CivicsFundamentals-001-Bullying

Bullying is the topic for the very first OnCivics blog because, broadly, this blog aims to improve the reader’s life through civics, and yes, having the reader understand and identify bullying behavior is actually key to the confidence needed in 2024 to setting enforceable boundaries that will improve the likelihood of a better life, even if the reader is not personally the target of bullying behavior.  It is the right place to start because:

Resisting bullying behavior broadly will make your life better, and of those around you.

In 3024, a thousand years after this was written, the author assumes that bullying was still the best choice for the first blog entry because it is linked to these additional, forthcoming blog topics: War & Politics, Negotiation, the Social Contract, and Violence.  And because it is linked to violence, it is linked to conservative political movements that are adjacent to fascism.  But mostly, bullying behavior is linked to Power, and thus to Character (human nature).  By understanding bullying behavior (and we strive to always describe *behavior*), the reader has insight into all of these future blog post/topics.  All of these are critically important to every human community.  And provided that these things are still true, that they still have faithfulness to enduring truth, they are to be discussed for a thousand years or more.

Bullying behavior is linked to plethora of problems that negatively affect humans throughout the world in 2024.

This blog, from OnCivics, seeks to be the single most positively impactful force for civics education in the history of the entire world (goal), with the belief that every human will one day assert that every human being deserves to live a life free from injustice (vision), with the temerity to claim that these ideas accurately reflect the natural behaviors of humans interacting at large scale (reflecting truth), thereby illuminating the path to each person having all the blessings that their own hands could possibly create, both without artificial limitations from others and also without harming others (ideal), and being integral to the process by which a society best governs itself (and always, centered around truth).

OnCivics seeks to be *THE* source (well… collection) of wisdom about human nature that leads to prosperity within societies for all of time.

Does one need to read much of this blog?  Not if one cares little or nothing about their own prosperity, happiness, or wealth, or the prosperity of their offspring, or of posterity, and thus only if one cares almost zero about the sacrifices made by countless nameless men and women throughout history to give this amazing opportunity to the people of the United States of America, starting with the men at the cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where our greatest President said that it was beyond mere humans’ abilities to add or subtract from many who gave some and some who gave all so that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from this earth.

The fruits of self-government have only been known to less than 1% of all of humanity, and it has produced the single greatest uplift to prosperity and standard of living ever.

Using data from 2020, this author once demonstrated that there were something like only 31 countries that had more than 1 million people and an average per-capita income above $10 USD per hour.  Assume 40 hours a week (a USA standard, btw), and 52 weeks a year (paid vacation or work the whole time), likely using PPP, and the result was this – be Singapore, be one of five oil rich countries, or be a western-style democracy (25 of them).

$10 an hour is seen by 2024 standards as being subsistence living in the USA.  Alive, but unable to afford luxuries, and also, maybe compromising on medicine vs food, definitely compromising on where to live (as this is very pricey to 2024 readers in the USA), with little safety net or reserves, and transportation is probably a perpetual challenge (unless there are quality local services, which is not common).  And if you have several children, $10 an hour is profoundly insufficient.  At the time of this writing, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, but many high cost of living states or cities have much higher legal minimums than that.

The USA in 2020 or 2024 is much higher than $10 per hour for its average citizen on per-capita income.  Much. 

The USA has been the land of opportunity for nearly two hundred years.  Why?  We’re so glad you asked…

Checks & Balances will be a future blog entry, and while many already understand the concept, few alive today are behaving like they truly grasp the implications of breaking them, how they have recently been broken, and most importantly, how this result imperils the life, liberty and happiness of pursuit of so many humans, let alone residents of the USA.

Throughout the 236 year history of the US Constitution, it was never assumed to be perfect, as it was emended before it was even ratified.  It is a living document that should always be adjusted to reflect the truth of human nature.  And when it fails to reflect human nature, there is a gap – and that gap might be exploited by fallible humans, and then the government might fall short of its purpose.  (This is foreshadowing, for sure.)

Failures in self-government hurt people, for sure.  But the correct lesson is to honestly strive to improve it, not throw it out.

Is human nature such that when a person is given unlimited power, that person’s behavior ends up corrupted?  Well, the Federalist papers believed that, “if men were Angels, there would be no need of government, and if Angels ran the government, there would be no need of limits (of Checks & Balances)”  So…Yes.  Rather unambiguously.

To give the reader some small but valuable knowledge about bullying behavior before going further would be to say this:  Bullying is fundamentally about grabbing power and using an existing hierarchy to do so.  There is much more about bullying behavior that will be discussed later at appropriate length, but at its essence, bullying behavior is about acquiring or maintaining power in a hierarchy. 

The concentration of power without checks and balances is not sustainable long term.

With that (intentionally partial) definition of bullying behavior, consider these current conflicts around the globe:

• Civil strife in Brazil, Venezuela, the USA, Hungary, India, Turkey, the Philippines (under Duterte, but maybe less so now)
• Fascist adjacent political movements in European democratic societies
• The Russo-Ukranian war, the Israeli-Gaza-Lebanese war, and the civil wars involving Syria, Haiti, the Rohingya, the Uighurs, and Sudan
• Drug cartels in Mexico and trans-national crime stretching to the south
• The causes of migrants fleeing Africa or South America…and the resulting difficulties in the countries they migrate to.

The OnCivics blog submits a claim that bullying behavior is present in all of them, and that this presents an opportunity to reduce the conflicts or drive them to a lower state of agitation by exploiting an understanding of bullying behavior.

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This blog entry will refer to two published external sources, which themselves are just notes of two YouTube videos of two scientists who have spent decades in their fields of research.  Additionally, there will be some experiences shared by the author both of being bullied, and of proto-bullying behavior by the author – shared for purposes of transparency and illuminating any possible bias that might interfere with the intent to identify and reveal truth.  No, the author does not need to go to confession for absolution – that has already arrived (or not) from searching one’s soul, and perhaps, as a Catholic, after he completed a  sacrament.

Finally the reader will be asked to bring to bear their own personal experiences and understanding of human nature.  It is not a requirement that the reader agree with total alignment of everything written, but it should be directionally true.  If things are in total conflict with the reader between their lived experiences and what they are reading then something is wrong; if it mostly rings true, then that is a resounding success for just the first blog entry.  This is a series of blog entries that support one another.  Judge not one Federalist Paper alone by itself in a vacuum.

External source number one is from a 2013 lecture by Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, wherein he discusses specifically his time observing baboons in their wild habitat.  There are many videos where Dr. Sapolsky is interviewed by leading YouTube channels, and where they discuss his baboon research – Hubermanlab, “The Rest Is Politics” with Rory Stewart & Alastair Campbell, and even Jordan Peterson, all of which have been reviewed by the author.  But Dr. Sapolsky’s 2013 classroom lecture is the video most structured around the baboons and hierarchies, so that is the source that is specifically used by this video.  If there is a conflict between videos, let us defer to Dr. Sapolsky – the person who did the research.

External source number two is a 97 minute interview by the Modern Wisdom channel by Chris Williamson of Dr. Tony Volk, a multidiscipline researcher at the Volk lab on children and childhood at Brock University in Canada.  During the editing process, the author discovered an interview on “The Dissenter” channel, episode #941 also with Tony Volk, also about an hour long.  The “Dissenter” interview had been posted to YouTube six months ago.  Oops!  More (post publication) research…But when the writer sat down, he believed (mistakenly) that the MW channel was the only hour length video on YouTube where Dr. Volk was interviewed.

Also, in the editing process of adding timestamps (x:yy) from the videos to this document, the author found he had to end up citing more than just the 2013 lecture from Dr. Sapolsky to add supports to key sentences that kept the flow, so a 3^rd video is cited – from “The Rest Is Politics” interview with Dr. Sapolsky from Feb 13, 2024.

