have offered survival advantages by allowing individuals to take pleasure in the suffering of others, so long as it ensured individual chances of survival.

This, for instance, may explain why to this day violence, brutality, and domination are some of the most popular themes in TV dramas, films, or computer games. We find carthasis and familiarity in viewing such behaviours while not suffering them. Likewise, portrayls of gangsters and gangsterism are very common. Since gangster culture is akin to tribal culture in many ways. It could be that men in particular find much familiarity and catharsis in viewing gang-related behaviour on TV and in films. Interestingly sadistic behaviour has far less common appeal. Again, this is not surprising. In human history, it's not hard to imagine that aggression and violence were common responses to unjust tyranny, oppression, or as acts of survival, while sadistic behaviour may have been more readily punishable or expunged by group members.

The point still stands, sadistic behaviour is taking pleasure in another person's suffering not for the purposes of defeating, tyranny, oppression, or for survival. However, it's an open question, what the origins of sadism truly are - bullying and taking pleasure in others' suffering are both forms of sadism. Thus not only bullying, but behaviour like my own as a child needs to be vehemently confronted. I would argue this should be apart of the strategy of empowering victims, by nipping the sade of sadism squarely in the bum.

Parting thought…

I wish I could say that I saw or perceived a sense of justice in acts of bullying. I even found myself writing that I had. I had to edit and cut this piece several times after reflection. The cruel fact is that most bullying was simply domineering, oppressive, and sadistic. Boys just didn’t seem to care, so long as they weren’t the victim. Boys were sadistic to the core, including myself. We didn’t care how, or how much, or for what, another boy suffered. I was happy and found pleasure in the fact that it wasn’t me. Though the one vessel of hope here is that many times this sadistic pleasure I took was simply masked fear. I was pleased it wasn't me, rather than pleased it was the victim. This suggests that again part of the soultion lies in just how we empower victims.

See you in part 2…

Selected bibliography

Buss, David. M. (1995). "The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology" Basic Books.

Chang, Iris. (1997) "The Rape of Nanking" Basic Books.

Eldredge, John. (2001). "Wild At Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul" Thomas Nelson.

Greene, Robert. (2018). "The Laws of Human Nature" Viking Press.

Harari, Yuval Noah (2015) "Sapiens" Harper.

Johnson, Robert. A. (1974, 1989) - "He: Understanding Masculine Psychology" Harper and Row.

Johnson, Robert. A. (1991). "Owning Your Own Shadow" HarperSanFrancisco.

Peterson, Jordan (2018). "12 Rules for Life" Random House Canada.

Wright, Robert (1994) "The Moral Animal" Vintage Books.