http://nowiknow.com/the-aquarium-that-turned-a-blind-eye-toward-bullies/
A hundred years ago, the word "bully" most often referred to a young man. It was often spoken with approval. "Bully beef" was marketed as a better grade than ordinary steers' beef. Theodore Roosevelt used "bully" as a general term of praise like "swell" or "fine." The popular song about "The Bully of the Town" expressed an intention to challenge the guy for leadership of a (not necessarily criminal) gang; fighting for dominance seems to have been one of the things guys in their teens and twenties were expected to do, after work, along with playing sports and, if they were lucky, tinkering with cars.
As people became more concerned that fighting with their friends was more likely to make young men violent and abusive than to make them good soldiers, the meaning of "bully" went through the process linguists call pejoration. It was more often applied to little boys than to young men. By the 1970s, most of us had a mental image of a "bully" as an eight-year-old boy who beats up five-year-old boys.
Then in the 1990s more attention was paid to the subtler ways girls (and older, smarter boys) make their schoolmates miserable, not usually by beating them up, but by leaving them out of things, laughing at unexplained jokes in a way that makes the people who are left out think they're the joke, and general verbal abuse. Yes, girls could be bullies too.
And the late-blooming guys with glasses who hung out in the computer lab? In the Information Age, they could do some serious bullying. College guys might laugh at the gawky nearsighted fellow who tripped over his fast-growing feet but three years later, when he went to work for the IRS, guess whose taxes were next to be audited.
For, no surprise, adults do not outgrow bullying; they gain access to more sophisticated ways to do it. Empire-building is the ultimate form of bullying. Prejudice and discrimination, protectionist legislation, censorship, hostile gossip, and other social abuses are the usual ways adults continue the bullying behavior they learned in primary school.
Socialist politics is a form of bullying. Socialists want to make people share their stuff! They'll "nationalize" it and "redistribute" it--their way! Yarrayarrayarrrrr! Socialist governments can come to exist when very nice, peaceable, neighborly people agree to let somebody plan their lives for them. That's happened in small independent communities, and occasionally even in small countries, when conditions were just right. Swedish people, who had a very long history of communitarian practice anyway, chose to set up their own form of national socialism as an answer to the uglier kinds of national socialism stronger countries were threatening to inflict on them. It didn't make them a strong enough, rich enough, or large enough nation to stand up to the huge Russian army or the fierce German one, but it did keep people from falling for the idea that German-style or Russian-style socialism was what they needed, and it won the sympathy of other countries that helped Sweden avoid being absorbed into the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. Sweden has become poorer in some ways by adopting Swedish-style socialism, but it has remained intact. This has made Sweden the wonder of the world. In other countries, in order to last very long, socialist governments have become bullies and tyrants...or else they've quietly abandoned their socialist ideals.
People in other countries have wished for a long time that their countries could be more like pacifist Switzerland, and in the twentieth century they started wishing their countries could be more like almost-successfully socialist Sweden. I don't believe that can happen. What those countries have in common is that they're small, with geographical conditions that have rigorously selected for a small, sparse population who have more or less chosen to be there as part of a large voluntary community. Sweden was ethnically homogeneous into the late twentieth century, while Switzerland is so heterogeneous they've never even agreed on a single national language, so blondness is not the key factor. Brutal winter weather probably is a factor. Sparse population is probably the most important factor. In order for a nation to function as a voluntary community people probably have to be spread out widely enough for thoughts like "Who cares if the people in the next town down the road want to speak a different language? If we ever need to talk to them, we'll find a way" to become commonplace. I do not imagine this happening in any English-speaking country.
The political opposite of bullying is libertarian politics. There are different schools of libertarian thought, and the Libertarian Party, in the United States, has failed to grow because it's failed to unify around a consensus among those schools. Libertarians should be people who can agree to disagree about economic plans, religious beliefs or the lack of them, fashions, manners, etc.; this agreement to disagree can make it hard to rally behind a candidate. My libertarian thought is probably closest to Jim Babka's ideals of "complete nonviolence" and "voluntary-ism."
Libertarians realize that, even if you and I think Billy ought to share his stuff, the only way we can make Billy share his stuff is to become a bigger, meaner bully than he is. That's not good for us, it's not good for the little brother who wants to use Billy's crayons, and--badly though Billy might need a good whack on the seat of the pants--it's not really even good for Billy. So what we can do, instead, is organize a game that everyone else will want to play, and when Billy wants to play, too, we can tell him he has to choose to share his crayons in order to join our game. We have to respect his freedom of choice. We have to push ourselves to be smarter leaders than Billy, rather than meaner bullies. If we're smart leaders who want for some reason to surround ourselves with a voluntary community that agree to be guided by socialist or communist ideals, we can organize one--but we have to limit membership to people who want to be part of our community.
