Dr. Mitch Horowitz examines bullying as status-driven violence, from high school peer pressure (his own 1980s creek incident) to workplace hierarchies and societal mob mentality, debunking the "low self-esteem" myth—bullies’ worth may hinge on their behavior itself. He contrasts primal dominance (like chimps or deer) with modern norms, noting tolerance thrives where harassment is normalized, while industries like construction now reject it without laws. The key: collective bystander opposition, but systemic change demands cultural shifts beyond isolated incidents. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Truth Unrestricted, our latest episode.
Currently counting them, there are three now.
Today we want to talk about bullying.
I have a lot of emotions about this topic.
I was personally, I was bullied.
I'm not even close to being in the minority in that respect.
But I'm going to ask some questions that even I don't like today.
So first let's start with what is bullying?
I mean, what is it?
Do you have any thoughts?
You know, do you in your head when you think, what is it?
What is bullying?
I would say it's the establishment of status through violence.
Or intimidation, right?
Yeah.
Which is itself a form of violence.
So.
Yeah.
And of course, not even necessarily physical, as we now recognize more clearly that psychological and social violence.
Verbal, emotional.
We got all kinds of ways to walk.
Yeah, we're really good at it.
We really, we really carved that onion down to three separate slices.
Is there anything more there?
When we say that this is, oh, every time you're intimidating someone, you know, you're a bully, or is there more to it than that?
I mean, that's, that's kind of a, I mean, one thought I have when I think about this is that it's what I call a tactic for upward social traction.
I mean, this is a thing.
It's so common and the tactics used are not really all that different across cultures, across continents, across every age group.
They don't differ that much.
What do you think is happening there?
Is this a piece of code that's in our social programming?
Before I answer that, I'd like if you could peel a couple layers back on the onion on a, what do you call it, a tactic for upward social traction or traction.
Yeah.
How?
Because I see it more as a means of, like it's most frequently used as a means of establishing this status quo.
Well, that's the same thing, isn't it?
Are people using this to maintain or increase their popularity?
No, I think it's actually, I consider it to be a psychological failure in humanity, like behavior that hearkens to, I don't know if you'd call it the it or what, but like the more primal part of the human brain that's wired to perceive life as a pretty black and white struggle for survival with limited resources and limited access to mates.
Like everything that drives this is sort of baser instinct stuff that we as a society in the developed world anyway are completely above and beyond now.
But I believe that's where it comes from is just a sort of baser need to assert cultural dominance on the assumption that there's not enough resources to go around.
So we're cementing our right to the lion's share of the resources.
It's just the resources now are social popularity.
One thing that strikes me when I think about this, the most interesting behavior related to bullying isn't really the behavior of the bully.
It's the behavior of the bystanders.
I've never known a bully that was ever really alone.
Almost all bullies I've known in my life were surrounded by allies.
Wingman.
Yeah, absolutely.
100%.
And they weren't necessarily bullies themselves.
Some of them were.
I mean, it occurred to me that it's very possible that in a vacuum, those people wouldn't be bullies.
They were conforming to the behavior of the bully that they were attempting to.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I buy that 100%.
I actually, interestingly enough, I have a very clear recollection of my own time in high school where I got whipped up in one of those mobs and participated in some really shitty human behavior and was taken to task for it by the vice principal.
We had that little smoke pit down by the creek where we all hung out.
We were all dicking around fairly close to the water.
And this sort of this one of the crew who was sort of one of the lower on the popularity rung guys was really dangerously close to the water.
And a handful of assholes in the crew decided, hey, wouldn't it be fun to throw him in the creek?
But it takes like minimum for preferably six to eight guys to completely overpower one guy, even if that guy's a small guy, right?
Yeah.
Like to pick him up and physically move him, like you need a mob.
And we had a mob like that at the drop of a dime.
A bunch of us, myself included.
I have no idea why made the regrettable decision to participate in this little act of ostracism, picked this poor kid up and chucked him into the water.
And I remember getting called down to the office for it and taken to task by the vice principal.
And like he just looks me in the eyes.
Like, you know, me in high school, I was, I was a pretty straight shooter.
Like I was a pretty square kid.
