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.
What do you mean by this, that the ones doing the bullying have shifted from the individual to the collective? Or the ones getting bullied have shifted from the individual to the collective?
It's a thoughtful assertion. By thoughtful, I mean it makes me think critically. I don't really think either is true.
If you think about small hunter-gatherer societies, or even modern societies like China with its social credit apparatus, the kind of bullying that we see on Twitter pales in comparison.
It does feel like there's an increase in polarized bullying - the two parties, or college educated versus deplorables, for instance - but if you look at 19th century newspapers, you'll see the same kind of thing.
As far as individual bullying goes, there is the rise of Karens...but this might be a case of media supply meeting readership demand. Hard to say. Why do you say that individual bullying has declined?
The "social credit system" as reported in Western media does not exist. What does exist is something like a cross between a credit score and a Better Business Bureau rating with extreme fragmentation.
Always good to hear from people who know more than I do! Pretty much everything I read is a narrative in search of a story, and I'm sure you're right that the narrative doesn't match the real story here.
But my bigger point is still worth thinking about: Is it actually true that collective bullying is on the rise? I guess it depends largely on your timeframe. Society has been hammering down the nails that stick up for eons.
Yeah, that is 100% the case here and your main point is totally valid (I don't have a position yet). My intent is to push back on the disinfo on China which is only getting worse as the US govt cranks up tensions. Here's a discussion from an American law professor who studies the real system:
One of social media's chief effects certainly has been to make bullying by a mob much more accessible.
My impression from working with youth is that physical bullying has declined significantly in the 3 or 4 decades since I was a youth. Children today are noticeably *far* more on the lookout for physical and less subtle verbal bullying and more likely to call it out in-person. I'm concerned about trends for youth today on several fronts, but one of the standout positives has been on the (offline) bullying front.
My suspicion is that bullying in all forms is much less, because it’s so easy to act out in other ways and get away with it. Schools have to be seen to act if bullying is an issue, but for anything that could be considered general bad behavior, the consequences for kids are honestly really low. And kids aren’t stupid, they know what they can get away with. If they know yelling curse words earns them a quiet talk with a guidance counselor, but shoving another student earns a parental conference and in-school suspension, guess which one most kids will chose most of the time?
This is really tough, because it’s absolutely better if no kid gets violently bullied. But the trade off for that seems to be that one kid can completely disrupt an entire classroom/school bus pretty much whenever they want, and nothing really happens. They are negatively affecting more kids on a smaller scale. I’m not saying that’s not better, I’m saying that there are no benefits in life, only trade-offs.
Yep. It's true that there are always trade-offs. But not every trade-offs are zero-sum. Thanks to the Green Revolution, Americans swapped malnutrition for obesity. Obesity is bad, but that was a really good trade.
I think you are referring the Thomas Sowell quote "there are no solutions, only trade-offs." Sowell certainly wouldn't agree that there are no positive sum interactions (that's the whole basis of markets).
That would be my suspicion: if it appears that bullying has gone down, it is rather that the bullying has changed to follow the path of least resistance.
I totally agree. I feel like my brain's thinking buttons are being pressed as opposed to the anger buttons. A great place for a reforming shit-poster such as myself.
BC, I’m a bit of a troll myself. These liberals are so aghast if you point out inconvenient things, it seems to inflict a deep aesthetic injury to their sensibilities, so that’s what i do.
I think a lot of the bullying has just shifted online and via phones so it seems like it's less in the eyes of adults. As a teacher I see and have to intervene in less physical bullying than existed when I was at school I'd say (fortunately I was subjected to that less than many others, but received my fair share of punches) but at least kids who had the luxury and good fortune of a stable, non-violent home life could escape from it in the evenings and weekends.
I was on the receiving end of some pretty harsh bullying in seventh grade. Girls have the tendency to bully other girls they see as socially threatening. I was never a popular kid, but not a hopeless nerd. I was the smart kid, like the smartest of all the girls in a class of around 90 students in my elementary school. I was also a fairly pretty girl and physically developed before most of my peers. My friends saw it to be socially advantageous to rat me out to more popular girls who saw me as a threat because I was both smarter than them but similarly attractive. I spent many a bathroom break in the middle of a circle of girls who were screaming about killing me and many an evening crying because the girls I thought were my friends basically turned on me. I spent my first couple of years in high school trying to be as weird as possible so I feel this.
