The Bully On The Playground
Picture, if you will, children on a playground. It could be any playground, anywhere. One of the children selects another. This is not for a game, at least not for anything we'd like to think of as a game. No, this child is looking for an outcast. He's looking for easy prey. He's wants something, power, and he's sure that abusing this other child will get it for him.
He teases the other child. He intimidates him. He pushes him. Then, perhaps, he hits his victim, knocking him to the ground. It is, for the bully, a game of escalation.
We're all familiar with this game. We've all played it, willingly or not. In some way we all still play it everyday. We may not choose to think of it as bullying, but step back far enough and the pattern emerges, whole or in part.
We don't want to think of what we're seeing as "bullying". The word carries so much weight from childhood trauma, merely hearing it spoken exhausts us in ways we'd rather not think about. The exhaustion, of course, comes from not wanting to think about it, from denying our own weakness and vulnerability. It is, therefore, the most accurate and appropriate word to use, for it describes a drama familiar to each and every one of us, one in which each of us has found and still finds a role to play.
For the risk averse among us, which is the vast majority, the role we find is that of audience. The part is to watch the action and to be seen watching. We are, so far as we are willing to recognize, neither bully nor victim, neither predator nor prey. We are bystanders, complicit in everything we see - and choose not to see - and aiding both predator and prey in turn.
At first, we aid the bully. This is natural. Power is attractive, and bullies collect power. To be in the bully's favor therefore seems to promise protection and survival. The victim, already weak in our eyes and offering no promise for our future, serves as a buffer between the selfish aggression of the bully and ourselves. As long as the victim remains strong enough to serve as a buffer - "viable" might be another word for it - we will not help him. The bully, using his audience's inaction as a gauge, then escalates his aggression.
And then the cycle repeats.
When the bully has grown so strong and the victim so weak that we, the crowd watching, begin to recognize the threat posed to ourselves, then and only then will they intervene on behalf of the victim. Our own selfishness, as defensive as the bully's is aggressive, dominates our decision making. It is how we, the majority, survive.
This is not to say we are lost to our own selfishness. There are and always will be those willing to protect the victim sooner, those willing to risk something of themselves for another they may not even know, but such defensive selflessness is rare, and they are rarely, if ever, capable of defending others on their own. They need the crowd, those watching and safely keeping their distance, and the crowd knows this. Just as the bully uses the selfish, risk averse crowd to gauge what he can get away with and for how long, so too do they use the warnings and urgings of the selfless to gauge how much more abuse they can allow and how much longer before they must recognize that the greater, long term risk, the one posed by the bully, is what they really need to fear.
The selfless among us often endure lives of lonely frustration, tempted towards rash even violent behavior by hopes of instant gratification. That temptation is, of course, the same aggressive selfishness driving the bully, which is why those that give into it fail. Short term thinking always will when the problem is long term.
This is the pattern, beginning with the bully engaging his victim and ending with the crowd finally stopping the bully. If you step back far enough to see it in its entirety, you notice that it isn't limited to children on the playground. We can, in fact, find this pattern at the heart of all behavior, both social and physical. It describes every decision we make regarding resources and survival, about acquiring anything, holding onto it, and losing it. It describes how we make, and more often than not resist making, decisions.
We have, in some wishful attempt to keep it at a safe distance from ourselves and those we love, relegated bullying to a childhood condition, as though we do not witness bullying in the workplace, or in our homes, or in our neighborhoods, or in Washington, or on Wall Street, or in Syria, or the Eurozone, or at the United Nations, as though trying to call what we see by different names changes what it is and what it does. The pattern is everywhere. It will always be everywhere. There is no controlling it.
And that isn't such a bad thing.
As individuals, in groups, and as a species we use this pattern to test our ever-changing environment and to figure out how to adapt to it. We do this, to our great shock, by making mistakes. When we fail - and boy do we ever fail - we learn. Well, those of us left after the failure. This is how we have established ourselves as arguably the dominant social species on this planet: we fail and learn collectively, and we do so better than any of the others.
And that's why this pattern is so important. In learning to recognize it, we can learn to anticipate it and take action to mitigate its worst effects. We can, as we have done with so many other threats, cultivate an immune response. We've done it already with many former social and cultural ills. There's no reason to believe that a species that has evolved so far and so well, that has adapted to and changed its environment so well, can't and won't continue to do so. Will we make mistakes? Count on it. Will we learn? Always, when we can no longer afford not to.
And then the cycle repeats.
- Daniel Ward