Bring Bullying Back
Many forms of what we call bullying provide incentives for correcting undesirable social behavior.
In the past few years, really since social media became such a ubiquitous aspect of modern culture, I’ve observed a cascading failure of the components that make up the social contract between individuals in our free society.
The formal components have been eroding slowly over time as activist prosecutors at the county and district levels have repeatedly refused to enforce laws they’ve arbitrarily decided aren’t worth enforcing. The informal components have taken a far more precipitous decline. Things like social norms have been thrown into complete disarray.
Which is why I feel that a tried-and-true method of maintaining social norms needs to make a comeback: bullying.
In its worst form, bullying should be totally eradicated. When it’s used to mistreat someone for the sole purpose of ridicule or self aggrandizement, it doesn’t serve any benefit to society. However, there are a lot of behaviors we have come to label as “bullying” that are little more than an imperfect, yet effective, means of incentivizing socially acceptable behavior.
Our social system relies on the fear of being ostracized. It’s a hallmark of our ancient roots, back when being ostracized often resulted in death. The fear of being a social outcast kept people in check and within the bounds of social norms. We’ve broken from that tradition. To point out a person’s abnormal social behavior is now the activity being punished, rather than the abnormal social behavior.
Part of why bullying has been given such a bad name in the past few decades stems from the Columbine High School massacre in 1999; one of the earliest well-documented cases of an active shooting event. The incident was incorrectly reported by the media as an attack perpetrated by bullied individuals who wore trench coats to school everyday. The Trench Coat Mafia became a legitimate concern of school administrators across the country1.
All of this was wrong. The perpetrators of one of the most heinous acts of violence in a school in American history were actually moderately well-liked kids. They both had prom dates and enjoyed a circle of seemingly close friends, most of whom were beyond shocked to learn who was behind the gruesome attack.
If you’d like to learn the real story behind that attack, I encourage you to read Columbine by Dave Cullen.
In part because of this misplaced blame on the act of bullying, the eradication of bullying-like behavior in any and all forms has become a rallying point for many well-meaning parents, school administrators, and even corporations2. And they’ve largely succeeded.
Xbox Live chat rooms, for example, were a hotbed of “shit talking” in the early days of the platform. God forbid anyone with an Xbox Live account in the Wild West days of the internet tries to run for political office…
Now you can have your Xbox Live account banned for using a curse word, so long as someone becomes offended and reports you for it.
I’m not advocating for more cursing in online chat rooms. I’m simply pointing out that the mechanism for preventing bullying, the standard of which in this case appears to be that someone is made to feel uncomfortable, has become unreasonable. The bar has been set far too low.
All I’m really advocating for here is a little moderation. Rather than complete abstinence from so-called “bullying”, we should place this informal social check on a spectrum from “cruel” to “useful”. Forms of bullying reasonably deemed cruel should be corrected swiftly and severely. If the action can be useful, however, it should be left to its own devices.
The reasonableness standard has a long history in the legal world3, and I think it can be applied here as well.
Humans are inherently social creatures. If we deny that fact and continue to prevent the proliferation of an efficient means of correcting negative social behaviors, we will only see more of it. Below are but a few examples of what a lack of bullying in the past few years has provided us:
The officer falling off their horse is unfortunate, of course, and the longer you watch this video, the more strange behavior you will observe from the crowd. The person twerking in a Donald Duck costume, for instance, could have benefited from the corrective power of bullying long before they put on that outfit.
Complaining about the tough job market in a particular industry is reasonable. The audacity to air your failure to secure a job on social media is not. Being humbled earlier in life might have taught this young woman that not everyone will be sympathetic to the complaints of a college grad, especially if they never got that same opportunity in the first place.
The so-called “knock out game” is a direct result of American children being sheltered from the causes and effects of violent acts. Being bullied, or even being the bully, at a young age provides a means of understanding the negative outcomes of doing violent things to other people.
I know the topic of bullying can be challenging to discuss. The word has become so negatively charged over the last few decades that it’s automatically assumed to be a bad thing all the time. But if we really think hard on each of our upbringings, I’m sure we can identify how the challenges we overcame from this admittedly imperfect social mechanism provided the motivation necessary for many of us to succeed later in life.
It won’t always be a good thing. In the moment it’ll probably never be seen in a positive light. But I contend that the current environment wherein bullying faces a “zero tolerance” policy isn’t working all that well for us, and we’ve had quite a few years to see the obvious truth in that contention.
References
Margaritoff, M. (2024, April). What Was The Trench Coat Mafia? Inside This Infamous Columbine Myth. All That Is Interesting. https://allthatsinteresting.com/trench-coat-mafia
Stomp Out Bullying. (2024). STOMP Out Bullying™ Campaigns. Stomp Out Bullying. https://www.stompoutbullying.org/campaigns
Weaver, D. (2017, March). The Objective Reasonableness Standard: Glancing in the Mirror Before Criticizing Graham v. Connor. Lexipol. https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/objective-reasonableness-standard/
I embrace the dangerous position of agreeing you and the best parts of your argument. Figuring your way out of adolescence while dealing with bullying and fighting strengthens our character. Wise voices are saying the same, such as Abigail Schrier and Jonathan Haidt, including that this part of the tough business of growing up that have become too safe and easy. Nature has no use for tame tigers.