Bullies and Dominance

We will start with the bullies.

I have been analyzing bullying for the vast majority of my life, ever since I was first a victim of it in elementary school.

But for years, I couldn’t really get a grip on it because I was stuck in a total evil/total innocent binary when the truth is always somewhere in between. It was only when I started to see things in a broader and deeper way, including trying to see thing from the bully’s point of view, that I made any real progress.

Lately, I have been trying to integrate thoughts about status into my thinking. Like most liberal intellectual types and DEFINITELY like most nerds, I tend to be status blind. People are just people to me. Status signals are just one of the forms of social information that my brain interprets as static and disregards.

So I am just now getting around to putting social status and social dominance issues into the equation. Sadly, being ignorant of status does not make one immune to its powerful effects.

And here is the key for us intellectual types : intellect is power. When we follow our natural instinct to show off how smart we are, we are (largely unknowingly) challenging all the other students for social dominance. The socially intact people all get this, even though few of them could articulate it. But we social retards are accidentally throwing down the gauntlet… and then are surprised when someone picks it up.

That alone makes us socially “weird”. From the point of view of the socially normal, we constantly powerfully challenge others and lose, and to them, it’s like we are beating out head against the wall and complaining about the headaches.

And to make matters worse, we are clearly the sort of person the school system likes : the academically gifted. The teachers themselves tend to, if not like us, at least give clear signals that the system approves of us.

So we have the favour of both the authority figure (teacher) and the society in which we are operating (school), and do not struggle as hard with our studies as the average student to boot. Everything about us is a social challenge to others, and yet, being status blind and socially retarded, we are at the same time the people least capable of actually defending ourselves.

So we get socially trounced. All we can see from our literal mindset is people being mean to us for no reason. Without the ability to understand the social milieu around us, that’s the best interpretation available to us.

And I am not, of course, saying we deserve what happens to us. Nobody deserves the kind of abuse we get/have gotten from our peers. As always, I only seek to understand what is really going on.

The root problem is socialization, or possibly something that predates it. Somehow, developmentally, a choice is made to primarily focus on abstract reasoning skills and interpret the world through them, and while that leads to high academic performance, it makes us ignore or suppress the information from our social antennae. That’s too random, emotional, intuitive, and real to be reliable or even valid.

The most extreme examples of this, of course, would be the various points on the autism spectrum. These people have “chosen” (only in a developmental sense) to value the rational over the intuitive to such an extent that it severely hampers their ability to function in normal society at all. The necessary information might well be coming in, but like I said earlier, their minds tune that out as noise in order to better focus on abstract reasoning.

And the thing is, this is all done in total innocence. From the point of view of the socially ignorant person being bullied, they did absolutely nothing to provoke these social challenges that they inevitably lose. Nothing we do is intended as a challenge or a provocation or anything of the sort. We just seek the sort of approval we can get (from the teacher and the system) and are stunned by the apparent random cruelty of people.

No wonder so many of us end up as cynical misanthropes with a nearly nihilistic level of hate and mistrust for our fellow human beings. If you form your opinion of humanity on the playground, where apparently people are mean to you for no reason, you can only conclude that most people are evil.

I have always felt that, somehow, bullies are acting on a group emotion… that they are only the active component of a whole social dynamic that hates you. The constant unconscious social challenges emitted by nerds and other intellectual types provides the stimulus for that social dynamic.

But there is one more component to said dynamic : what our social programming tells us to do about weak leaders.

See, by sending out challenges but also showing ourselves to be social weak, we put ourselves in the position of the incompetent alpha, and there is no group for whom we have less sympathy than weak leaders.

The whole dynamic of social status competition is focused on producing strong leaders. Part of that is betas constantly looking for a chance to become alpha. This ensures that when the alpha becomes weak, there is a strong replacement.

This means, though, that we are programmed to be enraged by signs of weakness in leaders. This rage leaves no place for mercy. Weak leaders must be torn down.

The hardest form of empathy for us naked beach apes is empathy for our social superiors.

And there we are, stuck, without knowing it, acting out the role of the weak leader over and over again. Our intellect is a powerful social status signal, yet we don’t know how to defend and maintain our status… so the herd turns on us.

And because we are ignorant of the real mechanisms in play, it happens again and again and again.

Not sure how to fix this, but I expect early intervention has to play a part of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.