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Every entry in this blog will call upon the reader to consider the following definition of the word, “Legitimacy” – a state of righteousness, of justness, of appropriateness such that it has broad social acceptance within a given culture.  Legitimacy is subject to being modified by perceptions such that something that de jure has full legitimacy gets lowered, or that something that lacks full legitimacy gets uplifted to (perceived) full legitimacy status.

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For the OnCivics blog, this is the definition of bullying behavior:

• An act of aggression or profound confrontation
• By someone above the bottom of a hierarchy (who thus has some power)
• For the purpose of sending a message to the rest of the hierarchy
• Which is unpleasant or undesirable for the target,
• Who by definition must be lower on the hierarchy.

This definition applies to adults in global political economics.  Earlier, we wrote a poor man’s definition of bullying behavior as “grabbing power, and using an existing hierarchy to do so.”  In this way, the OnCivics definition would appear to be different from the one used by Dr. Volk, which was ambiguous or at least not definitive about requiring a hierarchy.  Note that Dr. Volk is focused on children and childhood; often the hierarchy of the children is in the school or the social environment of the children, and it is not the choice of the child to exist in the hierarchy or not.  The child cannot just make a choice to change schools as a means of rejecting that hierarchy (often just to go to another school with perhaps a similar hierarchy but different individuals) as they are not yet fully enfranchised with the agency of adults.  Perhaps this is why the two definitions differ; otherwise, we state that our definition came from thinking deeply about the articulated thoughts of Dr. Volk’s work.

Furthermore, Dr. Volk’s (loose) definition involves “doing harm”, and of “unknown intent”.  Specifically, Dr. Volk is scientifically correct in stating that intent is difficult to know/ascertain/prove, and thus he leaves intent off of his definition, whereas we most definitely state that it is to gain power (or status, which could be exchanged for power in certain circumstances).  This is the unscientific choice of the author, which he is loath to do.  Why?  Both because he admires scientific rigor (loathing), but also because it is effectively true that for adults, this is a power grab (much simpler in communicating a point).  After all, children might just be trying something (and thus, intent may not wholly be to gain power), but adults?  Who believes adults don’t know this is about power (effectively true)?  As Chris Williamson said in the podcast, “those kids do it for personal gain; they do it to gain status.” (or something to that effect).  Yes, that is effectively true.  That’s a reasonable statement most people would support.  But scientifically?  Dr. Volk’s data probably cannot be used to *prove* that, so Dr. Volk does not, and we’d like to protect his scientific integrity by not over claiming something he does not claim.

Speaking more of science

The reader is encouraged to review the notes of Dr. Sapolsky’s 2013 lecture posted to YouTube.  Or if the source material is available, to view the original material oneself.  As a summary, note that Dr. Sapolsky is a multi-disciplinary researcher who spent 30+ summers in the Serengeti in Kenya observing the same troop of baboons (7:40 in an interview by “The Rest Is Politics”).  In his time there, he used a method of blowgun darts on male baboons (almost exclusively) that “knock the baboon out” (put it to sleep via anesthesia; 11:10 to after 12:32 in the video from his lecture) to enable him to take biological blood samples from a given target baboon, whereupon he used a hand-cranked centrifuge and sent his samples out to reputable labs for chemical analysis.  In his research, he was able to observe many different baboons in many different situations and probably even witness the full lifespan of several baboons but also take biological measurements of them and draw some profound correlations.

Dr. Sapolsky found that the bio-chemical stress markers of a male baboon who was low on the hierarchy and a human who was in the throes of psychological depression were remarkably similar.

One of the more important single sentences to be remembered from his work is this:  probably 50% of all of the aggression he witnessed in Africa in the baboon society was by one member of a tribe to another in something he named “displacement” aggression (9:47), which might be known to humans by the name, “kicking the puppy”.

What is displacement aggression?  One of the highest ranking baboons in the hierarchy loses a conflict with another high ranking male baboon, and then runs after a slightly lower baboon (who knows he’s lower), who runs away scared and then slashes at the butt of yet another baboon (who also likely knows he’s even lower) who makes an aggressive move towards anyone else lower than him that is handy – even if it is a female (who is always lower than any pubescent male), who likely then takes a swipe at a large child, who may then slap a baby baboon, all in the span of 15 seconds.  Almost like lightning, the aggression cascades (it is/was displaced) – not back at the (stronger but deserving) original baboon, but instead (displaced) to a weaker (innocent but conveniently located) baboon.

In more than one video, Dr. Sapolsky testifies to this phenomenon, and what is happening here?  In this situation there is a hierarchy, and most all of the members know where they stand.  Then a trigger event happens, where one of them suffers a public loss.  A chain reaction ensues, where each baboon that suffers a public ‘loss’ experience seems compelled to transfer or displace that loss to another nearby handy and lesser target, and publicly ‘win’ for themselves, causing aggression to cascade down the hierarchy until it has reached the powerless and defenseless bottom of the hierarchy.  And all of it happens very rapidly – less than a minute.

The animals behave as if there is a scoreboard visible to everyone that reads the number of times someone (a baboon) has been demeaned (lost) and has demeaned some other baboon (won) and no one wants to have a point added in the “loss” column without immediately adding something in the “win” column.

Note that the “win” column to most humans would feel … perverse, given time and distance to reflect. Almost sadistic.  But then, these are wild animals in the plains of the Serengeti, and they may not reflect backwards on events as humans might.  One of the main reasons this feels perverse to humans is that we like to believe we have evolved social structures and morals and reason and would ask about the legitimacy of smacking a bystander just because a human was angry or lost some conflict.  But the human name for behavior like this is ‘kicking the puppy’, which some people do when they get angry – say after a fight in the family or a bad day at work. 

‘Kicking the puppy’ is not something everyone practices, but some do.  Some people may practice it once and then stop, never to resume.  Some humans, they may have been raised in a world where their parents, well, for lack of a better word, regularly ‘kicked the puppy’.  And maybe, they don’t realize that they have a choice to stop it, but some do stop.  Maybe it has not yet occurred to everyone to say to themselves, “This poor behavior ends with me.”

Does displacement aggression meet the OnCivics definition of bullying?  We must admit that our definition of bullying behavior applies only to humans, and we find that limitation  inescapable.

But ignoring the human-to-baboon jump, it is reasonable to assume that the first displacement act of aggression by a ‘losing’ baboon is done because:

• They just ‘lost’ to some other baboon, and
• Other baboons saw it happen (loss of social status), and
• Yes, they are angry or mad about it.  Also – why not just smack someone else (well, some other baboon) to assert, “hey, I still have power.”
  • Other baboons witnessing their subsequent aggressive act will accrue them some power within the hierarchy – or perhaps cause them to forget or lose track of the preceding “loss”.

Note that Dr. Sapolsky specifically refers to this behavior as one of the four that can alleviate stress per numerous studies on say 20+ different social animal species.  He calls it an outlet for anger, or the like.  No, he does not praise or elevate it as a choice for humans, as after all, this is about animal behavior – specifically his observations were of baboons in the wild in a nature preserve in the Serengeti.  As a bystander baboon who became the target of aggression by some more powerful baboon, they relieve stress by … doing to some other (also innocent) baboon what was just done to them.  Here Dr. Sapolsky is withholding judgment scientifically, just as this blog seeks to do at times.

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The behavior of bullying is about grabbing or maintaining power and doing so within a hierarchy.  When the aggressive behavior is done to someone lower in the hierarchy, the risk of blow-back on the aggressor is low – a point which will be examined more in a moment.  And if the community sees the aggression, a clear message is sent – “don’t mess with me.  I have power, and I will use it to keep or improve my status.”