I have a kid who was severely bullied from 4th to 8th. He went through a "Satanic" phase as a freshman in high school. Luckily, it was what I thought, protective covering. I don't think it made him stronger as a person, it made him reclusive. He was friendly and outgoing until the bullying. He's happy, married and successful, but the lingering insecurities still exist.
As a result of my oldest kids experiences, and a few other factors, my younger kids were homeschooled in the later years. They did music and sports at the public school, but weren't fully immersed in the "social shit". At fifteen/sixteen they went to the community college, which was good socially. A lot of homeschoolers in Oregon go to community college.
It's a fine balance between protecting your kids from life and protecting them from lasting damage.
Maybe it's my conservative "there's nothing new under the sun" mindset, but I seriously doubt bullying has actually fallen, unless we've figured out how to make growing up a less massively insecure process. I can only see that insecurity is steady or increasing. I require a very persuasive set of arguments / evidence to get me to believe bullying has truly decreased. The things that drive it seem innate to the human condition to me. I'd be *much* more suspicious that our tools for measuring bullying are simply insufficiently calibrated to the bullying that is actually occurring.
I have five young kids and I observe and infer that there is much less overt bullying in my kids' elementary school than there was when I was a kid (disclaimer: small and non-representative sample). I doubt that all of any decline in overt bullying is redirected into more subtle forms of bullying (in economics terms, is subtle bullying a perfect "substitute good" for overt bullying?).
When I was a kid, overt bullying could give kids a high status among a subset of the student population. My kids are terrified of being thought of by others as a bully. It is considered extremely low-status and an undesirable way to be identified. If bullying can be successfully made into a low-status activity (or bully as a low-status identity), that would inevitably result in a decline in overall bullying.
Having 2 young(ish) kids, this is my impression as well.
Just to give one example I've noticed, my son has no qualms leaving the house in pants that are clearly 3 sizes too small, mismatched socks, uncombed hair, etc. When I was his age, I lived in fear of being made fun of if I showed up at school with "high waters" or other obvious failings of hygiene. Quite frankly, much of my youthful hygiene and clothing choices were driven by the potential for social shaming (I still remember making the ill fated decision to go with my mom to Wal-Mart in my PJs when I was about 10 and running across a girl in my class. I was mortified.). In my experience, this doesn't really seem to exist anymore.
Of course, I acknowledge that shaming may have just taken other forms, but this is one that I've particularly noticed.
Perhaps our anti-bullying culture has finally taken some positive effect. My daughter, who is fairly quirky, just went through middle school and while there was some bullying, it was relatively minor and hasn't appeared to hurt her self-esteem.
Anti-bullying culture did exist when I was a kid, but didn't really help at all at that time -- the only answers anyone had were a variant of one of two themes: you need to ignore the bullies and not care what they say and do, or you need to pop them in the nose a time or two and they will stop. I definitely agree that back in the day, anything that could be picked out as a reason to bully someone would be used as long as you were a "target" (i.e., someone who was both bothered by the bullying and unable or unwilling to fight back in effective ways, and had no external allies capable of mounting any defense).
While I'm sure there's been no decline in cutting remarks, I think schools go to much greater lengths to prevent aggressive, physical bullying than they did 40 years ago. At least in upper middle class suburban high schools, physical fights are now extremely rare.
Most (though not all) of the bullying I endured was not physical, and what was physical was only mildly physical. It was almost never out-and-out fights; the physical aspects of it were being casually pushed into a wall or lockers, or having the back of my neck or my forearms slapped with the fingers someone had spit on. The rest was the name-calling, shaming, badgering with explicit sexual questions, stealing things from me and destroying them, etc.
Agreed. I remember at least a couple of kids I thought were performatively weird who ultimately turned out to have genuine mental illness. Oof, I remember one guy in college who just seemed theatrically weird, until I walked into the women's restroom and found him naked and shaving his entire body. He vanished to the hospital for awhile after that.
I just had a 7 year relationship end with an all-grown-up butterfly kid and I now understand deeply that you can be performatively weird and also very mentally ill. Sometimes the mental illness is the exact vulnerable thing people are hiding with this strategy.
I thought I knew exactly where this essay was going and you surprised me. (Which is a good thing.)
We have been suffering from Trump overload for seven years now. Like a. Reincarnation of Godwin's Law, every article ends up being about Trump (or maybe climate change).
