- Bullying (children) is being opposed by the Cathedral, touted as something to be eliminated from society.
- While the Cathedral is parasitic, it is not without purpose in its expenditure of narrative. Narrative is only expended upon unmaking elements that serve civilisation.
- Logically therefore, bullying serves some valuable purpose in society.
- Furthermore, what we term bullying is actually (at least) two separate forces at work. One is the action of groups — boyhood mannerbund — to exclude the unworthy from their group, which I will refer to as policing. The second is the action of damaged individuals — budding narcissists and psychopaths — against weakness, which I will refer to as predation.
- Policing is actually a demand to become worthy in exchange for admission to a group. It is primarily engaged in to protect the status of the group as a whole; boys who are a net negative to the group (and who lack a protector of value) are denied access. Status is as real a notion, if theoretically unfounded, amongst young boys as it is among men. I contend that it is policing that is the main target of the Cathedral.
- Predation by the damaged or ill-cultured is an entirely separate problem. There are individuals who by nature or nurture, gain internal satisfaction by causing harm to others. They will target the weak, or the strong in moments of weakness. They represent a threat to all, and in a well policed society, will be excluded to the benefit of society. If the situation is treatable, well and good. Else at some point, exile is their future. This biological form of ours does not always generate towards greatness, and ever presents our communities with the challenge to impose atrocity.
- Policing is a call to worthiness. Predation is a call to alertness. Both alertness and policing (and by this, worthiness) are thus to be encouraged, that the great may lift the less fortunate; that the community may grow stronger; that the eternal struggle against Gnon may not be discounted.
- Thus bullying (policing) should not be condemned, merely mitigated in its greatest extremes (though never to the effect of removing the drive to worthiness). Boyhood mannerbund are innately sensitive to the balance of scale and quality in the pursuit of status; loss of status should only be imposed for overreach, not for policing. In no case should status be conferred upon the victim.
- At the same time bullying (predation) should be ruthlessly opposed, as an example. Policing of predation by the greatest amongst the children is the ideal outcome; status should be actively conferred upon those children who actively police against predation.
- Observation: Cathedral utilisation of conflation of two different problems in the service of the destruction of civilisation confirmed.
END
I wonder how anti-cyber-bullying campaigns play into this. It seems likely that cyber bullying is more likely to be predation “for the lulz” and therefore not beneficial to society. However it also seems silly that cyber-bullying could be a real thing in the first place, because no rational person cares about the opinion of an anonymous troll.
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My understanding is that most ‘cyber-bullying’ is not via anonymous trolls but rather by known individuals using a different media. If there is an issue with it, it has to do with the conversation being completely unrestrained, in a manner in which most real life conversation is not.
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Excellent.
>Logically therefore, bullying serves some valuable purpose in society.
🙂 The mot juste!
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Heh. Thank you.
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Children are, generally speaking, crueler and more violent than adults. They’re small and they don’t typically have weapons, so their ability to harm each other is limited, but that doesn’t stop them from pushing each other around.
Much of parenting is really just trying to get kids to be less aggressive. (The idea that kids are “naturally good” is kind of bogus. I still haven’t forgotten the day my 2 yr old casually picked up a toy, walked over to his little brother, who’d just learned to sit up on his own, and whacked him on the head.)
But in the natural state, kids are surrounded by people older than themselves–older siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents–most of whom are keen on protecting them and teaching rules like “Don’t hit the baby!” (If anything is a social construct, it’s not being violent toward each other.) Each kid has their spot in this hierarchy, the kids at their own level they can play with, the kids beneath them whom they can boss around, and the older kids (and adults) who can boss them around, but in exchange protect them.
Modern schools and daycares, by contrast, put kids into environments with a whole bunch of their peers but very few people older or younger than themselves. They are deprived of the guidance and protection of their elders, and the place becomes a Hobbesian free-for-all. (Although results of course vary depending on which individual kids you happen to get.)
Anti-Bullying campaigns tend to be bullshit because the adults running them don’t understand bullying in the first place. They do idiotic things like try to convince kids that the kid with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair is actually just as much fun to play with as everyone else. Most kids who aren’t completely feral already know better than to torture a kid in a wheelchair and so will normally leave them alone, but they also know that those kids can’t do the same things as normal kids, and so their reaction to being fed obvious lies on the subject isn’t going to be good.
Anti-bullying campaigns tend to focus on lecturing the socially dominant kids on the evils of bullying, even though the vast majority of kids sincerely believe that they aren’t the bullies in the first place, instead of teaching the kids who get bullied how social dominance works and how to have better relationships with their peers. Kids who get bullied tend to keep getting bullied even when moved to different schools because they are behaving in certain ways that invite bullying. But when these kids are rejected by their own peers and they have no near-age role models willing to teach them how to behave (and the grownups are useless–they’re either at work all day and barely interacting with their kids, or they subscribe to cartoon visions of how the world operates anyway.)
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