Bullying
is a problem that has drawn increasing attention in recent years around the
world. It’s a problem that is considered
to have negative effects not only for the victims but also for the perpetrators
as well as for the innocent observers.
And it has many different manifestations. There is name calling, general teasing,
harassment, college hazing, spreading rumors, and physical violence among other
forms. With modern technology, we now have cyberbullying, where people can get
teased, harassed and threatened on the Internet.
Bullying
is different from old-fashioned expressions of aggression. Many of the old forms of aggression related
to defending a person’s honor (I am excluding here raiding parties and warfare for
economic purposes). With defense of
honor, the victim is perceived to have done the perpetrator wrong. In many cases, the wrong would be perceived
by modern people to be imaginary as in the case of witchcraft. But the structure of traditional aggression
is to hurt the victim because the victim has hurt the perpetrator. Basically, the perpetrator of the new
aggression wants to get even. Even in
the case of a natural disaster, if a supposed perpetrator can be connected to
it through witchcraft, the supposed victim of a part of the natural disaster
can use the premise of witchcraft as a vehicle that permits him to express his
potentially explosive emotions against the supposed perpetrator in a way that
allows him to express these emotions without metaphorically blowing himself up.
With
honor defense, the flowing aggression that is activated by all the organic
stimulation in a more traditional natural living environment, but remains
latent until a target is found, finds an outlet for release when a supposed
wrong is committed against the perpetrator of honor defense. So, in truth, honor defense serves two
purposes: the surface one of getting even, and the deeper one of finding a
focused safe outlet to release the explosive emotions that build up inside many
traditional people as a result of all the organic stimulation they absorb from
their more natural living environments.
Particularly
in more preliterate societies, people deal with their strong flowing blendable
continual emotions by turning a lot of situations where things go wrong into
situations of honor defense. Some
misfortune happens, and a person is found as a scapegoat and accused of having
created the harmful situation through witchcraft. In this situation, we would call the chain of
causation attributed to the supposed perpetrator a magical fabricated chain of
causation. But for preliterate people,
it is a way of applying some kind of coherent explanation to a situation that
they really don’t understand. And it is
also a way of releasing swirling internal aggressive emotions in a safe
societally permitted way. Honor defense
is a very important mechanism for regulating emotions not only in preliterate
society but in all traditional societies.
Perhaps in Western traditional societies the explanation of witchcraft
wouldn’t be resorted to as much in order to explain all uncomfortable
events. Perhaps honor defense wouldn’t
be resorted to as much, and more reasoned patient explanations would be
developed to explain some of these events.
But honor defense would still play an important role in helping to deal
with some kinds of uncertainty. In honor
defense, what is important is utilizing a target perpetrator – real or imagined
– who becomes a receptacle for the aggressive emotions of the supposed victim.
Bullying,
although it is an aggressive action against a person, represents a very
different situation of aggressive emotions and behavior. Interestingly enough, in bullying, the focus
is more on the process of aggression rather than the target of the
aggression. The victim has usually not
wronged the perpetrator in any way. So
the perpetrator is not trying to get even with the victim. Rather the victim of bullying is a vehicle
the perpetrator uses to try to stimulate himself out of the numbness he feels
as a result of living in modern technological society. It is a way of pulling himself out of the
experiential vacuum in which he is living in as a result of living a life that
is too frictionless and too mediated.
And aggression is a tension-pocket action that can shock the bully out
of his numbness.
The
bully picks someone who is weaker and more helpless than he is, because he is
not really looking for a fight. Rather
he is looking for an object and a situation where he can safely express his
repressed anger without having to worry about any meaningful retaliation. In fraternity hazing, the bully has the
additional safety of numbers. The
fraternity members actively haze a whole group of fraternity pledges, who, if
they tried to respond to the hazing in a negative way, would not be offered an
opportunity to become a member of the fraternity which they are so desirous to
join. But the fraternity members are as
much in need of the pledges as the pledges are in need of the members. And not simply because the members want the
pledges to provide continuity for the fraternity. Rather, apart from the fraternity parties,
which can get raucous, fraternity hazing provides some of the most intense
stimulating experiences that fraternity members can have during their years in
the fraternity. The pledges help to pull
the members out of the latter’s own sense of weakness and helplessness as a
result of their numbness.
But
in today’s world, much of what we would call bullying is done in an almost
anonymous way. Bullies can spread rumors
about their victims by word of mouth or on the Internet. Also, on the Internet, bullies can directly
tease and threaten their victims. All of
these cases are what we would call mediated bullying. One would think that this mediation would
take some of the pleasure out of the encounter of bullies with their victims. But bullies, at bottom, are people who are
very numb. And although they are using
the process of bullying as a vehicle to pull themselves out of their numbness,
many of them are going to be overwhelmed by the aggressive stimulation they
generate inside themselves. To such
people, doing their bullying through a relatively frictionless mediated pathway
like the Internet, tends to dampen the intensity of the anger stimulated inside
of them. In this way, they can absorb
the positive effects without being swallowed up by their anger. In other words, they need the intensity of
the anger they generate inside themselves in order to feel alive, but they have
difficulty absorbing it sometimes and that is when they find a way to weaken it
by filtering it.
But
filtered or unfiltered, bullying today is a conventionalized way for many
people to pull themselves out of their numbness, out of the experiential
vacuum, in order to feel alive. And we
will never find a way to significantly diminish its impact, unless we acknowledge
the effect of modern living environments on its prevalence today.
© 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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