To belabor the obvious, Trump is the butterfly who capriciously darts and weaves, is so fucking unpredictable, that attacks simply fall by the wayside and fail because he's now in a different place committing another outrage. It's not even clear that he has a direction.
Well, apparently if Trump is not mentioned in an essay, then someone in comments just has to bring him up. This man Trump has supernatural power. Just think what will happen if he is finally struck down . . . but then becomes "more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Or if not him as a person, then the great repudiation he stands for.
"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."
I was fairly large and agile for a young cat, but I had to get out of the barn where I lived as ababy, before one of the adult tomcats killed me. Basically, it was die at home or take my chances on the outside.
Still, I survived and now that i am grown, I have never been one to harm kittens, not that any of the local mama cats would ever give me the benefit of the doubt.
From my own experience as a long-haul butterfly, I recognize in hindsight that this tendency - eerily spot-on with both the metaphor and the description of who it represents, by the way - stemmed from knowing deep down that I legitimately am fundamentally and categorically "off" compared to the median. As if I'm hard-wired from birth to perceive reality in a somewhat skewed fashion vis-á-vis my peers on average. So long as I took that for granted but without any concept of why exactly that might be, it was a foregone conclusion that I would run into a tripwire at some point almost daily...might as well pretend that I meant to do that and play it off in class clown fashion.
Of course, fast-forward more than a decade after graduating HS and a partial hospitalization-cum-psych eval and I have "autism spectrum disorder" and "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" printed on a diagnostic form in front of me, and the underlying sense I always had finally becomes a lot clearer. I'm sure a substantial chunk of the butterflies out there are in a similar boat...knowing that oneself is the common denominator that everything points to, and being terrified of the implications.
Unfortunately, it isn't obvious that something like earlier diagnosis is necessarily going to help, but it may be a start. This doesn't necessarily cover the tribulations of the other varieties of butterflies whose bullying derived from other (non-neurodevelopmental) factors, either. All in all, your point kindness falling to the individual stands.
When it comes to a more societal goal of cultivating kindness as a top virtue, maybe a broad cultural moral shift more in the direction of grace? Kind of like taking what Jesus was actually most serious about and deciding we aren't screwing around this time, IDK. There is something of a perpetual moral prisoner's dilemma that stands in the way which will have to be figured out at long last.
Bill Burr has called it, ‘controlling the reason why you’re being laughed at…’ and has credited this kind of behaviour in influencing him eventually getting into comedy. I used to squirt juice boxes up my nose in the sixth grade and can confirm the butterfly method has its pros and cons.
I’d never thought of butterflies through this lens, nor people. Great post. I do agree that prohibiting certain behaviors in public just sends them underground; how many adults can keep up with even the ever-evolving neologism/acronym/gesture landscape? That in itself is a full time job. I always forget what a LARP is and have to look it up. Kids/ppl can find ever-subtler (and even sharper) ways to be mean.
I’ve noticed that the more language is policed in public, the more free with it we have become in our own household (still and always with self-awareness and clarity about our fundamental values of tolerance and inclusion, but still). I think it’s like prohibition: the energy just goes below the surface.
Telling kids to be nice and kind doesn’t work, I think. The only way is to really know them, and give them the tools and awareness to recognize when and why they are being mean. What human need within them it is filling. And to teach the kids on the receiving end of meanness the same lessons. Real, sophisticated, nuanced self and social awareness. It’s possible. It’s the work of a lifetime, not some program.
Individual bullying has declined. Collective bullying has increased.
What do you mean by this, that the ones doing the bullying have shifted from the individual to the collective? Or the ones getting bullied have shifted from the individual to the collective?
Identities bully other identities who deserve bullying.
It's a thoughtful assertion. By thoughtful, I mean it makes me think critically. I don't really think either is true.
If you think about small hunter-gatherer societies, or even modern societies like China with its social credit apparatus, the kind of bullying that we see on Twitter pales in comparison.
It does feel like there's an increase in polarized bullying - the two parties, or college educated versus deplorables, for instance - but if you look at 19th century newspapers, you'll see the same kind of thing.
As far as individual bullying goes, there is the rise of Karens...but this might be a case of media supply meeting readership demand. Hard to say. Why do you say that individual bullying has declined?
