Posts Tagged ‘morality’
Bullying is Morally Wrong
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
Doing nothing is not a neutral act when an individual pleas for relief from the emotional misery bullying inflicts. Doing nothing is denying the person credibility as an adult. Doing nothing is sustaining the status quo and defending the perpetrator, however implicitly or indirectly. How dare HR, the primary agent responsible for implementing or blocking the employer’s response to reported bullying, side with the bully (most often in management, 73%) against the employee who naively came to HR for “help”!
So at the beginning of our second decade, we must not be reticent about calling perpetrators and those who support them immoral. It is not our subjective morality that is violated, but the deeper sense of human dignity that is undermined when victims of bullying are not supported. We need to rekindle our compassion for those less fortunate than us whose fate was not their own making. Bully apologists have an indefensible, unconscionable position of favoring abuse.
Once we are bullied and feel the full force of a laser-focused campaign of interpersonal abuse, we drop the smug justifications for the bully. If we work long enough in enough different places and encounter enough incompetent bosses, we are likely to be bullied ourselves in our work life (37% of U.S. workers are). The only people who still doubt that bullying happens are the ones who have never suffered an unexpected, univited disaster or catastrophe. Events humble arrogant superiority known only to those lacking experience in bullying, direct or witnessed. But we should not have to wait for everyone to be personally bullied so that they understand how destructive bullying can be to personal health, careers, families, and employers.
Tags: morality, WBI
Posted in Bullying Tutorials, Social Justice | 14 Comments »
Bullying’s Fundamental Question
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
We are a blame-the-victim nation. Part of this is human nature. Cognitive psychology teaches us that when faced with two conflicting internal beliefs when bullying strikes a friend — “I like my co-worker friend” and “Bad things happen only to bad people” — there is a tendency to want to reduce the conflict, the dissonance, by changing one of those beliefs.
The result is that we individuals are more likely to abandon the bond we feel for our friends in order to support the internalized twisted worldview that if tragedy visits someone then that person must have deserved it. Sounds bizarre, right? But this distortion, called the fundamental attribution error, is our tendency to overestimate the role individuals play in their fate.
Under the artificial cover of “toughness” or “responsibility,” we humans rationalize remarkable cruelty perpetrated senselessly against others. Though domestic violence is now criminalized, it is still rampant because of the insipid belief that if a spouse gets battered, the batterer must have rationally acted on the basis of something the battered one made him do. Poppycock!
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Tags: morality
Posted in Bullying Tutorials, Social Justice | 7 Comments »
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