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At the risk of being repetitive: The first baboon target of “displacement” aggression suffered a public “loss”.  In effect, he was called out.  Is he a zero?  Is he more than zero?  Is he a baboon to be reckoned with? People (or rather, other baboons) might think that first loser – that guy might be weak.  But there’s a solution to the problem of being perceived to be weak – by being aggressive to someone else (5:01).  Now people (baboons) don’t remember his weakness, they remember his act of aggression – by getting a public “win” at the expense of a nearby victim.  Or the ‘loss’ is balanced by a subsequent ‘win’, using perverse logic.  And so on.

For those who did not read the notes of Dr. Sapolsky’s lecture, here is a partial summary:

Consider what it means to be a male at the bottom of the hierarchy.  You’re probably new to this tribe.  You may not survive.  Do you have any friends?  Maybe some males who came to this tribe from your birth tribe years ago?  Maybe?  You have no control.  You have no predictability, other than the idea that any other male can probably assume he can take things from you.  You have no profound social connections.  You have no alliances.  You have almost zero outlets for releasing stress.

These four things all indicate stress:

• Lack of control
• Lack of predictability
• Lack of community & connection
• Lack of outlets

(6:04)

Bio-chemically, Dr. Sapolsky said baboons in this state had three similarities:

• Their biological response to threats was slow to respond. (Bad!)
• Their gluco-corticoids were elevated (bio-chemical stress indicators.  Cortisol is a stress hormone which alleviates temporary pain but causes long term damage to your body – Bad!)
• Their biological response to the departure of stress was slow to respond (to the absence, departure – Bad!)

(12:54)

Basically, you don’t respond fast enough to stress, and you have elevated stress hormones, and then you stay stressed after stress events have ended.  And constant stress is exhausting.  In fact, in humans, left with chronic/constant stress, they become depressed.

Baboons in an unstable hierarchy *all* had highly elevated stress unless they had their own pro-social connections or were insulated from the instability.

Basically, just like depressed humans, all of the baboons struggle to deal with a turbulent hierarchy – even the ones allegedly on the top of the hierarchy – and it biologically wears them out.

When that wildcard anti-social baboon came in and upended the hierarchy, Dr. Sapolsky had already gone through half of the tribe, and was able to get some “before/after” measurements and lo-and-behold, the high ranking male baboons who normally would have bio-chemically been living a pleasant existence because of their high status…were just like lowly, newly-arrived, bottom-of-the-hierarchy young male baboons.  Even the normally high ranking male baboons were stressed out.

Remember this – what stresses out the members of a hierarchy?

• Lack of control
• Lack of predictability
• Lack of connection
• Lack of outlets to release stress

What happens to someone ( a human) who is the target of bullying behavior?  Well

• Someone higher in the hierarchy has selected them to be a target for something unpleasant and public (Lack of control, predictability, and this possibly breaks connection)
• They do it once.  They do it twice.  They do it publicly.  They do it as they please.
  • Other observers (humans) sometimes enjoy the bullying behavior – maybe because they’re friends with the bully, or they are pleased that they won’t be the target, or what-have-you.  This is a human pile-on, something the author did not hear in Dr. Sapolsky’s work with baboons.
• A public message is sent: “I can do this all day long.  I am strong.  This person is weaker than me.  Ha! Ha! Ha!”
• Probably, the human lacks empathy.  As a character trait, this is “Honesty/Humility” in the HEXACO model (newer, more improved than ‘OCEAN” model – HEXACO works better as one adds more cultures than just “American”, and see the “H” in Dr. Volk’s work)
• A perception takes hold: The person who is creating the behavior gains in power and status.  The person who is the target may likely lose status, but has no positive outcomes.
• It is reasonable to infer that this person (the target) suffers biochemical stress responses, and is now someone who has to deal with increased risk of depression or mental illness in their life.

Why might they have this messy reality? 

• Lack of control. 
• Lack of predictability. 
• A likelihood of lower connections (as bullied humans often start or end up isolated). 
• And few outlets for relieving stress.

Yuck.  Triple yuck.  Vomit inducing, perhaps.  Human or baboon.

If you’ve been the target of bullying behavior, be kind to yourself.  The author is.  Hopefully today, you have safety.  If not, get connected, immediately.  Nurture those connections.  Exercise is an outlet.

What happens when a new dog arrives in a pack of dogs.  Is there a process where a new ranking is set in the hierarchy?  (hint: We think so)

When an army executes a coup d’etat, and the new commander names his generals that report to him, is there some jockeying for position amongst those generals to curry favor with the chief?  (hint: we think so)

Does bullying behavior happen in almost every culture?  Well, Dr. Volk can confirm it crosses cultures in these four countries – the USA, Canada, China, and the Netherlands, and the inference is yes, it is global. (hint: we think so, even though we prefer to have scientific data that affirms it without question)

Some animal species have high ranking males practicing infanticide – they will kill off young males when they first arrive in a grouping (pride/pack/herd/what-have-you), but stop that practice once their own offspring are running about.  This is a male-adaptive behavior to propagating one’s own genetics.  It is a brutal reality of a jungle of nature.

Furthermore, there is a “Bruce Effect”, known amongst lionesses that smell two different male scents while pregnant, that sometimes leads their bodies to begin spontaneous abortions (Bruce, 1960, Packer and Pusey, 1982).  Why do they have spontaneous abortions?  This is an adaptive biological behavior to propagate the female genetics, the theory goes.  If male #2 has killed male #1, and the cub she is carrying in her uterus is from male #1, and male #2 is likely to kill it not long after birth, her body essentially decides that it is not worth the (biological) expense to go through the whole process of bringing a cub to term that is only going to be killed by infanticide by the new King of the pride.  Birthing cubs is biologically expensive, requiring extra food and risk for the lioness.  Why put effort into birthing a cub, when the new King doesn’t want that cub?  Spontaneously, they go through a new cycle of being sexually available for mating and making cubs with male #2, who is now King of the pride.  That promotes the genes of the female, thereby adapting to infanticide behavior by males to just get faster to producing offspring with the new dominant male.  It is a cruel reality of a jungle of nature.

Bullying behavior happens.  It is unlikely in slugs, or snails, or insects.  It almost routinely requires a hierarchy, which means it probably requires social animals, which mostly means mammals, and if not, then only birds, too.

Do lizards bully other animals?  Probably not – they aren’t social.  Yes, they have ‘fight or flight’ responses of the amygdala.  Hmm….So let us briefly detour for some biological knowledge:

There are three Kingdoms – Plant, Animal, and Fungus.  Under the Animal kingdom is the Phylum “Chordata” – things with a physical backbone/vertebrae.  Fish, Amphibians, Lizards, Avians (Birds) and Mammals all have backbones, and are listed above in the order in which they evolved, meaning that mammals are last, and also, more developed, more biologically advanced.

Lizards have structures just like the human Amygdala, which is responsible for fear reactions.  The ‘lizard brain’ or parts of human nervous systems which match that of lizards (per a simplistic model that is useful for understanding despite being less-than-fully-scientific) are believed to govern automatic biological functions – say breathing, reflexes when a doctor thumps your knee, and perhaps even a sneeze.  This ‘lizard’ like part of your nervous system controls your breathing and heart rate. Next, the ‘Limbic’ system is believed to have fully evolved in mammals, and involves emotions – happiness, sadness, and other things which involve being social beings.  It is unclear how many or which birds may have some or more developed limbic systems, but certainly mammals widely and broadly have Limbic systems, and lizards/reptiles do not.  No lizards make “puppy eyes”, or act lonely or sad the way a pet dog does (mammal).

