Bully Nation

How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society

Charles Derber, Yale Magrass

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700622641
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Gewalt in der Gesellschaft

It's not just the bully in the schoolyard that we should be worried about. The one-on-one bullying that dominates the national conversation, this timely book suggests, is actually part of a larger problem—a natural outcome of the bullying nature of our national institutions. And as long as the United States embraces militarism and aggressive capitalism, systemic bullying and all its impacts—at home and abroad—will persist as a major crisis.Bullying looks very similar on the personal and institutional levels: it involves an imbalance of power and behavior that consistently undermines its victim, securing compliance and submission and reinforcing the bully's sense of superiority and legitimacy. The similarity, this book tells us, is not a coincidence. Applying the concept of the "sociological imagination, " which links private problems and public issues, authors Charles Derber and Yale Magrass argue that individual bullying is an outgrowth—and a necessary function—of a larger social phenomenon. Bullying is seen here as a structural problem arising from systems organized around steep power hierarchies—from the halls of the Pentagon, Congress, and corporate offices to classrooms and playing fields and the environment. Dominant people and institutions need to create a culture in which violence and aggression are seen as natural and just: one where individuals compete over who will be bully or victim, and each is seen as deserving their fate within this hierarchy. The larger the inequalities of power in society, or among nations, or even across species, the more likely it is that both institutional and personal bullying will become commonplace. The authors see the life-long psychological scars interpersonal bullying can bring, but believe it is almost impossible to reduce such bullying without first challenging the institutions that breed and encourage it.In the United States a system of intertwined corporations, governments, and military institutions carries out "systemic bullying" to create profits and sustain its own power. While acknowledging the diversity and savagery of many other bully nations, the authors contend that America, as the most powerful nation in the world—and one that aggressively promotes its system as a model—merits special attention. It is only by recognizing the bullying built into this model that we can address the real problem, and in this, Bully Nation makes a hopeful beginning.

CHAPTER ONE

Rethinking Bullying

From the Individual to the Institution

A PERSONAL STORY FROM YALE MAGRASS

It is the 1960s, and I am sitting on a wall during outdoor gym at the middle school I attend. Completely lacking in athletic skills and knowing no one will want me on their team, I do not join the games. At times in the past when I did decide to play, each team would fight about which side would be stuck with me. On this day, somebody grabs my tie. (Students were required to wear ties in public school back then.) He pulls it really tight as he puts his other hand under my collar and places an ant down my back. The air passages are cut off. I soon find myself getting dizzy, and my head bops back and forth. Someone else asks me, “What are you doing?” For a moment, I regain awareness and answer, “Nothing.” I get up and begin to walk across the field, but I soon collapse to the ground. Everyone who sees it starts laughing.

The next day, I am in the schoolyard. Someone says, “Knock, knock.” Naively assuming this is a joke, I respond, “Who’s there?” Wrapping a woman’s stocking around my neck and squeezing it tighter and tighter, the boy replies, “The Boston strangler.” I again fall to the ground. He lets go as I rise to my knees, waiting to regain full consciousness. Once again, everyone who sees it bursts out laughing.

Fast-forward to the high school cafeteria. Someone says my name. Kids next to him start shouting, “YALE, YALE.” The people on the next bench join in: “YALE, YALE.” Soon, all the students in the entire cafeteria are shouting my name in unison. This happens repeatedly over several days.

Another time, four boys surround me, each grabbing an arm or a leg. They carry me to an open window on a higher floor of the school, where they wave me around, counting one, two, three, and then hold me out the window. On the bus home from school on a different afternoon, a boy grabs my books from under my arm and tosses them to someone else who throws them to a third guy who then tosses them to another student. I run back and forth, unsuccessfully trying to get my books back. The next day as I get on the bus, the driver warns me, “If you act up again, I’ll throw you off.”

Bullying has been around since time immemorial, yet only recently has it gotten serious attention. A decade or two ago, it was commonly dismissed or minimized, often being seen as cute, as a joke, or as something to “get over.” The victim needed to toughen up. If he couldn’t take it and fight back, then he deserved to be a target of ridicule and harassment. Being a bully could actually be a source of pride, marking the individual as someone triumphant and powerful who was likely to be popular and admired, often by the victims themselves.

Only now is it being recognized that chronic bullying can lead to a traumatic childhood, whose scars may be carried well into adulthood. More and more parents worry that their kids will be bullied at school or online, or perhaps they will witness bullying in the schoolyard. Some parents think their kids might have to become bullies themselves just to survive or to be part of the in-crowd. Other parents encourage their children to bully in order to get ahead or fit in. Yet others tell the kids bullying is a terrible thing to do, possibly thinking about the horrific mass killings in schools—from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Newtown—that have been described in popular books such as Rampage¹ and The Bully Society² as the tip of the iceberg of a long-standing bullying problem.

