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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28302 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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For the first time in my life, I'm starting to think we need childhood bullying. I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies. It's like these people don't actually know what it's like to be on the other end. If they did, wouldn't they be more sympathetic?

So, what if we need childhood bullying to prevent adulthood bullying? Perhaps people need to learn at a young age how it feels to be a victim so they don't become the victimizer as an adult?

Of course, maybe being mistreated doesn't cause people to sympathize with others who are mistreated. But I've never seen anyone make this argument, at least prescriptively, so I figured I should, so I can see how people would argue against it.

There’s still bullying, it’s just that it’s backed up by the teacher and they don’t call it bullying.

I think the main thing is that kids need practice growing up in a social environment where there isn’t an outside authority figure you can ask to intervene. They need to learn that they have agency to alter both themselves and their social environment. A lot of online discourse, both from the left and increasingly from the right, has this flavor of learned helplessness, which ends up making people depressed and also craving some authority figure to fix things for them.

Then the problem is the only people willing to step up and be authority figures are the psychos who were immune to the learned helplessness training anyway.

I think the main thing is that kids need practice growing up in a social environment where there isn’t an outside authority figure you can ask to intervene. They need to learn that they have agency to alter both themselves and their social environment.

Schools and bullying don't teach that. They teach the opposite; that the unpopular can be bullied, and if they fight back not only will they be hurt by the bully but they will be punished by the authority figures who were looking the other way when they were just being bullied without fighting back.

That said, I don't think that has any wider implications for society- they all grow up, and naturally become enlightened and tolerant of others like all good adults with those fully-developed brains do.
It's all just a bunch of kids on middle school campuses, nothing to worry about.

I honestly cannot tell whether this is serious or sarcasm. Care to clarify?

There's a lot of assumptions here - that bullying is something that happens to everyone (rather that some kids being on the receiving end), that people who bully or get bullied learn that bullying is wrong. It could be that people who get bullied come to believe that bullying is normal or acceptable.

If you're talking about social bullying, e.g. kids calling each other names, excluding each other, talking behind each others' backs, etc. then that's never gone away and never will.

If you're talking about physical bullying, e.g. kids punching each other, that certainly has gone away mostly but I'd say that's a good thing. A small amount can be neutral or maybe plausibly beneficial in some circumstances, but it's usually overwhelmingly a bad idea to try to teach kids through uncontrolled physical harm. There's a reason most parenting guides say "don't beat your kids". It really screws them up.

That said, I presume this is in regards to things like "safe spaces", cancel culture, "crybullies", etc. Those aren't the result of a lack of bullying, but rather they come from women gaining political power. Hanania has a good overview of this. Women prioritize maintaining social harmony (not hurting people's feelings) over factual accuracy more than men do, evidenced by women consistently scoring much higher in agreeableness than men. Additionally, some women resort to crying (or claiming "abuse", or whatever else) when their points are disproven in an attempt to win the argument anyways. This is the female equivalent of a man losing the argument and resorting to physical violence, but whereas society has had millennia to come up with ways to deal with renegade males' outbursts, it is wholly unprepared to deal with the female equivalent.

There's a reason most parenting guides say "don't beat your kids". It really screws them up

Do you have any sources on this which attempt to control for the causation possibly running in the other direction? I.e. low-quality children simply more likely to be beaten.

IIRC the usual attempt to adjust for that is to look at the outcomes for children born before and after a locality banned corporal punishment, which has an entirely different set of confounders than ‘little Johnny got beaten by his teachers for being bad and then went off to jail as an adult for being bad’.

I'm a huge fan of childhood bullying, I would not be nearly as tolerable a person were it not for bullies rounding out my rough edges

Trying really hard to out-contrarian the folks who think that mile time would be a better filter for IQ than college admissions, huh?

There are a billion second-order arguments for and against any conceivable policy. If you're going to posit meaningful indirect effects of policy changes you're going to need to bring some kind of evidence to the table to make it interesting. Otherwise why should I take this any more seriously than a recommendation to let kids steal more (so would-be thieves understand that stealing is mean), or that giving money to poor people makes them worse off (because it makes them dependent on welfare)?