The "social credit system" as reported in Western media does not exist. What does exist is something like a cross between a credit score and a Better Business Bureau rating with extreme fragmentation.
Always good to hear from people who know more than I do! Pretty much everything I read is a narrative in search of a story, and I'm sure you're right that the narrative doesn't match the real story here.
But my bigger point is still worth thinking about: Is it actually true that collective bullying is on the rise? I guess it depends largely on your timeframe. Society has been hammering down the nails that stick up for eons.
Yeah, that is 100% the case here and your main point is totally valid (I don't have a position yet). My intent is to push back on the disinfo on China which is only getting worse as the US govt cranks up tensions. Here's a discussion from an American law professor who studies the real system:
https://asiasociety.org/switzerland/confusion-feature-not-bug
I think conformity has been on the rise and tolerance for viewpoints outside the mainstream is pretty minimal.
That said my subjective impression is that the pendulum is swinging back.
And what evidence do you have for this view? Not challenging you, just wondering what facts led you to your conclusion.
Which one?
Good video about the Chinese social credit score...
https://youtu.be/Kqov6F00KMc
One of social media's chief effects certainly has been to make bullying by a mob much more accessible.
My impression from working with youth is that physical bullying has declined significantly in the 3 or 4 decades since I was a youth. Children today are noticeably *far* more on the lookout for physical and less subtle verbal bullying and more likely to call it out in-person. I'm concerned about trends for youth today on several fronts, but one of the standout positives has been on the (offline) bullying front.
As I hear it, it's less getting shoved into lockers and more coordinated mockery via social media.
My suspicion is that bullying in all forms is much less, because it’s so easy to act out in other ways and get away with it. Schools have to be seen to act if bullying is an issue, but for anything that could be considered general bad behavior, the consequences for kids are honestly really low. And kids aren’t stupid, they know what they can get away with. If they know yelling curse words earns them a quiet talk with a guidance counselor, but shoving another student earns a parental conference and in-school suspension, guess which one most kids will chose most of the time?
That's the hope!
This is really tough, because it’s absolutely better if no kid gets violently bullied. But the trade off for that seems to be that one kid can completely disrupt an entire classroom/school bus pretty much whenever they want, and nothing really happens. They are negatively affecting more kids on a smaller scale. I’m not saying that’s not better, I’m saying that there are no benefits in life, only trade-offs.
There are tons of benefits in life. It's not like there's some cosmic law ensuring a consistent amount of misery.
Yep. It's true that there are always trade-offs. But not every trade-offs are zero-sum. Thanks to the Green Revolution, Americans swapped malnutrition for obesity. Obesity is bad, but that was a really good trade.
I think you are referring the Thomas Sowell quote "there are no solutions, only trade-offs." Sowell certainly wouldn't agree that there are no positive sum interactions (that's the whole basis of markets).
That’s a much better way to say what I was trying to convey! This is why public intellectuals exist.
That would be my suspicion: if it appears that bullying has gone down, it is rather that the bullying has changed to follow the path of least resistance.
What a great writer. I always immediately read his stuff because I adore language and his style is a pleasure.
I totally agree. I feel like my brain's thinking buttons are being pressed as opposed to the anger buttons. A great place for a reforming shit-poster such as myself.
BC, I’m a bit of a troll myself. These liberals are so aghast if you point out inconvenient things, it seems to inflict a deep aesthetic injury to their sensibilities, so that’s what i do.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I always thought it was mostly immaturity as they were acting like a much younger kid would act.
I think a lot of the bullying has just shifted online and via phones so it seems like it's less in the eyes of adults. As a teacher I see and have to intervene in less physical bullying than existed when I was at school I'd say (fortunately I was subjected to that less than many others, but received my fair share of punches) but at least kids who had the luxury and good fortune of a stable, non-violent home life could escape from it in the evenings and weekends.
I was on the receiving end of some pretty harsh bullying in seventh grade. Girls have the tendency to bully other girls they see as socially threatening. I was never a popular kid, but not a hopeless nerd. I was the smart kid, like the smartest of all the girls in a class of around 90 students in my elementary school. I was also a fairly pretty girl and physically developed before most of my peers. My friends saw it to be socially advantageous to rat me out to more popular girls who saw me as a threat because I was both smarter than them but similarly attractive. I spent many a bathroom break in the middle of a circle of girls who were screaming about killing me and many an evening crying because the girls I thought were my friends basically turned on me. I spent my first couple of years in high school trying to be as weird as possible so I feel this.
