Why We Can't Correct Bullying

Almost every day we hear stories of bullying and all the events that evolve therefrom, from schoolyard taunting, torture and murder, to a student running a amok with firearms in a school, to harassment at the workplace, racist gatherings and marches, riots in the street for many reasons and so on ad infinitum. We whine over the seemingly endless problem of bullying that consumes almost every neighbourhood. Gangs run rampant and jihads wage around the world. We create programs to attempt to bring it under control, but the problem persists. At this time, may people are beginning to wonder why the answer seems to be so evasive. Look around and we can see how pervasive it really is. Every party has its fight. The police always have their hands full in any entertainment district. We find disgruntled people everywhere spoiling for a fight. It's in the news no matter where we turn. It's a world wide disease. The boss barks at the employee as an incentive to go harder, faster, longer. The worker goes home in a funk and barks at and maybe even beats up the significant other. They in turn take it out on the children who have just come home from the school, provided they went in the first place, after a day of constant pressure from every teacher and coach as well as bullying from other children. The children take it out on siblings and pets. Police bully when they “don't like brown people”, when labourers are profiled as drug addicts and pushers and when “difficult people” are tasered to death for being disoriented. Gay people are bullied by seemingly everyone religious and not gay. Nations bully one another. The list is seemingly endless. In short, bullying is terror politics in action. The intent is to inspire compliance to some standing self appointed hierarchy or structure.

When we wring our hands and try to stop children from bullying each other, it is within the larger context of a bullying society. The example is set all around us constantly. To expect something from others when we ourselves are not willing to follow the example of what we expect makes a nation of hypocrites. All our images in the news, the movies, cartoons, video games and experience are about solving problems with violence, threats, intimidation and coercion. At the risk of being cliche, it seems that the incentive we give is the whip, rather than the carrot. We are a society verging on “going postal”.

The alienation that many people feel does not help in solving the problem. Many people feel alone in a crowd and this is more true for some than others. The nature and necessity of working in this environment geared to production for profit guarantees the atomizing of the people. Few schedules mesh, even among man and wife who often work different days and shifts. Children in this environment have bee labelled as “latch-key” children, who have no more relation to their parents than to an alien from deep space. Instead, they have TV and the internet and these are filled with opportunists, predators and violence.

Education under capitalism is all about controlling the masses in a command and obey exchange. The same can be stated for all other collectives, whether secular or theocratic in the world, no matter what they call themselves. Mass education is also done as cheaply as possible. It is known through research and investigation that the most formative years in the learning cycle of any individual, whether animal or human is the period between birth and the onset of adulthood. It is during this period that the young individual must learn to manoeuvre their own body, use the senses effectively and learn how to survive on its/their own. At this stage of development, the individual can be taught anything others of the community decide is worth teaching for a particular end. If that community is divided by class, then the decision on what is worth learning by various classes is made from on high. After the onset of adulthood, the individual should have learned these skills, because in the adult phase of life turns toward obtaining a suitable mate and to reproduction for the next generation. Human beings are no different than other animals in this regard and often have an extended learning cycle, as they don’t reach the age of reproductive capability until about the age of ten years give or take a year. Adult workers not only have to survive but must also look after raising and teaching the new generation of workers. For most people, the job, raising children and surviving in a mostly hostile class divided world is a huge task and a more than full time job. Many complain that they have two jobs, the one for the capitalist, the other raising the children.

Bullying can also come in the form of labelling, profiling and ostracizing. Although we are told that names can never hurt us, the fact is different than this. Spreading vicious rumours about someone can be libel that kills. Calling someone “fag” or pederast simply because we have some agenda against them and for no other reason is a case in point. We set them up for a date with torture and murder based on artificially manufactured prejudice. Whether a person is murdered or commits suicide due to bullying, the result is the same in both cases; that is, someone winds up dead due the harassment of others. We are so alienated from anything different that such behaviour against anything different is considered normal or usual.

In civilization, the reproductive urge is often curtailed until the late teens or early twenties. Learning under class division is extended into this period even though individual biological sexual forces are at their strongest. Needless to say, teens struggle to absorb the required education of the state while under the influence of such strong biological forces. If part of their upbringing in school has been religious, this adds to the pressure to conform to the “will of God.” Within the context of education is the bullying system of compliance enforced by propaganda of a terror deity. Civilization has gone far in subverting the natural learning process and bending it to the purposes of serving the powerful and wealthy elite.

