bullying as an underlying principle of modern society

Bullying in the school system is a serious problem. Let's look the stats in the eye:


BULLYING STATISTICS

* Thirty percent (30%) of U.S. students in grades six through ten are involved in moderate or frequent bullying — as bullies, as victims, or as both — according to the results of the first national survey on this subject.
* Bullying is increasingly viewed as an important contributor to youth violence, including homicide and suicide. [..]

RECENT STATISTICS SHOW THAT:

* 1 out of 4 kids is Bullied. The American Justice Department says that this month 1 out of every 4 kids will be abused by another youth.
* Surveys Show That 77% of students are bullied mentally, verbally, & physically.
* In a recent study, 77% of the students said they had been bullied. And 14% of those who were bullied said they experienced severe (bad) reactions to the abuse.
* 1 out of 5 kids admits to being a bully, or doing some "Bullying."
[..]
* 100,000 students carry a gun to school.
* 28% of youths who carry weapons have witnessed violence at home.
* A poll of teens ages 12-17 proved that they think violence increased at their schools.
* 282,000 students are physically attacked in secondary schools each month.
* More youth violence occurs on school grounds as opposed to on the way to school.
[..]


The last point especially stands out for me, underscoring that school is really a dangerous place worth avoding.

Homeschoolers are very aware of this issue: a full 9% of people list bullying and behavioral issues in the school as their primary motivator for the choice to homeschool.

no matter what the reason is for their educational and lifestyle choice, many more homeschoolers hold the notion that they would also, as a bonus, at least somewhat shield ther children from the bullying and all the physical and emotional stress it imposes on a developing psyche of a child. At the same time, nurturing the child with attention, love and respect will create a individual with a healthy self-esteem, who will no doubt effortlessly fit into his own cozy niche in the fabric of society.

Your truly is, largely, in this camp too. But recently I am beginning to see a bigger picture here.

You see, the unspoken assumption in this philosophy is that life at large is a much healthier place than school is, with is unnatural confines and absurd restrictions. Bullying, people maintain, really doesn't happen in the real world so much. Who could imagine someone being bullied at a place of employment?

As a result, the only damage they see from bullying is to the children's personal safety within the timeline of school age, and to their self-esteem in the future. The latter hurts their chances for a full rich life in an apparently safe and happy environment, where all is for the best.

The question I have is: if this is so, then where do all the school bullies, who through their years in the system became quite proficient in their craft, all of a sudden disappear when they hit working age?

The answer is: they don't. They find themselves cozy little niches in companies big and small, where they bully their coworkers in ways unimaginable (see the link below for some horror stories). I will stick with the stats in my quote, to show that the numbers are quite similar to what we see among the kids in school:




[..]

Bullying is "repeated, health-harming mistreatment," Namie said, and it usually includes "verbal abuse, behavior that's threatening, intimidating or humiliating, or work interference."

When the behavior perpetrates the boss's own agenda at the expense of the company's goals, you've got a boss who's going too far, Namie said.

[..]

At least one in four firms
How pervasive is workplace bullying? That's hard to pin down.

About 24 percent of companies said workplace bullying had occurred "within the past year," according to a survey of 516 firms in 2004 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). In that survey, bullying is "repeated intimidation, slandering, social isolation, or humiliation by one or more persons against another." It includes workers who bully other workers.

But that's a survey of managers, so it's likely an understatement. The survey respondents "may not be aware of what is going on, or they might want to present the company in a positive light," said Paula Grubb, a research psychologist with NIOSH and researcher on the study. "If they're managers, they tend to identify with management."

Between 10 percent and 16 percent of workers say they are currently experiencing "regular bullying" by their supervisor according to a separate series of studies focusing solely on supervisors who bully subordinates (rather than workers who bully their colleagues), said Bennett Tepper, in an e-mail message. Tepper is a professor of managerial sciences at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

When you ask workers to look back in time, however, that figure skyrockets: 50 percent of workers say they've had an abusive boss at some point in their working career, Tepper said.

Meanwhile, a separate survey finds that workers' top pet peeves hint at some forms of bullying: 44 percent said "condescending tones" are the most annoying workplace situation, followed by 37 percent who said public reprimands are the top pet peeve, according to a survey of 2,318 U.S. adults in February by Harris Interactive for Randstad USA, the staffing firm.