I have a kid who was severely bullied from 4th to 8th. He went through a "Satanic" phase as a freshman in high school. Luckily, it was what I thought, protective covering. I don't think it made him stronger as a person, it made him reclusive. He was friendly and outgoing until the bullying. He's happy, married and successful, but the lingering insecurities still exist.
As a result of my oldest kids experiences, and a few other factors, my younger kids were homeschooled in the later years. They did music and sports at the public school, but weren't fully immersed in the "social shit". At fifteen/sixteen they went to the community college, which was good socially. A lot of homeschoolers in Oregon go to community college.
It's a fine balance between protecting your kids from life and protecting them from lasting damage.
Maybe it's my conservative "there's nothing new under the sun" mindset, but I seriously doubt bullying has actually fallen, unless we've figured out how to make growing up a less massively insecure process. I can only see that insecurity is steady or increasing. I require a very persuasive set of arguments / evidence to get me to believe bullying has truly decreased. The things that drive it seem innate to the human condition to me. I'd be *much* more suspicious that our tools for measuring bullying are simply insufficiently calibrated to the bullying that is actually occurring.
I have five young kids and I observe and infer that there is much less overt bullying in my kids' elementary school than there was when I was a kid (disclaimer: small and non-representative sample). I doubt that all of any decline in overt bullying is redirected into more subtle forms of bullying (in economics terms, is subtle bullying a perfect "substitute good" for overt bullying?).
When I was a kid, overt bullying could give kids a high status among a subset of the student population. My kids are terrified of being thought of by others as a bully. It is considered extremely low-status and an undesirable way to be identified. If bullying can be successfully made into a low-status activity (or bully as a low-status identity), that would inevitably result in a decline in overall bullying.
Having 2 young(ish) kids, this is my impression as well.
Just to give one example I've noticed, my son has no qualms leaving the house in pants that are clearly 3 sizes too small, mismatched socks, uncombed hair, etc. When I was his age, I lived in fear of being made fun of if I showed up at school with "high waters" or other obvious failings of hygiene. Quite frankly, much of my youthful hygiene and clothing choices were driven by the potential for social shaming (I still remember making the ill fated decision to go with my mom to Wal-Mart in my PJs when I was about 10 and running across a girl in my class. I was mortified.). In my experience, this doesn't really seem to exist anymore.
Of course, I acknowledge that shaming may have just taken other forms, but this is one that I've particularly noticed.
Perhaps our anti-bullying culture has finally taken some positive effect. My daughter, who is fairly quirky, just went through middle school and while there was some bullying, it was relatively minor and hasn't appeared to hurt her self-esteem.
Anti-bullying culture did exist when I was a kid, but didn't really help at all at that time -- the only answers anyone had were a variant of one of two themes: you need to ignore the bullies and not care what they say and do, or you need to pop them in the nose a time or two and they will stop. I definitely agree that back in the day, anything that could be picked out as a reason to bully someone would be used as long as you were a "target" (i.e., someone who was both bothered by the bullying and unable or unwilling to fight back in effective ways, and had no external allies capable of mounting any defense).
While I'm sure there's been no decline in cutting remarks, I think schools go to much greater lengths to prevent aggressive, physical bullying than they did 40 years ago. At least in upper middle class suburban high schools, physical fights are now extremely rare.
Most (though not all) of the bullying I endured was not physical, and what was physical was only mildly physical. It was almost never out-and-out fights; the physical aspects of it were being casually pushed into a wall or lockers, or having the back of my neck or my forearms slapped with the fingers someone had spit on. The rest was the name-calling, shaming, badgering with explicit sexual questions, stealing things from me and destroying them, etc.
How do you know that weird kids are *intentionally* acting weird? This seems very difficult to distinguish as an observer.
I am human
Agreed. I remember at least a couple of kids I thought were performatively weird who ultimately turned out to have genuine mental illness. Oof, I remember one guy in college who just seemed theatrically weird, until I walked into the women's restroom and found him naked and shaving his entire body. He vanished to the hospital for awhile after that.
I just had a 7 year relationship end with an all-grown-up butterfly kid and I now understand deeply that you can be performatively weird and also very mentally ill. Sometimes the mental illness is the exact vulnerable thing people are hiding with this strategy.
