The Bully (Part 1)

A still from the movie Class of 1984.

In my previous post I discussed what makes one person stand up to a leader or a tyrannical system, and other people – most - just try to stay out of harms way, or even to become facilitators and accomplices. In this post I want to think about the person who’s causing all the sorrow. It’s probably fear of the bully.

We all remember being bullied at school. I had the misfortune of going to all-boys grammar school in a small provincial seaside town in England in the 1970s that was founded on what might be called the Bully Principle, or maybe just ‘traditional educational values’. It was all about discipline enforced through playing endlessly, and often ingenuously in a sadist sort of way, on us children’s vulnerabilities. Eastbourne Grammar school in the early 1970s was intimidation and bullying from top to bottom.  The teachers (or many of them) did it, the Prefects did it, the Sub-Prefects did it, the older boys did it to the younger boys, and the bigger boys did it to the smaller boys of the same age. As a result, my school life from age 11 to sixteen was full of dread.

A bully must remind people on a regular basis that that’s what they are, which, as a typical dictionary definition has it, is ‘a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.’ But what exactly did these bullies at school want?  Power?  Prestige? Glamour? Status? Love? Attention? Revenge? I suppose, all of the above, which means they wanted what we all want to a greater or lesser extent but are willing to share with others, or to leave unobtained. The bully, by contrast, thinks there’s only one person who can have these things, and so they must make sure that the others don’t. And the best way to do that is by keeping them down and keeping them fearful.  Vulnerability is therefore perceived by a bully as a sign that someone is inherently weak and  inferior, and if they are shown to be weak and inferior, they cannot be a threat.

Most people – let’s say the Russian populace who are not either part of the state’s organs of repression nor active protesters, like Marina Ovsyannikova whom I discussed in my previous post, the tv news editor who ‘invaded’ the news programme she worked for recently, and held up a banner saying the Russian people should not believe the propaganda – are basically OK with the limited power they can obtain by conforming with the status quo, keeping out of trouble, cooperating with others, and having a secure and good enough time. Some are OK with colluding with the bullies so that they won’t get bullied themselves, or with doing some minor bullying themselves. But a few hard cases think they can only have enough power if others don’t have any. This is because they think there just isn’t enough to go round. In other words, bullying is a zero-sum game. It’s winner takes all.

Which explains Putin, to some extent.

***

George Orwell, 1917. shortly after leaving St. Cyprian’s in Eastbourne.

I went to school in the same town as George Orwell, who was at a Prep School named St. Cyprians before going on to Wellington and Eton. This school had ceased to exist by the 1970s, but when I was recently back in my hometown I noticed for the first time a plaque marking the place where it once was.  At St. Cyprians, Orwell said he was often bullied. As a young adult, between 1922 and 1927, he was a member of the Imperial Police in Burma.  There, he had plenty more chances to witness officially sanctioned bullying, and to resist the temptation to do it himself.  

In an article Orwell wrote for Tribune, published on November 29, 1946, he reflected on the topic of bullying, which, in a sense, is his fundamental theme:

It is commonly assumed that what human beings want is to be comfortable.  Well, we now have it in our power to be comfortable, as our ancestors had not.  Nature may occasionally hit back with an earthquake or a cyclone, but by and large she is beaten.  And yet exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another.  Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is ruled by secret police forces.  Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before.  The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about.

He concluded:

The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth.  This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food.  Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling.  And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes:  What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?  If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper.

This is an excellent question to ask. “What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?”  Why is “pure power” so appealing? Is modern life really especially prone to idolizing ‘pure power’, thereby also idolizing those who achieve and maintain it? Is Nietzsche’s vision of the master/slave relationship, and his admiration for the master (which the Nazis found especially appealing) a prognosis of human nature in general, or was he diagnosing the symptoms of a specifically modern sickness, as Orwell suggests? Are we talking about a fundamental human weakness for power, and of a weakness of the weak for the powerful who oppress them, or some modern perversion?  