Without evidence, I'm inclined to KISS: the main effect of allowing kids to bully each other is more kids suffering under bullying. This is bad, so we shouldn't let kids bully each other.

I got some very intrigued responses, so my goal was accomplished. It hadn't occurred to me that conventional childhood bullying is still around. But as I just said in another comment: what does it look like now? I was targeted because people thought I was gay, but I realize now that that was just their way of articulating that I was autistic. Using sexuality as an excuse isn't kosher anymore, and I doubt kids are politically aware enough to think of calling each other Nazis or chuds.

This seems to tie in with my observation that if something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims from him about the opposite are concern trolling or motivated reasoning. That's a subcase of second order effects.

We could combine them: 1) Be skeptical of second order effects; 2) In particular, be skeptical of second order effects when the first order effect helps your opponent, but he claims that the second order effect helps you. Like Scott's post that people on the right shouldn't vote for Trump because that actually helps the left.

It might help if people realize how fun bullying is, so they don't confuse with righteousness. I've bullied and been bullied. Obviously the latter is unpleasant. But being superior to other people is fun, hating and interfering with them is a great group-building activity.

Having similarly been on both ends, I think it would be a great thing for discourse if more people had the self awareness to connect the visceral pleasure of “punching up” on twitter to the feeling they had when tormenting some poor child in the playground.

People on this forum have written about the difference between homeless and homeless.

Bullying is similar.

If by "bullying", you mean the rough and tumble nature of normal male play, then I suppose there is a point.

If by "bullying" you mean the scenario where one child is relentlessly picked on by nearly all the other children, then no, we don't need that. That would be like saying we need more kids molested so that they understand that rape is bad. Children's lives and subjective experiences have value. To subject a child to intense bullying is one of the worst things that can happen to them. Any theoretical gain in empathy as a result would pale in comparison to the immense harm.

I’ve long thought small amounts of bullying are useful. Helps you learn how to deal with adversity and not take yourself too seriously.

The problem is the adult figure needs judgement—when is the bullying small enough that the benefit outweighs the cost.

The biggest jackasses I've known were always people who's dads were cops.

The other students were afraid to punch them in the face in high school when they deserved it, and it's difficult to do that in a workplace as an adult.

Being a victim of child sexual abuse is a “strong predictor” of becoming a perpetrator in adulthood, at least for males. Source. Another lit survey was a bit more nuanced. Maybe encouraging other types of abuse is bad, too?

Historically, societies with extreme childhood trauma were not known for generating stable, productive adults. Exhibit A. They were pretty good at oppressing the slave classes, though.

Presumably OP thinks of 'kids angrily wrestling on the playground' or 'kids excluding / insulting / (maybe) lightly roughing up other kids who do dumb or antisocial things' as bullying, rather than child sexual abuse. Taking the term 'abuse', whose imagined connotations come from, variously, rape with a penis, physical beating to the point of breaking bones, and intentional starvation of children - and using the (reasonable) intuition and evidence that that's harmful for children to yell at or fight with each other is unproductive. Using terms like 'abuse' or 'racism' in this way is prevalent, and almost never useful imo. It is partially OP's fault for not at all characterizing what he meant by 'bullying' and instead posting a common rdrama rant.

That effect is strongly subject to genetic confounding, most child-abuse victims inherit the genes of a child abuser or at least the relative of a child abuser. Neither of your links take that into account, so they don't tell us anything about causation. I don't know if there's any studies on the "cycle of abuse" which account for genetic confounding, but here is one on a related factor:

The Origins of Cognitive Deficits in Victimized Children: Implications for Neuroscientists and Clinicians

Individuals exposed to childhood victimization had pervasive impairments in clinically relevant cognitive functions, including general intelligence, executive function, processing speed, memory, perceptual reasoning, and verbal comprehension in adolescence and adulthood. However, the observed cognitive deficits in victimized individuals were largely explained by cognitive deficits that predated childhood victimization and by confounding genetic and environmental risks.