Oh shit, I’m sorry. That sounds pretty awful.
I thought I knew exactly where this essay was going and you surprised me. (Which is a good thing.)
We have been suffering from Trump overload for seven years now. Like a. Reincarnation of Godwin's Law, every article ends up being about Trump (or maybe climate change).
To belabor the obvious, Trump is the butterfly who capriciously darts and weaves, is so fucking unpredictable, that attacks simply fall by the wayside and fail because he's now in a different place committing another outrage. It's not even clear that he has a direction.
Thank you for not defaulting to my expectations!
Well, apparently if Trump is not mentioned in an essay, then someone in comments just has to bring him up. This man Trump has supernatural power. Just think what will happen if he is finally struck down . . . but then becomes "more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Or if not him as a person, then the great repudiation he stands for.
If I knew how to use emojis I would use that wildly laughing one here. You nailed it (and me). Damn!
Glad we both got a chuckle, even if from different perspectives.
This was never me as a kid, but it sorta describes me — an adult — on social media.
"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."
Or they simply do not care.
You could one step further and say they feel it is justified. I feel bad so I deserve in indulge in a bit of sadism.
Hurt people hurt people, etc
Or lack the capacity; too burnt out from failing to care for themselves.
I was fairly large and agile for a young cat, but I had to get out of the barn where I lived as ababy, before one of the adult tomcats killed me. Basically, it was die at home or take my chances on the outside.
Still, I survived and now that i am grown, I have never been one to harm kittens, not that any of the local mama cats would ever give me the benefit of the doubt.
From my own experience as a long-haul butterfly, I recognize in hindsight that this tendency - eerily spot-on with both the metaphor and the description of who it represents, by the way - stemmed from knowing deep down that I legitimately am fundamentally and categorically "off" compared to the median. As if I'm hard-wired from birth to perceive reality in a somewhat skewed fashion vis-á-vis my peers on average. So long as I took that for granted but without any concept of why exactly that might be, it was a foregone conclusion that I would run into a tripwire at some point almost daily...might as well pretend that I meant to do that and play it off in class clown fashion.
Of course, fast-forward more than a decade after graduating HS and a partial hospitalization-cum-psych eval and I have "autism spectrum disorder" and "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" printed on a diagnostic form in front of me, and the underlying sense I always had finally becomes a lot clearer. I'm sure a substantial chunk of the butterflies out there are in a similar boat...knowing that oneself is the common denominator that everything points to, and being terrified of the implications.
Unfortunately, it isn't obvious that something like earlier diagnosis is necessarily going to help, but it may be a start. This doesn't necessarily cover the tribulations of the other varieties of butterflies whose bullying derived from other (non-neurodevelopmental) factors, either. All in all, your point kindness falling to the individual stands.
When it comes to a more societal goal of cultivating kindness as a top virtue, maybe a broad cultural moral shift more in the direction of grace? Kind of like taking what Jesus was actually most serious about and deciding we aren't screwing around this time, IDK. There is something of a perpetual moral prisoner's dilemma that stands in the way which will have to be figured out at long last.
Bill Burr has called it, ‘controlling the reason why you’re being laughed at…’ and has credited this kind of behaviour in influencing him eventually getting into comedy. I used to squirt juice boxes up my nose in the sixth grade and can confirm the butterfly method has its pros and cons.
I’d never thought of butterflies through this lens, nor people. Great post. I do agree that prohibiting certain behaviors in public just sends them underground; how many adults can keep up with even the ever-evolving neologism/acronym/gesture landscape? That in itself is a full time job. I always forget what a LARP is and have to look it up. Kids/ppl can find ever-subtler (and even sharper) ways to be mean.
I’ve noticed that the more language is policed in public, the more free with it we have become in our own household (still and always with self-awareness and clarity about our fundamental values of tolerance and inclusion, but still). I think it’s like prohibition: the energy just goes below the surface.
Telling kids to be nice and kind doesn’t work, I think. The only way is to really know them, and give them the tools and awareness to recognize when and why they are being mean. What human need within them it is filling. And to teach the kids on the receiving end of meanness the same lessons. Real, sophisticated, nuanced self and social awareness. It’s possible. It’s the work of a lifetime, not some program.
Taking a look at the present day behavior of the people who were really into criminalizing bullying in 2015...yeah, checks out.