History is recorded by peoples who either were conquered or by the conquerors who invaded the territories of others. Politics is written into these histories. Many cultures were subverted or eliminated by invading cultures via imperialist conquest. History as written in diverse sources from the Bible, to Homer’s Iliad, Josephus, Pliny the elder and Pliny the younger, records the conflicts and conquests of one culture by another. Often the invading civilization destroys the one invaded, taking everything of value and enslaving the people. Many times, the ones invaded, if they survived within the dominating culture, managed to keep alive their traditions and beliefs, oftentimes embellishing them with those of the ruling civilization. At other times, destruction was so complete that the losers were absorbed completely and served in the lesser positions in the dominating society. This is another source of multi-layered classes such as we find in India, a culture subdivided into four major classes. When the Aristocracy and later the budding bourgeoisie invaded the Americas, they took what they found by trickery or force. Whole cultures and civilizations were laid to waste without regard except for seizing what was considered of value. Anything conflicting with the invaders ideology was destroyed except for a few examples secreted away by organizations like the Catholic Church. Children were taken by force and re-educated to serve the new masters. They were discouraged from learning the long established hunting-gathering way of life in favour of “jobs” taught to them to serve their new masters. They became a second class or lower class serving population. The result was alienation that had a profound psychological impact upon the conquered that were given menial roles in the new order with no pride of self respect or any way to escape. To keep all of this as it is, bullying is used in one form or another.

Religion as promulgated by the aristocratic and ruling orders was designed to humiliate the conquered into servile submission. Religious ideology as taught to the newly conquered was very alienating from nature and from ones own nature and biology. Free enquiry was discouraged for formalism, dogma and catechism. The workers place was not and is not to ask but to obey without question, to accept what was stated as unquestionable truth. The worker had to take on faith what was taught and given. Free thinking was and is discouraged and those workers who by chance or intellect, teach themselves widely are regarded with suspicion and kept away from other workers who acted according to what they were taught. The result of this is that most receive no stimulation except what is permitted and the result is a mass of people who behave more in a bovine fashion than their birthright as human beings. Carry this a little further and we can see a sex divide in action too. Women in particular were discouraged to pursue free thinking, math, and the sciences and encouraged in areas dealing with the home, like cooking, child rearing and cleaning. The woman’s specific role in class divided society is to raise the next generation of workers and they couldn’t do this if they were in a full time career outside of the home. Traditionally, women were to be in the home, look after and raise children and support the church. Though women have some freedom to a limited extent today, the old prejudices prevail especially to working class women, who, if they work, take low end jobs. The women of the ruling class have more freedom, but even here prejudice prevails. Beneath all of this is a furtive bullying.

The role of religion, mysticism and obscurantism has had a profound impact upon humanity especially when the people so educated in their formative years have become alienated from all direct contact with nature. Religion itself was born from nature, from observing the sky and the uncontrollable forces of nature. Even today, under our high civilization, we are utterly helpless in the face of tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, big freezes, heat waves, droughts, floods and other forces. The original gods were all forces of nature, personified by the observers and writers. Solar and Lunar eclipses that could be predicted early in civilized history were used to inspire compliance through fear when the “gods” showed signs. These gods were joined by other planetary deities, sea gods, wind gods, earth gods and such. This does not lessen the impact of raw forces. When these forces were personalized as deities, then the unscrupulous were able to bend the will of the toiling people to their desired end, even to the point of human sacrifice to appease the gods or in wars of conquest. Great calamities are terror inspiring when they occur. They induce psychic shock as observed in the victims of the Malaysian tsunami of Dec. 24th, 2004 and the victims of hurricane Katrina in Aug. 2005 in New Orleans. Unscrupulous people take advantage of this and can make people do what they command, even though the demands are counter to their survival or the survival of others. It can also be highly profitable to enrich ones self from the misery of others. A new form of capitalism has arisen called disaster capitalism.

We also endure a ceaseless round of “end of the world” scenarios that inspire mass fear. In Feb. 1962, the Hindus predicted the end of the world. A flood of pe4ople went to bathe in the Ganges River to make themselves ready for the end. The day of destiny came and went apparently without incident; that is until the summer when US spy planes noticed unusual activity going on Cuba. By October, we came within half a minute of mutual assured destruction through nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This event terrified the civilized world. The point was made. Bullying by super powers had the potential to end the world as we know it. Today, we live “the war on terror” where everyone is terrified. This then forms the back drop of all the bullying going on all around us. In order to end bullying, we will have to face our own dark sides and seek out a way to correct it individually and collectively, a huge problem of logistics carried on the backs of successive generations in a combined and unequal fashion.