I don't see any reason to expect that all people subject to childhood bullying will have a uniform reaction to it. Surely some people subject to it will come away more empathetic for people in symmetric situations. Undoubtedly others will come away thinking such behavior is normal and appropriate, the only problem is to make sure you are not the one on the receiving end.

There's also something of a question of the sustainability of this practice. Say we have cohort C_0, whom all are bullied as children. As a result of this bullying they all sympathize with the victims of bullying and will not bully another person. Where do we get the people to bully some future cohort C_1, so they will develop the same sympathy? Do we teach the people in C_0 that, actually, they need to bully the people in C_1 because the bullying is ultimately for the good of the people in C_1? So childhood bullying is Good Actually? That seems like quite the opposite of the message we wanted to send!

While I am not the biggest fan of arguments about how people need to be bullied more, I take issue with your assumption that

As a result of this bullying they all sympathize with the victims of bullying and will not bully another person.

This doesn’t match my model of how “bullying” and related behavior works. Otherwise, for instance, no frats would have hazing rituals for the pledges, because after the first pledge class joined the frat, they’d all sympathize with the next pledge class and swear never to put them through what they themselves went through. More generally, cf. theories about the “cycle of abuse”.

This doesn’t match my model of how “bullying” and related behavior works. Otherwise, for instance, no frats would have hazing rituals for the pledges, because after the first pledge class joined the frat, they’d all sympathize with the next pledge class and swear never to put them through what they themselves went through.

One of the reasons why frat hazing is so stable is that there's an intermediate stage when you're a sophomore or a junior and expected to participate in the ritual as a hazer. Since the conscription to the Russian army was changed from 24 months to just twelve, I've heard of some cases when hazing was successfully stopped in specific companies by sufficiently motivated soldiers, usually those drafted as undergrads: with just two drafts a year you basically jump from a bottom bitch straight to a top dog, and you get to write your own rules if you can sway the rest of your draft.

The fact that hazing still exists in the rest of the army is a telling sign that the "cycle of abuse" is real, though. Power is delicious.

I agree, I was adopting the assumption of the OP I was replying to for the purpose of illustrating the issue of perpetuating the model. I think frats and related hazing are excellent examples for "some people who are bullied come to see it as normal behavior to inflict on others."

I disagree with your premise that childhood bullying is less than before. Bullying is a universal feature of children's culture (and arguably, human culture) where low status outsiders are ritually demeaned and excluded by the mainstream. If violence is allowed, violence will be used; if not, the bullying will express in other ways. It's just that the people you think should be bullied are no longer outsiders; they are the mainstream, doing the bullying.

That makes sense. I don't even know what kind of bullying kids do these days. I haven't been bullied by classmates in a school environment since.. the 2010-2011 school year, before the Great Awokening.

If kids can't call each other fags or retards anymore, what do they say?

My impression from talking to older people is that the severity of, and violence involved in, school bullying has declined significantly over the past hundred years. I'm not super confident in that, but it'd make sense as part of a general intentional move away from things that seem to be harmful and coercive. E.g. really old people talk about parents and teachers harshly physically punishing children and students, that doesn't happen anymore.

the severity of, and violence involved in, school bullying has declined significantly over the past hundred years

In our majestic modern enlightenment, the law prevents both boy and girl from bullying in ways that only boys are sociobiologically suited to.

school bullying has declined significantly over the past hundred years

Yeah, now it's just "culture war".

My impression from talking to older people is that the severity of, and violence involved in, school bullying has declined significantly over the past hundred years.

Like @jeroboam, I suspect there's a important difference in the way we're using the word "bullying". Let me share an anecdote from Rachel Simmon's Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls which I got via Joyce Benenson's book on male v. female friendship.

