Butterfly Theory

I’d love to take credit for this analogy, but I picked it up somewhere along my teaching journey, from one mentor or another. I haven’t taught since I was still at Brooklyn College. I miss it very much.

You may have noticed a particular type of kid at school, at some point from kindergarten to college. It’s a fairly rare breed but one that crops up from time to time in pretty much any educational context. These kids are ones who are not just weird but intentionally weird. They act in a characteristically “zany” way, deliberately cultivating a reputation as the crazy kid who will do anything. They’re typically tolerated by most of their peers, bullied by a few, and in a sad parasitic relationship with others - the “normal” kid who will pay the weird kid a dollar to eat food off the floor, the kids who cheer him on when he acts provocatively antisocial, the ones who prompt him to get into trouble at school. This kind of behavior is best defined as that which cultivates a deliberate reputation as the weird kid, at social and academic cost, in exchange for which the weird kid gets nothing but that reputation - and a defined identity in the social order. It can be hard to understand, but this type of student can be effectively described and understood according to butterfly theory.

If you’ve ever watched a butterfly fly, you’ll know it looks strange. Butterflies tend to fly in weird, unpredictable, sweeping motions, very rarely traveling in a straight line. Even if you know where a butterfly is starting from and where it’s going, you’d never be able to predict its exact flight path. And that’s strange from the perspective of conserving energy; the shortest path between two points is a straight line, when flying, and the shortest path is the one that burns the least calories. Animals tend to evolve to preserve calories wherever possible. But in fact there’s a clear fitness advantage to flying the way butterflies often do: when no one knows exactly what path you’ll take to get somewhere, it’s much harder to intercept you along your way. If you fly too straight, with too regular a trajectory, you’re going to end up as a bird’s lunch. Other animals, animals that are less vulnerable and better able to defend themselves, can move in straight lines. They enjoy the luxury of being predictable, moving as they care to move. Bees will swoop and veer and fly a little crazy, but they’re also much more likely to move in straight lines. Because a bee can sting, and they’re especially well-defended when they’re with their hive. Butterflies can’t sting. So they fly in ways that are hard for the rest of us to understand.

Obviously the analogy here is that those performatively-weird kids are acting like butterflies. They’re making themselves unpredictable in the eyes of their peers in the hopes that they’re never presenting an easy target to hit. It may seem odd, since acting this way ensures a degree of bullying. But kids who act this way are at least dictating the kind of abuse they take, to a degree, and in doing so they’re clawing back a little agency and maybe keeping the focus away from their biggest vulnerability. I think the mindset is something like “If I bark and grunt in the middle of class, if I never wash my hair, if I deliberately wear mismatched clothes that don’t fit, then they will make fun of those things, and they won’t go after the thing inside of me that’s most vulnerable.” Whatever that vulnerable thing might be. So, they hover and swoop. Does it work? You know, sometimes, it might. Being intentionally, excessively odd in your behavior might keep people from finding your real weakness. That’s a harsh deal, and you’d hope nobody would ever have to make it. But they do make it. I don’t know; I read all the time that bullying has declined. I have no way to know if that’s true. But I’m guessing that it’s just gotten more subtle and harder to spot.

I must admit, in the name of accuracy and intellectual consistency, that there is no such thing as someone who’s a butterfly, all the time. Butterflies don’t have stingers; all humans do, in the right circumstance. And I must repeat my consistent observation that it has never in fact been true that the popular kids are all remorseless sociopaths or that unpopular kids all have hearts of gold. The losers can be very cruel too, and very selfish, and very bigoted…. It’s a generic fact of human life, and something of a cliche, that people that are in pain can have the hardest time recognizing the pain they’re causing in others. Now, we have adopted a new cultural ethos of “care,” an obsession with managing the emotional lives of everyone at all times. I have become a critic of this reality. And now I get anguished emails from people asking me whether I care at all about bullying. The answer is that of course I do. I’ve never said I don’t want to reduce human cruelty. What I have said is that the social tools we have could never regulate cruelty away. The responsibility to be kind will always fall on the individual, who must make the right choice in the moment, and all society can ultimately do is work to make gentleness a valued characteristic. Whether any given kid will get bullied on any given day will always be up to the fickle choices of some other 11-year-old.

Still, I feel for the butterfly students, want better for them. I taught some, way back when. And though it wasn’t for long, for a little while I was a butterfly too.