“Bullying Doesn’t Stop Until The Target Is Dead”
My first essay about societal bullying dynamics.
A clarification before we get into it: this essay about bullying is an exploration of what happens if you stay. In the real world, people usually realise they must up sticks and start over elsewhere lest a terrible fate befall them, and so bullying is an effective strategy for eliminating people.
Dave Chappelle taught me the worst thing to call someone is crazy,
dismissing all the pain that plagues them in one word
just to avoid confrontation with yourself
Here’s the psychology of the average person. Such a person’s main concern is eir own reputation. If ey is ever called out for anything related to bullying/social abuse, then that’s a big reputational threat for em that doesn’t go away unless ey makes amends. But amends can’t be squared with resentment for eir victim, indeed the same feeling that led em to bully in the first place, now infused with what it’s cost them. So instead, ey is incentivised to undermine as much of the foundation of the claims and credibility of the accuser as possible.
It plays out like a game of life. If the victim’s social standing is good, the pathogens are kept out, but anytime the shield is breached, the swarming starts. It’s a good time to delete any apologies and say to the victim, “stop hitting yourself”. As the factual consensus shifts beneath the victim’s feet, the victim becomes more and more distressed and erratic – but that actually means it’s working. Normal observers are looking for stability, since it’s easier to befriend and fit in. Stability is offered by the façade of the bully, in contrast to the insanity of the alienated victim, which becomes cause to dismiss the victim’s experiences and pain as something ey made up.
So there begins a chain reaction of observers emotionally connecting with bullies, and then observers with observers, each seeking to accept the last’s worldview in exchange for bonding, and so participating in the gaslighting needed to erase the original trauma.
So quite curiously, to me at least, there is no empathetic response in the bullies to draw them closer to making amends. Likewise, no inkling in the observers to seek out the red pill. Rather, they’re all home free once the victim can no longer say anything, once what the bullies did can no longer be articulated. And once they’re forced by social convention to respect the dead, only then does the bullying finally stop.
Telling humans to stop bullying is a bit like telling ducks to stop raping. It’s strictly prohibited by their evolutionary fitness. Your biggest threat as a human is your victim, because if you get exiled then the children won’t be yours. If you kill the victim then you kill the story, thus avoid exile and then they will be yours.