May 25th, 2010

A little "good" bullying?

Hateful, despicable people often act as apologists for bullies. For instance, corporate attorney Jeff Tannenbaum from Littler Mendelson long ago told the SF Business Times that some people deserve a “little good bullying.” He probably meant to use fear to motivate. That was a foolish thing to say. I ran across a new essay by Anthony Tiatorio (read the May 25 article) in which he thoughtfully represented the stop-student-bullying initiatives as failed. He quoted our WBI national survey prevalence and understood some of the less well-known findings. His conclusion: “the message is unmistakable, ‘get used to it;’ it’s a way of life in this culture.”

Tiatorio argues that bullying serves as a crude “social stabilization strategy ingrained from an earlier clan-based life.” By using violence, the strong eliminate the social outliers, the different ones. Sounds just like social darwinism except that it comes from an advocate of societal ethics. He invokes Greek mythology describing Procrustes who attacked people and had the nasty habit of adjusting the leg length of passersby to fit a bed he had positioned conveniently on the road to Athens. Procrustes shortened legs that were too long and stretched the short ones to fit his arbitrary standard. For some bizarre reason, Tiatorio thinks Procrustes served some important social function. I do not.

However, I do agree that bullying/aggression/violence is infused, perhaps inextricably, in our culture. He doesn’t have faith that school administrators can run their buildings in ways that stop bullying or that laws work. Instead, he believes “this as an educational issue requiring a proactive, early and on-going curriculum response involving children and their families …  bullying can only be reduced through broadening our sense of community, knowing that only this can actually stabilize the group and ensure harmony.” Too bad his solution is curricular (as a former teacher) and so obtuse as to be undoable — “broaden our sense of community” — when our society grows more polarized allowing people to de-humanize and demonize others with impunity more every day.

I’m not as optimistic as in my younger years. Without the threat of undesirable consequences looming, people will choose the more expedient course of interpersonal behavior every time — aggression. No amount of bullying is good for society. It coarsens it. We grow cruder and rougher and more adversarial when no laws are present to ensure good conduct that might have been normative previously. So, let’s get real. The reason we work so hard to push for laws (the WBI Healthy Workplace Bill Legislative Campaign) is to have society officially declare that repeated abusive conduct is unacceptable!

Since Tiatoro brought up mythology, who knows which god(s) did good deeds and made peacemakers in the world?

Tags: Anthony Tiatoro, bullying, culture, greek mythology, Procrustes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Bullying Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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