Then the ‘Neo-Cortex’ evolved, and it is believed to be responsible for the capability of abstract thought.  Can your dog figure out how to unlock a gate?  All animals have some neo-cortex.  More on the neo-cortex later.

And while humans are the species with the most neo-cortex nerves, all mammals are social animals.  Are mice social?  Yes.  Are possums, and cats, and kangaroos, and koalas, and dogs?  Yes. Wolves have a pack.  Elephants have a herd.  Lions have a pride.  And humans have a tribe.  Some birds may be social.  But almost all mammals are social.  And if you’re going to joke about cats being anti-social, well, maybe house cats, yes, but think of big cats (lions, tigers, jaguars) in the wild, not your house cat (which, well, may be superior to all of us.  Possibly)

Back to lizards.  Do they have fear?  Yes, they have amygdala-like structures.  But lizards are not inherently social animals.  Humans get serotonin and other hormones and neurotransmitters when we smile at other people.  And!  The people we smile at?  They get serotonin, too.  Social.  Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin – these social hormones exist in a great many mammals (future blog post).  Mammals are social.

Sharks are not social.  Sharks are a type of fish, which are earlier than Amphibians, and earlier than Lizards.  Sharks do not hunt or live in packs.  Dolphins live in packs.  Er, pods.  Dolphins are mammals that breathe air at the surface. Is there a hierarchy in the dolphin pod?  That would seem likely.  That would seem to be part of the natural world.  Dolphins can claim ocean territory and kick a shark out of it – why? – because they form teams and are social and communicate and work as a team.  The bigger, faster, more powerful shark mostly acts alone.  The shark does not coordinate with other sharks.  The shark is not social.  The social dolphins can push an otherwise bigger animal away because they coordinate with one another.

Recall that Dr. Volk’s definition of bullying behavior does not evoke a hierarchy – perhaps because children (which is the age-group that Dr. Volk studies) do not have agency in the hierarchy they are in (or not).  They’re automatically in a hierarchy – the school’s social scene.  But the author posits this question: What is the point of picking a target that is outside of a hierarchy?  The author infers both a lower reward and also a higher risk if the target is outside of an understood hierarchy.  Payoff from “picking on” someone outside the hierarchy goes down, an the risk of loss from doing so goes up.

Recall from above the ‘wild newcomer’ to a baboon hierarchy.  Is the baboon tough?  Or weak?  Dunno.  Is any newcomer tough or weak?  Dunno yet.  We can observe size, we can infer muscles, we can observe relative speed, so maybe we have a rough sense.  Is this newcomer actually a beast?  Or is this newcomer just all bark and no bite?

If you’re the first to take on this newcomer, or any newcomer – did you win because you are tough, or because they are weak?  And if you lose in a conflict with a newcomer – did you lose because you are weak, or they are strong?  The hierarchy knows *you*, and not the newcomer.  The newcomer is still (somewhat) of an unknown – still to be determined.  But you?  You just lost, dude.  You’re going down, that much is certain.  And if you won, okay – but did your esteem in the hierarchy go up a bunch?  Did it go up as much as maybe you ‘deserved’?  Here that depends on perception of the newcomer.  Was the newcomer actually really tough, and you as a baboon were just tough enough?  Maybe you won, but didn’t look impressive in the win. 

The risk-reward of bullying behavior is more motivating to a bully if the target is wisely chosen (in a Machiavellian sense) from inside a known hierarchy, and much less rewarding if the bully unwisely makes a risky selection from outside the hierarchy.

College football beauty contests:

If a college football team plays and wins 12 games, and wins them all by 30+ points, is that a great college football team?  Dunno.  Maybe all 12 don’t even know how to complete a forward pass.  Maybe they can’t tackle, either. Now…were any of those teams ranked?  What number?  Were any of those wins against tough teams?  What was their best win?  What is the strength of schedule?

So…a college football ranking is almost like a hierarchy?

Not really.  But it implies one.  The voters vote as if #1 could beat #2, who could beat #3, who could beat #4.  Just this week, the once mighty Alabama Crimson Tide went to Stillwater, Oklahoma and lost, 24-3.  They also lost to the very very mighty…Vanderbilt Commodores?  No, Vandy just isn’t seen as mighty.  In 2024, if you lose to the Vanderbilt University Commodores, you are not a real football power, or you’re in a rebuilding year.  Defeating teams that are perceived to be strong is a feather in your cap.  Losing to teams perceived to be weak is cause for derision.  Losing 24-3 when last year you played for the Championship…yeah, how the mighty have fallen.  You see, if you scored only 3 points, you didn’t even make it to the goal, the end zone, you only got kinda close.  Champions score touchdowns, not just one measly field goal.  But your opponent?  They got to the end zone three times and they also got close enough to score a field goal of their own.

For decades, the University of Alabama has scheduled a late-season patsy.  This gives them a low-stress environment to mostly rest their star players.  They do this almost always just before they play the last game of the regular season.  They pay other small universities for the privilege of getting beat on campus at Tuscaloosa, AL.

Maybe the author is just jealous.  Arizona State cannot do this because there are not enough nearby universities with patsy football teams out west.  ASU cannot ask some weak football university to come get paid to lose because out west, the population is less dense, so there’s a paucity of universities, and thus, not enough patsies.

But there are plenty out east.  By scheduling a patsy late in the season, they guarantee a non-loss.  Why is that valuable?  If you have a non-loss, you … didn’t lose.  If teams ahead of you in the rankings *actually lose*, then you go up.  Why?  You didn’t lose.  The Miami Hurricanes lost late this year.  Their 12 game record is 10-2.  The Alabama Crimson Tide didn’t lose late.  Their record is 9-3.  One of their losses was bad.  To Vandy.  But Miami lost later in the season.

You can lose in August.  You can lose in September.  But the losses they remember happen in November.  It is tough to lose late and still have a resume that looks good for a shot at the championship.

So Alabama avoids late losses by chicanery.  And voters don’t penalize Alabama for doing this.  It is a sin to lose late in the football season.  Alabama avoids late losses by scheduling nobodies in November.  This year it was Mercer, 52-7.  Go look it up.  If a college football team loses early, it can recover.  People remember the losses in November.  For decades, Alabama and other SEC teams schedule a late ‘patsy’ so that other teams can  lose late (and they can rise as a result).

Does Alabama admit this is their strategy? Intent? Nope.  Do they do it?  Yes, for decades.  They avoid the punishment of losing late by scheduling one patsy in every November.  For how long?  20+ years.  JFC, which stands for “Jefferson Fried Chicken”

On top of this, the SEC plays only 8 conference games instead of 9 games that the PAC12 used to play (remember: no local universities to play the role of patsy), the Big XII does today, and the B1G just started to play 9.

What’s my point?

College Football is manipulated by manufacturing fewer losses among your conference, and having fewer late losses, so that the SEC can benefit from fewer public “losses”.  Yes, manipulated.

How?  Every loss in a college football season is like ‘being picked on’ in a social hierarchy.  Every time you lose, you go down.  If you beat an opponent, the opponent goes down.  You go up.  How much you go up depends on how tough people thought that opponent was, and how tough people thought you were before the game.  If you’re the first team to beat a team that is perceived to be tough, you go up a bunch.  If after you beat them, they lose all of their games, now your win doesn’t look so special, does it?  If you beat a nobody, and you’re supposed to be tough – well, that was expected, right?  Everyone beats terrible teams.

“Hey, we beat that team over there.”

“Yeah, but look at who they beat.  Nobody.”  (Their strength-of-schedule might be around 80^th  in the country, which is par for the course for Ohio  State University.  Who just lost to the 7-5 Michigan Wolverines).

