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cluegirl has been talking about bullying, and the need for speaking the controversy.
Bullying is a system of subtly interlocking actions and beliefs that people have about the world which influence their perceptions about power and control. Bullies all have parents who use pain or the threat of force to control them. Always. Spanking and physical/emotional intimidation mean power to them from the time that they're toddlers, and that makes pain the natural way for them to seek control in later situations. They don't turn to bribery and social maneuvering the way normal children do, so they don't develop those skills 'til much later. As humans, we identify with our tools, even the emotional ones. Making deals with someone means that we are the kind of person who makes deals, we own that and identify with that sense of agency and the problem-solving that it implies. Hitting someone makes us someone who hits, and we identify with violence. If our development has arrested at that earlier point, before social bargaining, we do not develop the tools that others identify with until much later, so we spend our formative years identifying with using force to get what we want.
As we develop moral reasoning, we develop justifications for the things that we do. I never had the will to power, so I had no reason to build up the layers of moral justification and the necessary ethos to carry on hurting people once I had other ways to do things. Others were not lucky enough to be my kind of broken. I only had ethical problems with fighting once I got scared of myself and what I might do, and that wasn't until junior high. Before then fighting had no moral component for me. It had nothing to do with being mean, and in fact sometimes those were mutually exclusive. People who wanted to beat me up were sometimes not actually mean to me and vice versa. And some of the meanest bullies never tried to hit me at all. The worst of them just belittled me for being white trash, a clumsy loser, and a freak.
(Dominica McCarthy: I remember you. I have no more shame to paralyze me, and I'm no longer afraid of harsh words. Dread my return.)
( Starting when I was 4, I used to pick fights with bullies. )
That's my perception of the bullying that had happened to me. What I think should be done about it is going to be a whole other post.
cluegirl has been talking about bullying, and the need for speaking the controversy. Bullying is a system of subtly interlocking actions and beliefs that people have about the world which influence their perceptions about power and control. Bullies all have parents who use pain or the threat of force to control them. Always. Spanking and physical/emotional intimidation mean power to them from the time that they're toddlers, and that makes pain the natural way for them to seek control in later situations. They don't turn to bribery and social maneuvering the way normal children do, so they don't develop those skills 'til much later. As humans, we identify with our tools, even the emotional ones. Making deals with someone means that we are the kind of person who makes deals, we own that and identify with that sense of agency and the problem-solving that it implies. Hitting someone makes us someone who hits, and we identify with violence. If our development has arrested at that earlier point, before social bargaining, we do not develop the tools that others identify with until much later, so we spend our formative years identifying with using force to get what we want.
As we develop moral reasoning, we develop justifications for the things that we do. I never had the will to power, so I had no reason to build up the layers of moral justification and the necessary ethos to carry on hurting people once I had other ways to do things. Others were not lucky enough to be my kind of broken. I only had ethical problems with fighting once I got scared of myself and what I might do, and that wasn't until junior high. Before then fighting had no moral component for me. It had nothing to do with being mean, and in fact sometimes those were mutually exclusive. People who wanted to beat me up were sometimes not actually mean to me and vice versa. And some of the meanest bullies never tried to hit me at all. The worst of them just belittled me for being white trash, a clumsy loser, and a freak.
(Dominica McCarthy: I remember you. I have no more shame to paralyze me, and I'm no longer afraid of harsh words. Dread my return.)
( Starting when I was 4, I used to pick fights with bullies. )
That's my perception of the bullying that had happened to me. What I think should be done about it is going to be a whole other post.