The current conversation about bullying depicts it as a personal, psychological trouble to be solved by counseling or therapy for both the victim and the bullier.³ The victim needs better communication or adaptation skills. He may need to tell the bully how he feels, as if the bully does not know he is causing harm or does not intend to do just that. There is little discussion about larger social or cultural forces that may actually encourage bullying or about how bullying may indeed serve certain institutional interests. But as the renowned twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills points out in The Sociological Imagination,⁴ personal troubles are often public issues. A purely psychological approach to bullying is deeply distorting. We need a larger picture showing how key institutions in society—the economy, military, culture, family, schools—all help create and perpetrate the bullying milieu. We need a paradigm shift, with the current microfocus on individual psychology tucked into a new and larger conversation about America’s corporate and militarized society.

The psychological paradigm masks the institutional bullying that encourages and reinforces individual bullying. Bullying is carried out by societies and is a characteristic of cultures, economies, and the military. Militarized capitalism is one way of describing the structure of American society. It’s a system that gives rise to both institutional and personal bullying.

The idea that bullying has societal roots and reflects the dominant values and interests of powerful institutions may have some intuitive plausibility. After all, we speak of politicians such as Donald Trump or Chris Christie as bullies, of the National Football League (NFL) as encouraging bullying on the field to make big money, of large and powerful nations bullying smaller ones, of companies such as Walmart bullying their workers, and of agricultural corporate giants such as Tyson or Smithfield Farms even bullying animals and the environment. But these are seldom the focus in scholarly or popular books and articles about bullying. A few researchers, such as the sociologist Jessie Klein in her book The Bully Society,⁵ have begun to talk about widening the frame, honing in on gender relations, but we will show that psychologists and psychiatrists have captured bullying as a subject for analysis. They concentrate on personal bullying in schools and treat it as a psychological and individual problem, seldom considering how it reflects structural problems embedded in our society. Even Klein, despite having a chapter on the “bullying economy,” focuses overwhelmingly on kids and violence in schools.

In this book, we take a different path. We shall show how bully nations operate on the world stage, even as they bully their own citizens and, in the age of climate change, the environment itself. Our spotlight is on the United States, the most powerful bully nation in the world today—yet hardly the only one. Bully nations have operated throughout history, but we want to explain why bullying has such a significant part in American life, how it developed, and what can be done about it.

Since we need a paradigm shift, we will first look more carefully at the current psychological paradigm and show why it is deeply flawed. We will then turn to an alternative approach.

THE MICROPARADIGM: SHRINKING THE BULLY

Whom do you think of when you hear the word bully? Maybe a big guy in the schoolyard or cafeteria, like the tough jock with a buzz cut who tries to rough up Michael J. Fox’s short, small-framed character in the film Back to the Future?⁶ Or maybe a mean girl in a clique of popular girls who goes around attacking others as “fatties” or “sluts” or “geeks”?

And whom do you think of as the victim? Perhaps a gay boy who is taunted for being “girlie”? A girl who is chubby or looks “funny”? Or maybe a skinny boy who is uncoordinated and weak looking or “geeky,” one who would never be captain of the football team?

These are certainly the images that are presented in most books, media articles, and movies on the topic, including comedies (among them The Diary of a Wimpy Kid)⁷ that treat bullying as something to laugh at. Carrie Goldman wrote a widely read book entitled Bullied that described the not-so-funny experiences of her daughter, Katie, a girl who had been taunted and teased mercilessly because of her looks and so-called geeky interests.⁸ Katie came home in tears after a first-grade classmate named Jake called her “Piggy.” Jake got other boys in the class to call her by that name, and the constant teasing and taunting grew worse. Breaking down in sobs one day, Katie told her mother that she did not want to go back to school. She couldn’t take it anymore.

Goldman wrote a blog about her daughter’s experiences, and it went viral. Thousands of other parents wrote in to sympathize and tell stories about their own kids who were bullied in school and online. Some of the children’s supposed crimes were looking funny, wearing the wrong clothes, being “nerdy,” being gay or a minority, or having a disability. The bullied kids included the boy who was not tough enough to make the football team and the girl not pretty enough to be a cheerleader.

By “bullying,” Goldman refers to the use of power by tough kids to repeatedly taunt, threaten, intimidate, humiliate, or hit her daughter. She says that all the kids whose parents wrote her—the parents of gays, geeks, nerds, and others who typically get bullied—are subject to this kind of traumatizing abuse. This is consistent with the psychological paradigm’s general definition of bullying as a repeated emotional, verbal, or physical battering by a more powerful or tougher child of a weaker one. We will return to the definition of bullying soon.

Goldman’s story shows that the popular images about fatties, geeks, gays, nerds, sissies, “uglies,” or “weirdos” are not just stereotypes. They refer to hundreds of thousands of real kids who are players, usually victims, in the bullying drama. But they also reveal only a small slice of the world of bullying, and they highlight the serious limitations of the current way of thinking about bullying.

The psychological paradigm is centered on schoolyard bullies and traumatized kids. Its first premise, which most people take for granted, is that bullying is a matter of individual behavior. The bullier is a person, and the bullied are also individuals.

Moreover, within the psychological paradigm, the bullies and the bullied are all a particular type of person: they are children or young people. Their bullying is usually seen as a nearly inevitable part of growing up, especially as students in grammar schools, high schools, or colleges and universities.