So here’s an uneven comparison basis:  In some leagues, all of the teams play 9 games against each other.  In other leagues, they only play 8, and usually, the difference is an extra patsy.  The Georgia Bulldogs are an exception, we should note.  They routinely play their in-state rival, Georgia Tech – and that 8 overtime game this year was a marvel for the record books!  It was a tough win.  For which Georgia received marginal credit, but for which they took a profoundly larger risk than Alabama’s win over…Mercer.

If every team in your league plays 9 games against other teams in your league, and a neighboring league only plays 8, then you play games against teams that have 0.5 extra losses.  Because the teams you play have more losses…does that mean you play crappier teams?  Psychologically, it would appear the answer is yes.

Yes.  Mathematically, the answer is yes.  On average, you play teams that lose 0.5 more games.

But the mathematical truth is not because they’re lousy.  Nope.  But because your opponents played more of your other opponents, and one of them had to lose (the half-loss).  Don’t bother making the “but someone had to win” argument.  Why?  When you’re near the top, the “hurt” of a loss is bigger than the “gain” of a win.  Always.  Just win baby?  In order to get to the championship in College football, just don’t lose, baby.  And don’t lose late.  Ask yourself: What counts more – a quality win or a bad loss?  A win against a mediocre team or a last second loss to a quality team?  “Whoa, Nellie!”, in the infamous words of the late, great Keith Jackson.  Tongues are wagging about which team is better and which team got left out and who actually is #1, who is #2, who is #3…

…a lot like the baboons Dr. Sapolsky studied.

Now…Imagine a football team comes from Norway.  They formed over there.  They trained over there.  They have been working on their game for a whole year.  They want to play the 13-0 Georgia Bulldogs, champions of the vaunted SEC league.

And the Norwegians whup them, 35-0.

After that game, Georgia will no longer ranked in the top 5.  Why?  They lost, and they lost badly.  The top five teams are not supposed to lose badly.  We have no idea who or where or what the Norwegian team should have been ranked.  But now…they probably will be ranked in the next college football poll.

If Georgia played an unknown team and lost, then the result is this: they lost a lot of respect in the hierarchy.

What if Georgia had instead won the game, 35-0?  Is that because the Norwegian team was a bunch of nobodies?  Georgia would get almost no credit for beating the first college football team from Europe to play an American team.  Georgia took a risk playing the Norwegians, and got little upside.

Every conflict is a potential to change how you are perceived in the hierarchy – you might go up, go down, or if you’re near the top, just maintain.  But there’s risk in taking on an unknown.  And there’s no reward for defeating an unknown that could be assumed to be a zero.

Thus far we agree:

Pat Tillman was one of the greatest American Heroes from football, and the PAC-12 defensive player of the year award was named after him.

(here, the author is mostly trolling college football fans for the purpose of bringing attention to civics.)  And also:

Hierarchies happen.  Bullying behavior is more likely inside a hierarchy.  Humanity will never not have hierarchies. 

Almost as true – humanity will never not have bullying behavior.  Even if one country were to magically never have bullying behavior inside its boundaries, bullying behavior would still exist outside that country.  And people in the country without it would still have to deal with it, even if only at the soldier and diplomat (and international business executive) levels. And maybe athletes at Olympic events.

So when is bullying behavior okay?  Inside sporting events, at the very least.

It is a part of nature to have to struggle against a bully and overcome bullying behavior.  Stand and fight!  Why not inside sports, when the play is going on?  After the whistle?  No. Inside the game?  Game on.  The time when humans should behave like baboons (short of lethal violence) is inside raw, animal sporting events.

In no way is the author encouraging parents to encourage their children to adopt bullying behaviors.  Nope.

If you’re against the idea of bullying behavior wholesale, please bear with us:

Some cultures are more “honor-based”.  They produce better warriors.  They probably have more bullying.  Compare Southerners in the USA in 2024 to Midwesterners.  In the USA’s civil war in 1860s, the Southerners were more … warlike.  They had a more hierarchical society.  The author presumes the two are linked.  It is not critical to the overall blog post, but perhaps it helps with persuasion.

In most of the wars of the USA, southerners seem to be over-represented amongst our best soldiers at all levels.  The south is … how does one write this nicely … appears to be a more ‘honor-based’ society than say, New York City, and definitely more than Seattle or Des Moines or Denver, but perhaps on par with say, Norfolk VA, Colorado Springs, CO, and San Diego, CA.  Why?  There are military bases in those last three cities, and military personnel are also more warlike.  Hoo-Ahh!

And the South is the best place to recruit a defensive tackle. 

Since my football team is not from the South, it pains me to write this, but it feels like the truth, at least in 2024.  I think the best one ASU ever had was Will Sutton, 3^rd round pick of the Chicago Bears, 2014.

Any human that thinks that we are not animals is under some kind of self-delusion about our true nature.  At the simplest level, we have lizard like behavior that regulates our biological function, and that includes breathing, heart rate, and a fear driven amygdala.  And then we have emotions, which we share with all mammals.  And then we have our abstract neo-cortex, which is what we use to read symbols that form words that compose sentences which communicate ideas that go to things we cannot immediately see but can intuitively understand.  We’d like to say all of our decisions are from the neo-cortex, but that’s folly.  Our behavior uses all three, and honest people admit it to themselves.  They’re even possibly aware when their behavior is driven by lizard nerves, limbic (emotional) nerves, or neo-cortex (abstract) brain cells.  For example, some of the fundamentals of reproduction are absolutely not neo-cortex processes.  Or if they feel cortex-like, you may be doing them awkwardly or incorrectly.

All animals have a neo-cortex.  Primates have larger neo-cortex regions than other mammals, and mammals more than other animals.  Humans, or more specifically the Homo Sapiens that emerged ~ 400,000 years ago to 250,000 years ago, right around the time we started cooking food, have more of a neo-cortex region than other primates (monkeys, gorillas, baboons), and we developed language 80,000 years ago, and agriculture oh, 12,000 years ago, and writing around 5,000 years ago, and alphabets by Carthaginian (Phoenician) seafarers in the Mediterranean around ~2,500 years ago.  The mythological Xi’an culture was from 5,000 years ago.  Base 10 mathematical writing came 1,700 years ago from India, but the numbers 0-9 came from Arabic peoples 1,300 years ago.  The Romans never had a symbol for the quantity “zero” but the Mayans and Aztecs and Mixtecs and Toltecs did, and they understood the moon’s position and where the stars would move to next in a 52 year cycle.

Three hundred years ago there were humans that could float and fly on broomsticks and cast magic spells, and they were all female, so we burned them at the stake and were fortunate to eradicate this vicious type of malevolent human from within our ranks (sarcasm: the idea that early migrants from England to the western hemisphere were so consumed with religious fervor that they convicted females of the crime of witchcraft should be laughable and sad and … in 2024, and we hope it is still laughable in 3024).

Human beings are a particular type of animal that is the animal that is the most evolved into having a neo-cortex and also is the most fooled into believing that it always uses its neo-cortex (when in fact, there are many emotional and/or amygdala-based decisions).

And we have hierarchies.

And we have bullying behavior.

If one is a target of bullying behavior at one church, might one (as an adult) move to another?  If one is a target of bullying at one corporation, might one move to another?  If one is a target of bullying in one culture, might one move to another?

One interesting hypothesis the author holds follows:

• If fascism tends to pervade every aspect of society (assume for the sake of argument it does, even if you don’t yet agree)
• And hierarchies are the mechanism for asserting or grabbing power by bullying behavior,
• Do fascist movements try to force a hierarchy on everything, and thus, make everyone subject to the control of the fascist at the top?  Consciously or not, intentional or not, does that end up being the point?
  • In effect, does bullying behavior become central to the control of fascist political movements?

Scientifically, that is yet unproven speculation by the author.  As someone who aspires to science, respects science, he wishes for people to speak about it as an unproven claim, or to unearth proof of it that has already existed but which the author was simply unaware.