I didn't get into a lot of trouble.
And like, he just looked at me like he couldn't even comprehend.
Like he was begging me for an answer to help it make sense to him.
He's like, Jeff, I just, did you throw Mitch in the creek?
And I was like, yeah, why?
I don't know.
And, you know, doled out punishment, et cetera.
But like, yeah, all I can say is that like in the moment that that pole of pack mentality was strong.
And like there was something really uncomfortably base driving it, like a glee in being a member of the pack and not the one who's being held up as an object of what is not a member of the pack.
I mean, I think I definitely want to do an episode sometime in the future about mob mentality.
This is way too much.
It's tough to discuss.
Well, yeah, but I think it's going to be really difficult to address the issue of bullying without also taking a good hard look at the issue or concept of mob mentality because one feeds and informs the other.
They're related.
A bully is nothing without a mob.
Here's some thoughts I have.
So when I think of mob mentality as sort of a momentary one-time event, one doesn't participate in riots every weekend, but one might get caught up in the moment and participate in a riot that's happening around them because of all the social cues happening around them.
But what we typically refer to as bullying is usually repeated behavior.
You know, a person who's a bully once in adolescence because they're trying something out and then they never do it again, I wouldn't typically refer to them as a bully, but a person who tried it once and presumably loved it and then tried to do it again every chance they got, that's the person I would call a bully.
In adolescence, we try all kinds of things.
You know, we try lying, we try stealing, we try nearly everything that we can try.
And some of it is things we try and we go, you know what?
It's just not for me.
And then other stuff are like, you know what?
That was awesome.
I want to do that again.
And whenever it's bad behavior that we love, we begin to become wired to want it again and again and again.
And that to me is where you divide the line between a person who's a bully and a person who was just shitty a time or two when they were a kid.
You know, and while we're on the topic, is there something you'd like to say to Mitch?
Oh, I'm so sorry, man.
Unbelievably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm proud of you.
To put it back into the philosophical, I think it would be possible to discuss both the noun of the bully and what defines him or her as an individual, the personality, and also the verb of bullying, which is the action.
Like, I think it's a disservice to neatly package up that mob mentality scene that I just described as a completely different thing that should be set aside.
I think in cultures or social groups where flare-ups like that are accepted or even encouraged or, you know, again, at a bare minimum, accepted as the status quo as a show of status or whatever.
Those are environments where the noun of the bully flourishes because you can and do have environments where there's just no place for a bully to go.
Oh, yeah.
Like you can have a community that rejects it utterly.
Yeah.
So like a bully needs a pasture, right?
Like you need to have a certain type of social order for that creature to survive.
Yeah, I agree.
When I think about the fact that bullies that I've known in my life were never alone, when you think of the grander, you know, if you picture everyone in your peer group as being on some kind of hierarchy, they were also almost never near the bottom.
I don't like to reference things that I don't have like the actual link for, but I did read about some research that was done about 10 years ago.
They published it and it made quite a stink because a lot of people were upset about it.
There was this idea that was in the world that bullies were all people who lacked self-esteem and then they bullied because they needed to increase their self-esteem.
And the people who did the research were asking that question, do they have low self-esteem?
And in their research, they found that they really didn't have low self-esteem.
I thought to myself immediately, as soon as I read it, they're asking the wrong question.
The question they should be asking is, if they found a way to prevent these bullies from regularly engaging in the act of being a bully, would their self-esteem drop?
Because they didn't really get to heart of any question by saying, oh, yeah, these people who are doing the bullying, they feel really good about themselves.
If they're wired in such a way that they need to do that to feel good about themselves and they're still really doing, do they stop feeling as good about themselves if they lose the?
That's the real question that they didn't seem to ask at all.
Again, difference between the noun and the verb, right?
The real question here though, is, is bullying natural?
I mean, when we, if we were primatologists and we were in the jungle in our little hut and we were observing a group of chimpanzees and we saw chimpanzees bullying other chimpanzees, what would we think?
Would we think that's deplorable and someone's going to do something about that, or would we think that probably the chimpanzees put up with that behavior and probably also occasionally take part in it the way humans do?
What do you think is that?
Well yeah, like I said, I think it's.