Of course, as Nietzsche knew very well, it’s misleading to talk about ‘human nature’ as if it’s  something fixed and essential. We are socially constructed. The raw material of our biological nature places limits on the range of this construction, but it doesn’t fully determine what we end up being. There’s a kind of feedback loop in which a society reinforces certain preferential traits, and often these are very far removed from what Evolution has in mind. Think of religion and ideology. These do not simply mirror the apparently pristine state of human nature. They are social constructions that feed on themselves, and this leads to weird and grotesque versions of what ‘human nature’ is. Take the God of the Old Testament, for instance. He’s certainly not something that Evolutionary theory would expect to appear.  Or, take Kimilsungism-kimjongilism, the reigning creed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…….

So, is Orwell correct in thinking that modern society is especially prone to idolizing the bully? It must have looked like that in 1946. But surely less so in 1946 than in 1940. After all, the Allies had just defeated Hitler, the ace bully on the Western block. True, Stalin was very much still there. In fact, the Cold War was just getting under way, and China was about to get its very own super-bully. But shouldn’t the fact that an alliance of liberal democracies thoroughly defeated totalitarian Germany and Japan - with, it has to be added, quite a lot of help from Stalinist Russia - suggest that things were not as bleak as Orwell thought, certainly not as bleak as the novel he was soon to write, Nineteen Eighty-Four, makes out: a dystopian vision captured by the harrowing words of O’Brian: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”? If this is really true, then there is surely no hope at all that we can successfully oppose the Bully Principle, or at least minimize the damage done.  

There are plenty of examples from the present day to suggest Orwell is correct. Russia, for instance.

And yet…..

History shows that humans have always grudgingly admired might. After all, in less civilized times, ‘might was right,’ and you’d have been dumb not to respect it. And old habits die slowly. Very slowly. Over millennia.

The point Orwell is making, however, it that this behaviour, or more significantly, people’s respect for it, may have made sound if regrettable sense in the past, but in modern times had become much less essential, and therefore a seeming anomaly. Orwell couldn’t understand why it is that a society that has managed to gain such secure levels of comfort and control over nature would still wants to idolize the archaic bully.

Maybe the cult of the bully is a negative consequence of the Enlightenment’s declaration that everyone is born free and equal. Ideally, this is a wonderful vision of social justice in the future. But it could also be a recipe for social injustice. It could make someone think that life really is a zero-sum game. If there are no traditional hierarchies serving as entrenched checks and balances, then it really is a case of if you don’t stop others having the pie there won’t be any left. The individual within a competitive meritocratic system  sees a level playing field in which the most ruthless are the winners.

***

The majority of people do not “habitually seek to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.” After all, it’s hard work, and likely to end in tears – the bully’s own, as well as the vulnerable’s  – because if bullying is a zero-sum game, then logically speaking, it’s only a matter of time before someone else grabs your pie.

There are many ways to theorize or explain why some people think life is just winners and losers. Psychologists point to the childhood of a bully, and argue that a cruel father or mother, or cruel siblings or relatives, or the wrong choice of friend, or sadistic teachers, set in train the compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience of being powerless and dealing with it in the same way that you were once dealt with. Sociologists refer to environmental  conditions of deprivation or alienation, or conditions that in one way or another encourage bullying. But there is no overarching explanation for why bullies are bullies in general, or of why a few people perceive powerlessness as caused by a finite amount of  a resource that is non-shareable.

But with a Russian arch bully currently grabbing headlines, one might feel like asking if there is something specifically about Russians - or certain peoples - that makes them prone to idolize bully-types? It’s a risky question, as it suggests there’s an essential ‘Russian-ness’ to be analyzed. But there isn’t. Peoples’ societies evolve. For example, none of the liberal democracies have always been liberal democracies, of course. The places where they are now more or less well established were previously ruled by fairly freely-operating bullies: absolute monarchs, for instance.

Sources:

George Orwell, ‘The Impulse to Bully Others’, Tribune, 29 November 1946. http://alexpeak.com/twr/titbo/

‘Class of 1984’ photo: https://reelrundown.com/movies/The-Top-10-Best-High-School-Gang-Films

Orwell photo: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/engelsineastbourne/2020/11/16/george-orwell-and-st-cyprians-school/