If this is true – if fascist political movements attempt to force an over-arching social hierarchy onto and into every single aspect of life such that bullying behavior becomes instrumental to the control of the society by a fascist leader – then the only way to avoid that is to either block the spread of that over-arching hierarchy, or to leave the country.

Do fascist political movements try to force an over-arching social hierarchy onto every aspect of life, and in so doing, make bullying behavior a guarantor of control by the fascist leader?

But when you leave the fascist country, perhaps one had better hope that war doesn’t follow, like when Jewish people left lands that were occupied by Nazi Germany, only to later become encompassed by Nazi German invasions of yet other countries.  Right?  One can leave a church, or a town, or a job.  But leaving the zone of control of Nazi Germany was not simple.

The author asks the reader to also examine the work of Dr. Tony Volk.  In some ways, we have already examined it – the definition we are using comes almost 1:1 from Dr. Volk’s work, with the addition of “stay in or exit the hierarchy” discussion above.

What else does Dr. Volk report?

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• The behavior is presumed to be global, even though Dr. Volk does not yet have scientific data from every culture in the world.
  • He does have specific data from one study that says it exist across four countries that were specifically compared – the USA, Canada, China, and the Netherlands(12:07).
• Poverty is not a good indicator of bullying behavior, as poverty correlates with lower status in the hierarchy.  What does correlate with increased bullying behavior?  Wealth(36:50).  Why?  Wealthier children are higher on the hierarchy.  They are more likely to have power to wield in the hierarchy.  Poor children are less likely to be high in the hierarchy, and thus, they probably have less opportunity to behave like a bully.
• Nobody particularly likes the person who executes bullying behavior.  Everyone is aware that it is uncomfortable to be the target of the behavior.  Nevertheless, some gravitate towards the bully because they gain something (34:10) from the affiliation – perhaps they don’t like the target, or they like being perceived to be on the ‘winning’ side.  It is in this fashion that the bully profits (at least in the childhood setting done by Dr. Volk).  A message is sent (3:06), “Watch out for me.  I am dangerous.  Be glad I am not picking on you.”  Of course, Dr. Volk’s work involves someone lower on the hierarchy, done by someone higher.  They profit at the expense of the target.
• Bullying behavior as a child correlates to bullying behavior as an adult(35:55).
  • If your hero or idol practices bullying behavior, then there are likely an increase in your bullying behavior (per a study in 2016 in North Carolina, 38:28)
• (19:25 to past 21:55) Bullying is inversely correlated with Honesty and Humility (using HEXACO, which captures something “OCEAN” or the “big 5 personality” test misses).  Essentially, this is empathy for the target (probably this is the author’s opinion and not part of what Dr. Volk scientifically claims).  The implication is that someone with empathy chooses not to use bullying behavior against a target, because they have empathy for the target, and perhaps, children who practice the bullying behavior lack empathy for the target of their bullying.
  • Almost all action heroes from Hollywood movies are high in Honesty/Humility of HEXACO, and thus, are not bullies (33:15).  John Wick – don’t touch his dog.  They have a noble side to them, and that is why audiences like them – they don’t behave like bullies, and the audience makes this distinction.
• There are several axes for bullying, and one of them is physical strength.  The other two are intellectual strength and social skill.
  • (27:27) A very physically powerful man was mercilessly bullied as a child, and it was because he spoke funny and had hearing loss.  The man is Lou Ferrigno, who played the Incredible Hulk in 1980s TV shows with only green paint – all the muscles were really his.  As a child, Lou could not just punch his way out of the bullying – he was being picked on for being socially weak, and his physical strength was useless as a defense.  Presumably there were many allied kids who picked on him, and he simply could not physically solve his problem.
• In Norway (59:23), the government put in place an expensive social program which caused bullying behavior to drop by 30%-40%, which was seen as successful.  More importantly, the program was cancelled 3 years later due to expense, and the bullying behavior came right back, implying (via Dr. Volk’s conclusion) that it was a cost-benefit analysis – if it is easy and profitable, a child might rationally choose to use bullying behavior.  If it is risky, and provides little reward, they likely less so.
  • Presumably, high Honesty/Humility kids will be less tempted, and low Honesty/Humility kids will be more tempted.
• Some people with status can stand up for others who are being bullied and protect them (8:06).  More on this later.
• When puberty arrives, bullying behavior has specific gendered avenues:
  • Males criticize another male’s manliness/masculinity (24:52)
  • Females criticize another female’s chastity
  • Both of these have an evolutionary role – the bully is more likely to procreate and pass along their genes, and the target is less likely to do so.
    • Why would a woman mate with a less masculine male?  Her offspring would be weaker.
    • Why would a male mate with an unchaste female?  Her offspring might not be his offspring, and this will not propagate his genes.
    • Dr. Volk pointed out these as biologically rational reasons for bullying behavior in say, cave-man societies that continues to this day.
• People don’t automatically resent the top members of the hierarchy.  Some of them *make a choice not to behave like bullies*. (1:34:58)
  • This is in line with “Pick on someone your own size.”
  • We tend to respect the people who were high in the hierarchy but make choices *not* to bully, and not to behave like one or positively associate with them, per Dr. Volk’s statement in the interview.

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It should be noted that it is not bullying to challenge someone higher than you in the hierarchy.  Nope.  This is simply aspiring to rise in the hierarchy.  Oh, surely it may not be welcome in a school setting, but in any other setting it could potentially just be a moment when the hierarchy gets updated.  Challenging up is good in football.  It is not necessarily bad in a business environment.  Done the right way, it is acceptable in the military. 

A hierarchy is not necessarily a bad thing.  A military has a hierarchy, and thank goodness, as it makes for clarity in times of both emergency and chaos.  A football team or a sports team has a hierarchy – someone is in charge, there are assistant coaches, and within the athletes themselves, there is often a hierarchy of respect – for those who work hard and show genuine leadership.  A military should be a meritocracy, and if it is, the hierarchy will be mostly stable – especially if it is comprised of professionals.

A sales organization always has a hierarchy.  People who sell more are almost always higher.  Or if not, please send in comments.  The hierarchy might not be just – but mostly, the sales organization wants to sell more.  Sales people are broadly “coin operated” – they expect more rewards for selling more.  A sales organization might have inequity. It might lack legitimacy. But a hierarchy?  Yes, that is sales.  And if it is a good sales organization, it will have legitimacy and integrity.

Of course, some coaches play favorites… And sometimes, the Quarterback only throws the ball to his friends.  Ugh.

The reader is encouraged to think back to the baboons of the Serengeti.  If the hierarchy is stable, #1 beats #2 if they fight, so why fight?  #2 beats #3 if they fight, so why fight?  A stable hierarchy promotes a sort of Burkean order – things seem ‘righteous’, orderly, organized, efficient, and they are handled without drama.  There is probably less “displacement” aggression – as there are probably few challenges in the first place.

But eventually, the hierarchy will need to be updated.  Eventually, the King will grow old.  Eventually, an upstart new baboon will arrive.  Eventually, someone will upset the hierarchy.  A hierarchy that has had a long period of stability may be bursting with excess chaos right under the surface – many actors may be plotting to rise; other actors may have ‘fallen asleep’ that the hierarchy is comprised of wild animals.

Sometimes, the stability of a hierarchy at a school may be upended by a kid moving away, or a new kid that is wealthy moving in.

Hierarchies are natural.  They are abundant in humans and in nature.  They may be stable, they may be just.  They may be erupting, and those are stressful.  The actors in the hierarchy determine if it is miserable for low ranking individuals.