These days we hear a lot of candidates for office promising, in one way or another, "Give the U.S. federal government, or the U.N. as a global government, total control of all the money and we'll make everybody happier." Right-wing advocates of government expansion openly say they want more power to enforce stricter laws at gun-point. Left-wing advocates of government expansion talk about wanting more money to help people and more power to rescue people, but since they're talking about bigger government, what they mean is more power to enforce stricter laws at gun-point. The helping and sharing parts sound good, but that's not the way they're going to happen.
But expanding the powers of government, getting rid of that scary, "chaotic" democracy where people are responsible for their own choices and the bullies have no way to predict what they might do, is only one way adults extend bullying behavior into the adult social world. Nagging, gossipping, chattering, clamoring for dress codes or censorship...any time we try to get behind people and push them to do what we want, rather than honestly asking them to do what we want (and respecting their right to tell us the rewards we offer aren't enough to get them to do it), we're trying to be bullies.
For those true extroverts who become anxious when they're not in full control of someone else's attention, the temptation to be a bully is constant and needs to be constantly repressed. "I was just being friendly. I just want to talk to people. How can you be around other people and not want to talk to them?" The answer to this question, which is probably a sincere one, is "By respecting their right to lead their own lives without my interference." This concept probably needs to be pounded into the heads of little extroverts from the day they first toddle toward another toddler, squawking for attention. If those other people have anything close to normal lives and levels of competence, it's almost certain that they have at least fifty other things that they believe need more of their attention than you or I do.
Those of us who've developed enough of a talent and enough of a conscience to be called introverts don't usually find it difficult to imagine that other people have their own lives but we may find it difficult to imagine that, because they have lives, other people may not have learned as much about something as we have. In yesterday's Glyphosate Awareness chat I was accused of "condescending" to someone who has the Twitter profile of an ignorant party-line left-winger, who tweeted something about being anti-glyphosate but not thinking it was something to be greatly concerned about. Whether or not the accusation was part of the ugly social bullying pattern that's become common among young leftists, the "Follow my party line exactly or I'll call you a nasty name," is irrelevant because the fact is that I do feel "condescending" toward people who've been ignoring the harm glyphosate's done to people in the last eleven years. More than that, I'm tempted to feel like a martyred saint when I only talk down to them, rather than demanding that their death by torture begin today. I'm not immune to all temptation to engage in social bullying.
This web site, once again, affirms an anti-bullying position, and asks readers to consider when and how we may be tempted to engage in some form of bullying.
Do we try to shove our message in front of people with clickbait e-mail headers ("You have to open this e-mail to find out what it's about!"), screen-hogging ads that demand that readers do something about the ad in order to get on with reading the story, efforts to override people's right to ignore us if they're not interested in the contents of our web sites? This web site has never done those things but many otherwise excellent web sites do them.
Do we demand that people we pass by on the street, or even wait on in the workplace, interrupt their thoughts or even their conversation to indulge us in "greeting" behavior--even when these "greetings" are not redeeming themselves by opening real conversations? The function of words like "Hello, how are you" is to entrain the brains of people who have something of substance to say to each other. Some of us are tempted to subvert "greetings" into grown-up versions of a toddler's squawks and screams for attention.
Do we spew hate at people with whom we disagree? Donald Trump obviously has no problem with people calling him a clown. Barack Obama probably feels pain when people call him a token, but he's obviously learned to cope with it. And so on through the list of nastier insults this web site's policy bars repeating. As long as we're not actually talking to either one of them I suppose the great American tradition of insulting the President does less harm than other things people might say. But the partisan political cyberbullying at some forums and social sites does more harm than people realize...to the people who indulge in it, and to the causes they support. I've got through more than fifty years without feeling any desire to put on a red hat, even upon the occasion of reaching the qualifying age for membership in the Red Hat Society (old ladies who recognize that life is too short to put off doing the things we want to do), but ever since a Democrat blogger whined that seeing Trump supporters' red hats aggravates her emotional problems, I've had an irrational urge to go out and buy a Trump hat. And I didn't even vote for Trump. The hatespews, the name-calling and howls for censorship, need to stop before they make it impossible for any of us to support any party.
Well, this is long enough for a status update. On to the next item on the list...
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