The focus on young people is a second and critically important dimension of the current bullying paradigm. The bullying world is populated by kids. Adults, especially parents and counselors and teachers, are affected, but they are not central players in the direct bullying drama. They are rarely highlighted as the bulliers or the bullied.

As we will show shortly, both of these assumptions—that bullying is mainly behavior by individuals and that it specifically involves kids—are wrong. They take the spotlight off the world of adults, which is itself a vast arena of bullying and has a pivotal role in creating the bullying world of children.

If we conceive of bullying as personal behavior among children, we immediately move to a third unstated premise of the microparadigm: that the problem lies largely in individuals and their psychology. The scholarship on bullying is laden with analyses of personality, mental health, and psychological challenges related to being part of a group that is targeted by aggression.⁹ It also highlights child psychology rather than the psychology and behavior of adults, as if people might be expected to grow out of their roles in the bullying drama. In fact, the opposite may well be true, for reasons about adult society that we will explore throughout the book. And in any case, the emphasis on children is a convenient way to hide an inconvenient truth: that bullying in the schoolyard mirrors the larger adult social world that kids see every day. Within the psychological paradigm, there is little space for an institutional and political analysis that would uncover these grim realities of the adult social world and its leading institutions, except for some discussion of the way schools are operating and how they might intervene to reduce the problem.

Cutting to the chase, the psychological paradigm frames the conversation about bullying as a therapeutic discourse. In this way of thinking, adults—especially parents, trained counselors, and psychiatrists—learn to see bullying as a phenomenon having to do with the psyche, the psychology of cliques, and the biology of the brain itself. The ruling conversation falls within the claimed professional expertise of psychologists and psychiatrists. Consequently, bullying analysis centers on categories of psychological disorder, and treatment relies heavily on psychiatrists and counselors, with teachers and parents as secondary supporters.

This is yet another reason why we need to move beyond the ruling paradigm. Psychiatry claims scientific expertise, but there is a growing challenge to the scientific validity of the profession itself, as well as its diagnoses and drugs.¹⁰ Psychiatry has succeeded in creating a medicalized world for children, with millions of youngsters on drugs or in therapy. But whether this is a solution to bullying—or good for children—is problematic at best, and such treatment can often do more harm than good. One obvious harm is that it moves attention away from the real causes of bullying, as we will discuss. A common social and political assumption in the psychological paradigm is that bullying is mainly caused by misunderstanding, by a lack of communication. If geeks, nerds, funny-looking kids, gays, or children from minority backgrounds were only brought together with jocks, popular children, and mean girls, they would learn to appreciate each other and bullying would cease. But what if there are underlying societal conflicts leading some individuals or groups to have an interest in tormenting others and reinforcing differences in power? Woody Allen offers an alternative perspective on what could happen when children of different or conflicting backgrounds are brought together: “I won two weeks at interfaith camp where I was sadistically beaten by boys of all races and creeds.”¹¹

The psychiatric paradigm blinds us to the role of the larger society. And this point is central to our argument that bullying, though it may reflect or cause psychological disturbances, grows out of the wider society’s mainstream institutions and cultural values. Clearly, individual bullying has psychological dimensions and can cause deep and lasting emotional scars. We in no way wish to minimize the trauma associated with almost all forms of bullying. Indeed, we know firsthand that the psychological curse of being bullied, which can damage a person for life, is often understated. But the current psychological paradigm is a deeply inadequate way of thinking because it does not offer the socioeconomic and political analysis necessary to understand—or even recognize—the massive amount of bullying that arises from and is fueled by the core values of the most powerful institutions of our society.

Our talk about social institutions such as corporations and the military will sound odd to many readers who pick up a book about bullying. Though some of us do, as noted earlier, casually refer to politicians or corporations as bullies, almost all of us have learned to think of bullying as such a personal issue that we forget the institutional or societal context surrounding it. Say the word bully and you think of a tough boy or mean girl in school. We have unconsciously absorbed the idea that bullying has little to do with our economic, political, or military organizations. In fact, we had to do reality checks of our own as we developed our analysis. And we are certain that many readers will think that we have missed the point, that we are diverting attention from the kids and schools that need help, and that we probably have our own axes to grind.

But remember that we do not dismiss the importance of the bullying of children by children that is the main topic of the current conversation. Part of what we are saying is that if we really care about kids bullying each other, we need to widen our angle of vision and consider issues that are now outside the bullying conversation, taking us on new journeys into the heart of our corporate and militarized society.

In our society, a “structural bullying” is built into the DNA of leading institutions, such as huge corporations and the military. It is a different and larger scale of bullying, but as we will show, it has many of the same basic features of the school-aged bully’s abuse of power—and it is a core cause of the schoolyard jungle.

Yet the large-scale institutions helping to shape the adult and child worlds of bullying are not subjects of study for psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are not trained to analyze societal institutions and the economic organization of society. They usually try to help their patients “adjust,” seldom considering whether this a society to which anyone should adjust.¹² Society is usually treated as an unseen, automatic given or an inherent good. In their training, psychiatrists learn that societal forces are distractions from inner psycholog...