One of the most respectable hierarchies the author has ever seen was inside the sales organization of Intel Corporation before 2018.  The author left by 2018, the author cannot write first hand comments about anything after that.

But what does one do with one Intel CPU?  If you’re a computer geek, maybe you build your own computer.

What does one do with a million Intel CPUs?   One had better be able to put them into machines that can be sold to other people.  Period.

Specifically, the embedded sales force at Intel was quite a merit-based hierarchy, especially when compared with Intel business units.  Embedded marketplaces are for fixed purpose machines – think Automated Teller Machines (ATMs – for dispensing cash from your bank), to self-checkout machines at grocery stores, to rudimentary robotics automation, to wind turbines, to, well, any intelligent fixed-purpose machine.  An Intel embedded sales person had to help his customer sell more of their units with Intel chips in them – or he or she was going to miss their quota.  Get paid less.  And eventually get moved out.

Nobody needed to bully anyone.  Everyone had avenues to success available to them – simply by helping more customers succeed.  Almost every embedded sales leader was truly a leader.  Or at least, that’s what the author believed of the senior people.  And the author had lots of people whispering things to him as the chief-of-staff to the VP of worldwide embedded sales across three years.

There was almost no need for anyone to behave like a bully.  There was almost no reward for being a bully in the sales force there.  You helped your customer succeed, or you didn’t.  You performed, and therefore you advanced, or you didn’t, and you didn’t.  And the sales VP?  He was very widely respected.  Oh, there were more respected people in Intel. But in Embedded?  He was admired.  Broadly.  And did you know what?  Rick Dwyer was a wonderful person to work for.

Did some people complain about Dwyer?  Yes.  Were some of the complaints valid?  Probably.  But they were mostly small.  Rick Dwyer was not a saint.  The pope was not going to canonize him. And he sucked at riding a snow mobile off of a frozen lake.

But was he fair?  Was he diligent at trying to do the right thing, the just thing, the righteous thing for his people and for the customer and for Intel?  Yes.  Broadly, yes.  It was one of the most satisfying, rewarding, fulfilling work experiences ever.  And almost everyone enjoyed working with him.  All around, Rick was admired – both inside the company and outside.  Both inside the sales force and outside.

Rick never practiced bullying behavior.  And almost nobody tried to pull bullying behavior in front of Rick.  Nobody thought it would be rewarded.  Nobody perceived that it would have upside.  Everyone rightly assumed it would be risky.

The author had a very good friend.  A friend most people didn’t know was a friend.  And he and Rick went back-and-forth a couple of times – but always in private.  Rick never went at him in public.

Had Rick gone at him in public, it would have been bullying.  Rick was higher in status.  The author believes that Rick was just stubborn about the friend.  And the author is disappointed, because the friend was doing the right things.  But oh well.  Maybe Rick wasn’t perfect.

Yeah.  Rick wasn’t perfect.  Nobody is.  But OMG, Rick Dwyer was and still is well respected.

Also – it is possible to create legitimacy and just outcomes even if you don’t run the hierarchy.

The only other place to go on this bullying blog is to point out the times when someone protected the author.

The author…had a bigger mouth than his body could support as a school child.  The author…got along better with adults than with kids his own age when in grade school.  The author … was concerned with fairness as a seven year old kid.  Are you surprised?

Many kids wanted to pound the author here and there.  And who could blame them?  The author cannot.  Mostly, tough kids did not pick on the author.  Who did?  Kids about five to ten to fifteen boys higher on the playground.

Yes, other scrawny kids used to pick fights with the author.  If bigger kids came bullying, the author wisely ran away.  Perhaps the author was so much lower on the totem pole that bigger kids did not waste their time with the author.  Dunno. 

But the author sometimes … memory is not precise, but let’s guess the author was more likely to be a pain in the butt to kids his own size for rational reasons.  And sometimes, those kids wanted to fight it out.

Is that bullying by them?  Probably not.  The author…was precocious.  Unwisely loud.  Precise, accurate, factually correct, and likely to be a know-it-all.  From that perspective, maybe the author was guilty of making other kids feel picked on – intellectually.  Maybe the author’s behavior was somewhat akin to bullying behavior on an intellectual level.  Maybe.  Ouch.  I wanted status, but I had none.  Or very little.  This was 1977 to say, 1982.  The author did not have a long term plan to rise in the hierarchy.  The author did not have a long term plan at all, and was not trying to rise per-se.  Everyone knew the author was low on the totem pole.  Perhaps the author was just trying to give (intellectually) as good as he got (physically).  Maybe.

The author moved to a new school in 2^nd grade – the author was about to turn seven years old, and all of the other kids would turn 8 during that year.  He was, in essence, a year younger than most other kids and all other males.  He was almost always the skinniest.  Frequently the lightest.  And the only way he kept up was that for his age, he was of decent height.  So that meant on the school yard, he was slower.  Less coordinated.  Less powerful.  Less athletic.  The author did not skip a grade.  He was just entered into school very young.  This is almost the opposite of the practice of sports “redshirt” – holding the male back by one year so that he is one more year developed when competing against other boys in the same school in athletic pursuits.  See Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers.

Given that education was paramount to his parents and grandparents and his extended family was all educators, the author was always expected to work hard at academics.  And, the author lacked the social skills to keep his academic prowess to himself.  The author was prolific at informing other people when they got the problem wrong, and that he got it correct (usually).  At home, being academically proficient was praised, and that’s what the author was good at.  At school, it was social skills and for boys, also athletics.  Those he was terrible at.

There were many days, probably in 5^th grade, where the author went to play chess at lunch.  Several of the author’s friends had moved away between 4^th and 5^th grade, and being out there on the sports playground where the author had little skill – that was almost zero fun.  Nope.  That had to be avoided.  The author learned to love Chess.  Thinking back on those days, he had to be away from playing ball at lunch, even if he wanted to be out there.

The author was perplexed that outside of his cousins’ parents, other kids parents did not have such a focus on education and academic achievement.  The author was puzzled as a boy as to why other kids were apparently less-than-interested in getting the right answers, or in being informed that their answers were incorrect.  And since that was more to his skill set, he was naturally inclined to see the world that way.  Consequently, the author had a great many physical challenges from other boys who were bigger.  Many times they bluffed.  He was in something like seven or eight fist fights.  The few he picked – he lost (thank goodness!)  Many of those he didn’t pick – he lost in a decision – black eye (loser), bloody nose (winner).  The last physical fist fight was in 1985 – in 8^th grade.  The author was 13 years old.

The stress will eat you up.  You cannot think straight.  You cannot concentrate.  The day of a fight, your whole biology is responding.  You are chemically a different person.  The thoughtful, curious, inquisitive, playful, adventurous, imaginative boy was absent on fight days.

The fights were tough. But what was worse?  Having everyone at school walk up to you to tell you, “Ha ha!  You lost!”  Even your friends would say it to you nicely – “Sorry you lost.  The other guy was a jerk.  I really wanted you to win, so he would have shut up.”

Most of those were not the result of bullying behavior, though.  Threatening behavior  happened, and mostly, the author ran away.  He was little and speedy.  Mass matters in a fist fight.  He ran away, and usually insulted the intelligence of a big-but-dim-witted wanna-be bully.  He countered with a strength of wit, of intellect.  He wasn’t the target of the highest-on-the-social totem pole kids – nope.  He was the target of kids ten to fifteen kids higher in the hierarchy.  Interesting…but only of the ones that were smart, or within shouting distance of smart.  The author just realized something as this was being written.

