The Bully (Part 2)
Three bullies from the same Korean family.
There are two versions of ‘modern Korea’. One is ruled by the most autocratic dictatorship today - which makes Putinism look very amateurish - while the other has just elected a new President coming from the political party that had previously been in opposition. Two radically different systems developed, starting with the same circumstances and the same people. One Korea seems to have used Nineteen Eighty-Four as its guidebook, while the other started out with an authoritarian regime but evolved into an American-style liberal democracy. This situation has nothing to do with intrinsic ‘Korean’ proclivities. How can it? The same ethnic and historically extremely homogeneous people have gone very separate ways, like identical twins separated at birth.
One explanation of this bizarre and tragic siutuation is to see Korea not in isolation but as holistically connected to everything else going on in the world, and so to more or less random factors. Specifically, in 1945 Korea had the misfortune of being a colony of the defeated Japanese, and so was carved up by the two victorious forces: the Soviets and the Americans and allies. As a result of the Cold War an Iron Curtain descended across the 38 Parallel. Two nations were created. War ensued. No definitive conclusion to the war was achieved – neither side was wholly vanquished - and so the two rivals Koreas remain to this day. And so here I am, writing my blog near to where the Iron Curtain still remains drawn and looks like staying into the foreseeable future.
But chance factors also extend down from the macro to the micro level. Yes. Korea became a pawn in the Great Power’s struggle for world hegemony. But what happened was also due to individual players on the ground. Specifically, Korean leaders and their entourages. The first President of the Republic of Korea, Sygman Rhee, the American choice, was no friend to liberal democracy. Ostensibly in order to protect the Republic from North Korean aggression (In 1968, for example, North Korean commandos almost succeeded in assassination Park, making their incursion to within a few hundred meters of the presidential Blue House in central Seoul), the South Korean leader, the former army General Park Chung-hee (who had taken control of the state in 1960), suspended the constitution in 1972 declared martial law, and wrote a new constitution that gave him much increased executive power for life. The new constitution would remain in force until Park’s assassination (by his own bodyguard, not the North Koreans) during a military coup 1979, whereupon the military extended its powers of repression even further. In 1980, there was a popular uprising in the south-eastern city of Gwangju which was brutally put down, and most of the 1980s passed under authoritarian rule. However, finally, after the amendment to the constitution in 1987, a democratic presidential election was held for the first time, and since then, elections have been peacefully held every five years.
Why was this possible? Critics will say the United States engineered the semblance of liberal democracy, making South Korea into a compliant a vassal state. But this can’t be true. The level of genuine democracy here cannot be imposed either from outside or above, by fiat. That much we know from history. It must grow from within and below. Which isn’t to say, like some apologist for democracy, that democracy is somehow inevitable. Is certainly is not. Which is one very good reason why democracy needs to be well defended. North of the DMZ, a very different political situation occurred. Things froze into totalitarian place, and this was largely due to the odious bully Josef Stalin and the equally odious bully Kim Il sung and his two progeny. The bullies are certainly there in the Republic of Korea. But the Republic of Korea, like other liberal democracies, devised ways to hem them in, limit the damage they can do.
Steven Pinker marshals plenty of compelling evidence in books such as the better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) to show that history can be read as a narrative in which societies have become increasingly buttressed against the inevitably of zero-sum thinking by creating checks and balances to diminish the chances of a bully getting so much power that he or she can enslave us. This has happened at all levels of society, especially over the past fifty years.
At my grammar school for example, which i mentioned in my previous post on bullies. In the mid-1970s the headmaster of Eastbourne Grammar School changed, and the new headmaster arrived with an updated education philosophy in which the aim was no longer to instil the necessary body of learning through intimidating, and, more profoundly, did not see life as a zero-sum game. There was now enough for everyone. Admittedly, by this time I was sixteen, so I was no longer at the bottom of the bullying pecking-order. But I’m sure what I perceived was generally felt - even by the even-year-old squirts who made up the First Year. The ethos at my school went very quickly from the terroristic to the consensual. You could say it went from totalitarian state to liberal democracy in less than five years. That is no trivial change, and was largely down to the revolution is how people thought about society that happened in the sixties. Obviously, bullying did not disappear. But it was no longer institutionalized, and so could do less harm.
This same process has occurred on the level of nation-states. Look at Donald Trump. He’s almost a caricature of the bully. When he was a reality tv star doing The Apprentice, that was basically his role. And, yes, the show as a hit, because, yes, we enjoy watching bullies at work – as long as they’re bullying someone else. The zero-sum psychology is something like this: if I’m watching someone else getting bullies, then it’s not me. But when he was President of the United States, Trump the Bully - who was largely elected because he was a bully - found he was unable to do what he needs to do as a bully, which is intimidate the vulnerable and keep all the pie for himself. The United States Constitution got in his way. What does this tell us? Yes. I know. The United States is very far from perfect, but it has a political system that is obviously more able to stop bullies than, say, Russia’s. Indeed, all liberal democracies have this in-built capacity. This is real progress, and we should be able to celebrate.
Which leads me back to the point I’ve been making in previous posts: in our eagerness to show how far our liberal democracies are from perfection, we progressives spend a lot of energy exposing their imperfections. In fact, this is precisely one of the main reasons why liberal democracy is the least bad political system: it makes room for criticism and opposition. It knows that if you don’t have freedom of speech and diversity of opinion, you don’t have the ability to stop the bullies. We can’t get rid of them entirely, because they are an aspect of being human. But we can make them less able to freely bully, to bully without consequences. The deeper problem is how to ween us of our primitive admiration for bullies.
To do that, we would have to address a very deep predisposition.
A few years back I was disgusted to discover that my Korean wife’s sister-in-law, who lives in the USA, had voted for Trump. When I asked her why, she replied it was because he was “strong.”
If we want to get rid of the cult of the bully, our acceptance of being bullied, and our collusion with bullies, we will have to change the whole idea of what human ‘strength’ is.
Not easy!
Credits:
Kim photos: https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/kim-jong-un-kim-jong-il-kim-il-sung-why-are-all-north-korean-leaders-named-ki
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/