On Status…
Note: this is an attempt at elucidating, and forming arguments to defend, a particular view which I do not entirely hold, but do find to contain much truth and insight.
Are you familiar with the origin of the term “pecking order”? How chickens determine and maintain status? Lost feathers, bloody wounds? Bullying away from food, water, etc.? How the lowest-status birds can end up pecked to death? In short, “status” in chickens is all about who can “get away with” hurting whom.
Now, it’s frequently discussed in particularly nerd-heavy areas about how that old piece of frequently repeated “wisdom” about bullies having low self-esteem is nonsense. And “anti-bullying” rules and measures consistently end up used not against the bullies, but against their victims. Teachers and authority figures consistently side with the bullies and punish the “aggression” of the bullies’ victims. And if a victim ever breaks and either self-destructs or lashes out, we see everyone involved jump in to explain how said victim totally had it coming, and if they lashed out in particular, that this constitutes proof of such justification. (Do I really have to name the salient recent example?)
Why is this so, if not “status”? Paraphrasing someone else from memory, suppose we have Adam and Billy. Adam (our bully) has just punched Billy in the face and then shoved him headfirst into a garbage can, and a teacher, Ms. Carrol, has just seen the tail end of this conflict. What happens?
Well, Adam immediately gives some spiel to Ms. Carrol about how Billy had it coming. In the 50′s, it might have been “Billy tried to grab my wiener, I think he’s a faggot!”; nowadays, more like “Billy called me a faggot and said Trump was gonna deport my parents!” Either way, Ms. Carrol immedately agrees that Adam’s words must be the truth, and drags Billy off to be punished for attacking and “bullying” poor, poor Adam like that.
What is this power Adam has? What do we call his ability to have his patent, self-serving lies trump visible reality, his ability to have people automatically take his side and excuse, even praise, his hurting other people for the sake of hurting them? Well, someone who has lots of people automatically take their side, wouldn’t a good word be “popular”?
And why does Adam bully Billy? Because he can. For the same reason a higher-status bird pecks bloody wound into a lower-status one: for no other reason than his victim is too weak, too low-status, too unpopular to stop him.
In the words of 1984′s O’Brien:
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
Yes, people hurting others physically is relatively rare outside select areas like “the schoolyard.” But that’s because most of our “pecking” is done via inflicting emotional harm (or via attacks on property, particularly with female bullies). Mockery, rumor, aspersions, we have plenty of ways of inflicting real pain without resorting to physical harm. And people use it. Because “trampling on an enemy who is helpless” is a pleasure. And there’s plenty to show that it’s not uncommon behavior outside the schoolyard, in the workplace, in the world as a whole (and social media has only made it worse).
Bullies are not aberrant, low-status outliers; they are more popular and well-liked and higher status than their victims. Because their behavior is not an outlier, any more than pecking is in chickens, but because it’s what people do. It’s what status and popularity are: the ability to “get away with” inflicting pain on those who cannot stop you from doing so for the joy of doing so, and the ability to have others side with you and praise your hurting of others.
(Again, don’t totally agree, but making the argument)
(@balioc)
I confess that I’m not totally sure why I’ve been tagged here.
But if my reaction is in fact a thing you want –
– this is pretty much a Wise Man of Hindustan holding the trunk of the elephant and declaring that he’s found a snake.
Like, yes, this is definitely a real dynamic that really exists. Orwell wasn’t making it up. And it is a very useful concept to keep in your mental toolkit, if you’re trying to understand the world; it helps to correct for certain big errors that are reliably made by other models, such as the popular “everyone thinks he’s the good guy and is trying as hard as he can” model. Status games are an unavoidable part of human interaction, and they come with some amount of cruelty packaged in.
But this dynamic definitely not everything, and if you try to use it to account for everything, you’ll be wrong more often than you’re right.
Teachers don’t always side with bullies, especially when the bullies are the ones escalating to physical violence. (I say this as someone who was relentlessly bullied as a kid, and who often got in trouble afterwards when the teachers sided against me.) People who look like they’re “trampling helpless enemies” from your perspective really are in fact often terrified and trying to defend themselves from perceived threats. Most importantly, it’s totally possible to find circles and communities where recreational beating-up-on-the-omega (or beating-up-on-the-outsider) is not a major source of entertainment.
(…it’s especially possible if you’re willing to do what it takes to find such a circle in meatspace instead of relying on the internet. But that can be very costly, depending on where you’re starting from.)
Humans are complicated. Love and generosity and integrity aren’t lies, any more than cruelty and domination are lies. You can find it all if you go looking in the right places.
..I have more thoughts, but I’m getting very tired and I’m not sure they’re coherent, so they’ll have to come later.