But what cannot happen is for one to live a long life perpetually running away from a bully if one day, a person begins to rise in the hierarchy.  One no longer feels trapped.  Stress will grind you down, and either you stand and fight, or die young of stress.  When you stand and fight after a small but measured rise in status, it relieves stress.  OMG does it relieve stress.  Maybe it adds control and predictability.  Regardless, in life, one only gets one shot to do it right.  And if you do it right, that’s enough.  Emiliano Zapata once wrote, “Es mejor morir a pie que vivir de rodillas.” – translation –

“It is better to die on one’s feet than to live on your knees.”

The author believes strongly that when someone lives their whole life being bullied, they will one day likely draw a line in the sand and say, “No more.  Nada más.”  That is if they are presented with an opportunity, a chance, to make a meaningful stand, and that opportunity happens after a rise in status.  The author supports that choice in wise conditions.

Now… there was bullying behavior that was a real threat to the author.  Sometimes, a second kid was ready to jump in and fight the author as well.  But a third kid stepped in and said, “No.  Before you go fight him, you fight me.”

That third kid never fought *for* the author.  He just stopped other kids from piling on once the author was already in a fight.  This third kid was powerful.  He had status.  He never started fights, but he always finished them.  Unlike the author, he liked to eat as a kid.  He had mass.  Muscle.  Coordination.  Skill.

And some of the bullies, they were disappointed.  They said, “Hey, get out of my way.  I’m just going for Joe.”

And the third kid said, “I know.  But me first.”

And none of those kids – the kids who wanted to pile on top of the author while he was already in a fight – where they wanted to make it two-on-one – they never got the chance.  The third kid stopped them.  How?  One simple word:

“No.”

None of them wanted to fight that third kid.  That third kid, who was strong, who was capable, who was an eater, who had muscle and skill – nobody wanted to fight him.  Nobody.  Not even the kid who was perceived to be at the top.  Not even him.  And that kid was literally a year older than the author, and 11 months older than the third kid.  That third kid, you could call him a chicken all day long and he would walk away.  But if you threw a punch, he would finish the fight, and you would be the loser.  Every time.  That was his reputation.  He would sometimes say, “Look, I’ve never started a fight.  And while I’ve been in many, I’ve never lost one, either.”

Did he stop the author from getting a beating the author may have deserved?  Nope.  Did he stop the author from getting a beating he didn’t deserve?  Countless times.

How do you stop bullying?

And aside from that – learn when to walk away, and when to stand your ground.  And that last piece is something that has to be learned after the moment when your stomach turns all squishy and chemically, you are a completely different kid.  There are things to be learned by standing up to bullies.  Namely, the belief in the value of standing up to bullies.

In addition to *stopping* bullying behavior (above), there is a different choice – never starting it.  Making a choice to refuse to behave like a bully.  Conducting oneself in a manner which garners long term respect.  Ask yourself – who do you respect more – the power hungry person who chooses bullying behavior, or the person who choses never to show bullying behavior?  And do you want to be more like the baboons of the Serengeti, or one of the humans who uses their pre-frontal cortex for the basis of their values and character?  Except Dr. Volk would likely say this:  The HonestyHumility trait of HEXACO is likely an enduring personality trait – one that likely changes little over a person’s lifetime, and kids who start with decent HonestyHumility traits will likely never choose to implement bullying behaviors, and they’ll grow up to be adults who have high HonestyHumility traits, who also…never choose bullying behaviors.

So maybe that isn’t a choice.

But what about a society that says, “Hey, we want to offer our appreciation for people who make a choice to grow their HonestyHumility trait, and make a choice to join the reasonable people of the world who reject choices that lead to bullying behavior.”

Now…people who were always at risk to be bullies – now those people have an incentive to choose to grow as people and become people who have high HonestyHumility.

And remember – every single action hero worth mentioning from Hollywood – they all have high HonestyHumility (33:15, ModernWisdom/Volk).

Never trap people in the problem when they can make choices to become part of the solution.  Never.

So what did we discuss?  And did we learn anything?

We had lots of opportunities to see how bullying behavior is likely done to gain or assert power in a hierarchy.  We discussed many aspects of hierarchy, and how a stable hierarchy promotes social order and an unstable hierarchy creates a ‘wild west’ environment with people’s stomachs churning.  We discussed how ‘winning’ in public allows one to keep status in a hierarchy, but that ‘losing’ in public is a cause for loss of status – both by baboons, by college football teams, and likely, anyone in any hierarchy.  Animals, and perhaps humans that have a deficiency of empathy, will seek to gain a public ‘win’ at someone else’s expense – in human terms, this is ‘kicking the puppy’.  College football teams should always seek a public win.  That is the sport.  Individual humans…well…

And we had a chance to realize this is the most basic incentive to choose bullying behavior:  releasing stress, getting a public ‘win’ after a public ‘loss’, even if it is at the expense of a ‘puppy’.  Per Dr. Sapolsky, this is one of the ways for baboons to relieve stress, and this is perhaps sad, because the target is almost always a bystander.  This makes the whole hierarchy a terrible place for baboons who are low in rank.

Baboons do it fluently.  Children do it often.  Adults do it, and almost no other adults respect that choice – they’d much rather work with a respectable leader than with someone who chooses bullying behavior, unless they get something from the bullying that is being done.  The truth is that everyone is accountable to someone, or should be.  While this is for another blog post, even ancient kings are subject to the judgment of history, and they knew it.

The author asserted without proof (but it is coming) that your prosperity broadly depends on a semi-decent functioning self-governing society, based on the claim that 25 of 31 countries using 2020 PPP dollars make an average of $10/hour based on 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year.

We also reviewed some elements of animal biology – within the Animal Kingdom, there is the Phylum ‘Chordata’, and all Chordata animals have a backbone – they have physical vertebrae that make up a spine.  In order, the classes of the phylum ‘Chordata’ are: fish, amphibians, lizards/reptiles, avians (birds), and mammals.  And one model for human brain choices and behaviors says that our lizard brain regions handle automatic behaviors like breathing and fear.  Next our limbic systems bring in emotions, and those we share broadly with all mammals.  And we discussed the idea that the neo-cortex is involved in all abstract thought decisions, and all animals have neo-cortex regions, but mammals have more than other animals, and primates more than other mammals, and the genus-species homo sapiens, which showed itself 400,000 to 250,000 years ago, and around that time started cooking its food with fire, has the most of its nervous system devoted to the pre-frontal cortex and is capable of the most abstract thought on the planet including decoding complex language (80,000 years ago), squiggles on paper (5000 years ago), alphabets (2,500 years ago), but they are still animals, and sometimes, they make decisions just like other animals, say…

…say like baboons on the Serengeti.  Even when they tell themselves they only ever always use their pre-frontal-cortex.

But mostly, we hope you remember this:  Bullying behavior is a behavioral choice one makes to gain or keep power, almost exclusively within an existing hierarchy, and done at the expense of innocent bystanders, unless that bystander agrees to play a college football game in November in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Plus, in the end, we all have more respect for the people at the top of the hierarchy **who make a choice to not choose bullying behavior**, just like almost every action hero in a Hollywood movie is high in HonestyHumility (33:15, ModernWisdom/Volk)

So we can reduce bullying behaviors by: (individually) exiting the hierarchy, (collectively) reducing the benefit, (collectively) increasing the cost, and (individually-externally) lending your strength to someone who is a target of bullying.

And lastly, if you speak to a bully like they will always be a bully, they likely will.  But if you speak about bullying behavior as a choice, *and you welcome people who habitually use bullying behavior to make a more pro-social choice and reward that choice*, they may stop being part of the problem, and take your invitation to be a better person and start being part of the solution.  (This is also some of the author’s foreshadowing, by the way.)

~//==//~

The next blog post will be about what happens in a hierarchy when loyalty is above competency.  What happens in a hierarchy when the top guy shoots the messenger that brings bad news?  What happens when people lower in the hierarchy learn to give the “correct” answer instead of the truth?