[..]


What I note here is that those bullies quoted in the article are only the ones who got caught. There is probably just as many who were more careful and covert in their aggression.

All that creates a truly pathological environment, where homo homini lupus est, and it is just the way things are: either you eat or be eaten - or go insane trying to grasp why the world is so crazy.

The latter apparently is exactly what happened to the young Barbara O'Brien: under the stress of covert and overt bullying at her workplace, her mind snapped and she ended up hopping around the country for six months in the state of acute schizophrenia. She eventually snapped out of it spontaneously (a truly rare case), but not before her subconciousness took her through a rollercoaster of a complex drama, truly fantastic and yet incredibly closely mimicking reality.

She wrote about her experience in the book, "Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic". In her hallucinations, she was visited by people, or entities, who called themselves Operators, and referred to other human beings as Things, which they exploit and manipulate mercilessly for the cshow of power:




Hadley [an operator] was famous from coast to coast for his
experiments. There was a woman who had been convinced that she was an
apostle of the sun and who thought she dined every night with the sun
god [a projection of the operator]. She had used her delusions to
start a new religion among Things and had made quite a bit of money
out of it."

[..]

"People lived out their lifetimes, I reflected, taking strange
actions, never aware that their actions were motivated by some Operator.

[..]

Such laws as Operators were subject to had obviously been made to
protect Operators. Nowhere was there compassion or sense of
responsibility for Things.
"Are you shocked because Things are exploited?" Nicky wanted to
know. "Doesn't your own kind exploit every form of llfe it can
exploit? There's nothing more ruthless than a Thing. Your kind is in
no position to criticize."
"I should think," I told him, "that Operators would feel toward
Things at least the way that Things feel toward dogs."
"That's about it," said Nicky.
"But that's not it. Apparently nature developed two species of
men. One could help and benefit the other. Instead, one exploits the
other without compassion."

When she regained her power of reason, she clearly related what she saw to what is going on in an average workplace, calling the bullies Hook Operators:


As a young adult, I dug into the community, living by its codes.
You went to work for a company and you stayed with the same
company untill you married or became pregnant or died. You advanced.
in the company, step by step, until you reached your top
level. You didn't flit around from job to job. You were expected to
adjust to your company as you adjusted to the community. At my
company, I adjusted well until I came up against something, sud-
denly, which Burr couldn't handle. Hinton might have been able to
cope with it but Hinton had long been restricted to a limited area,
work methods[Hinton and Burr are both Operators from her hallucinations, whom she later identified as subconcious archetypes]. He was never permitted out of Burt's pocket for any
other task. The human Hook Operators appeared and started their
operations and Burr could only behave like a Burr. Overcome by
fear he could neither fight nor run. He could only stand, digging in,
until tragedy struck. In insanity, there is nothing more important than escape.

The individual, whether he is invaded by strange chemicals or not in-
vaded by strange chemicals, is caught in a situation which says
plainly: fight or run. The individual who is to become schizophrenic
can do neither. He hangs on, digs in, breaks finally, unable to meet
stress. What is stress? Stress is a situation which you have not
learned to meet and which terrifies you, occurring in a place you
cannot leave.

The Hook Operators were new in my life when they appeared
in Knox. They represented a type of human behavior that horri-
fied me because it was so new and vicious, and which paralyzed
mc because I had no idea whatever of how to deal with it. The be-
havior patterns o£ the people I had known all my life were funda-
mentally decent patterns formed from principles and codes that had
been built into individuals. Coming upon the Hook Operators suddenly
was something like turning a calm winding country road and
finding mysdf in a nightmarish jungle. I had had no training for
journeying through jungles.

I am afraid we can not change the broad-scope reality here, either via our thoughts or revolutionary action. Creating a safe niche, a strategic enclosure of a sort, works. And yet, while enjoying it's safety, we must teach our children to navigate through life's jungles, almost like a branch of human knowledge.

Because bullying is here to stay. There will not alsways be an adult on the playground to break up the fight. When bullies grow up, it's a level playing field.

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