Brianna and Mackenzie were the queen bees, and they presided over the seventh grade. Brianna was the prettiest, Mackenzie the best at sports. Their favorite hobby was having a boyfriend. Jenny [a transfer student] wasn’t really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.

She had barely introduced herself when Brianna and Mackenzie gave her a code name and started calling her Harriet the Hairy Whore. They told everyone Jenny was hooking up with the boys in the woods behind the soccer field. Jenny knew that being called a slut was the worst thing in the world, no matter where you lived. No one was even kissing yet. It was the lowest of the low.

Brianna and Mackenzie started a club called Hate Harriet the Hore Incorporated. They got every girl to join except two who didn’t care. All the members had to walk by Jenny in the hallway and say “Hhiiiiiii...”

They made a long sighing noise to make sure she knew they were sounding out the initials of the club: HHHI. Usually two or more girls would say it and then look at each other and laugh. Sometimes they couldn’t even say the whole thing, they were laughing so hard. It seemed like Mackenzie and Brianna had suddenly made it their goal in life to ruin her.

[...]

There was no way she’d tell her mother, and certainly not her father. She felt nauseous just thinking about telling her parents she was such a reject.

Every day was an endless battle. She was exhausted trying not to cry, stiffening her body against the hallway attacks, sitting through lunch after lunch alone. There was no one else to be friends with in the grade because everyone, the few that there were, was against her.

One night Jenny’s sadness left no room for her fear, and she picked up the phone. Jenny called Brianna, Mackenzie, and a few other girls. She asked each of them, “Why do you hate me?” They denied everything.

“But why are you doing the Hate Harriet the Hore club?” she pleaded.

Their voices were light and sweet. “We don’t have a Hate Harriet the Hore club!” each one assured her, as though they were telling her the earth was round. They were so nice to Jenny that for a second she didn’t believe it was really them. Then she could almost feel her heart surging up through her chest. The next morning, she actually looked forward to getting out of bed. It would be different now.

Then she got to school.

“Hhhiiiiiiii...!”

To me this is bullying, and the psychological content received by Jenny is equal to that if it were 1923 and MacKenzie and Brianna instead took her out to the woods, stuck a bonnet in her mouth, and strapped her with a branch. Or if it were 1963 and they circled around her and screamed SLUT to her face. Social disapproval and assertion of dominance, when it comes to bullying, are the essence; violence and open confrontation but delivery mechanisms.

So, yes, we have created rules that limit beating a kid up or yelling slurs in their face. That doesn't mean bullying has decreased, it's just become harder to measure.

Those are not equals. Jenny can decide to just not have friends and eat alone. Read a book during lunch.

Having your own physical space threatened is a lot worse. Words you can just check yourself out of.

Those are not equals.

The intent behind them is, though; indeed, that's the whole problem. I see no difference consequentially or deontologically between burning down your enemy's business directly, or spreading rumors so that your enemy's business is destroyed.

"But it wasn't my fault anyone else believed me" is the distaff counterpart of "how could I have known that breaking in, dumping gas all over the floor, and lighting a match would burn the building down?" and for a society to function properly both must be punished the same way.

No, most normies find social death worse than physical violence.

How did you test them?

This would not at all be my assumptions about how any of this works.

First of all, I really doubt there's been any noticeable decrease in bullying in schools. Human nature doesn't change, I doubt administrators suddenly got more competent at stopping it (or caring), and as you say we've hardly grown kinder as a culture.

Second, I would expect being bullied to make you much more likely to be a bully, not less. People model the behavior they see in their environment, people try to gain mastery of traumatic experiences by recreating them with themselves in control, suffering and alienation makes people more hostile and aggressive not more understanding.

Is at least my limited understanding of the psychology literature, could be wrong. But the idea of people learning from suffering, persevering, and becoming better and kinder people because of it, feels a lot more like a 'just-world' narrative that we like to see in stories, than how humans actually work.

I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies.

Could you give some examples? This sounds similar to Jonathan Haidt's ideas in The Coddling of the American Mind (safetyism, call-out culture, etc.) but it could also be completely different.

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