Absolutely natural, but like, natural doesn't necessarily mean good.
A lot of what is natural about how we're wired physiologically, psychologically and emotionally is a genetic throwback to an era of scarcity that we no longer live in.
We as uh society and culture should have evolved past now because of the application of human intelligence, human social consciousness.
So yeah, it's totally natural, but again, in the way that it's totally natural that if a deer in a herd of deer breaks its leg, that deer is eaten by the wolves by the end of the day.
Yeah, because that's natural.
Yeah, that's so.
Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's good.
Here's the and yeah like yeah you, you know, and I know that in that example you gave of the, the chimpanzees um yes they, they absolutely engage in bullying behavior.
Most deer elk moose, you know, all all hooved uh, mammals that i'm aware of males, will straight up beat each other half to death for the opportunity to prove their social superiority and are in the right to mate, like we're wired for it.
You said something earlier that's tickling my brain a little bit about not being the one that's targeted.
This is a thing that I've noted many times in my personal life about bullying is that often when I hear people talk about when they have children who are about to go through high school, the one thing, one thing that they really are worried about is whether their kids are going to be bullied.
And sometimes when I talk to people about it, one thing that they mention is, oh, you know, so I really worry about my child being bullied.
So I make sure I make sure my child has all the good clothes to wear and that they don't act in any way that's weird or stands out at all.
Oh, yeah.
And like I have I have heard mothers of high school age girls, like parents in my peer group say to their preteen and teenage daughters, you know, you can belong to any group or any social circle you want to, sweetie.
So it may as well be the popular kids.
Yeah.
This to me is you're essentially saying that bullying will occur.
And the strategy then is to make sure that it's merely not happening to your child.
That's probably a reasonable strategy to keep your own child from suffering from the effects of bullying, but it's a very poor strategy to do anything to reduce the overall incidence of actual bullying.
You're comparing bullying to like a natural phenomenon that will occur regardless of anything you do, like lightning.
All you have to do in a lightning storm is not be the tallest sticking up in the field.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You need to be have some other thing that's going to get struck before you, and then you'll be fine.
And bullying isn't lightning.
Human behavior isn't a thing that's always necessarily going to occur.
We shouldn't be okay with a certain number of people getting murdered each year.
We should still do something to try to cut down the overall number of murders.
We shouldn't be okay with a certain number of people dying of cancer every year.
We should still try to reduce the incidence of cancer.
And the same thing with bullying.
We should say that bullying does occur and we should attempt to stop people from bullying each other.
And this starts with children.
Children bully other children at an alarming rate.
Anyone with any clear memory of their childhood knows that without me having to tell them.
And if they had a childhood where there weren't any bullies, contact me, please.
Yeah.
And the other thing that's really worth noting, I was hopeful for an opportunity to mention this point.
Typically, bullies are the big, tough kids, like the physically larger, stronger kids, the ones capable of physically dominating any other child.
We think of the male bullies that way.
Yeah, male bullies that way for sure.
Well, like, yeah, when we're talking the bullies tool being physical violence.
So for the purpose of this exercise, we'll go over that definition.
Sure.
But the kids that typically belong to the groups that are subject to bullying, like the geeks and freaks and gamer kids, you put those kids in an online, competitive first-person shooter gaming environment and give them voice-to-voice communication.
And you watch them be just as terrible human beings as your big jock physical bullies are in person.
That behavior is capable of being evidenced by really any child of that age in the right environment, I think.
But again, they're developing physiologically and psychologically.
So they go through these sort of like, you know, every teenager hits that period where, you know, they're really mopey and depressed.
Some of them it's more severe and longer than others.
some of it.
It's not so bad, but they all go through some of it.
And it's just their brain is coping with a higher dump of that particular level of hormone for that six to eight month period of their development, right?
Interesting sidebar, though, like exploring the psychology of the people that participate in those mob mentality outbursts of ostracism.
I would hazard a theory that other than the instigator, the sort of cockbully who's leading the crew, everybody who's participating in that would rank themselves in one of two positions within the social circle.
Nobody participating in that would consider themselves to be in the middle of the pack.
They would either consider themselves to be very close in status to the alpha and thus participating to trumpet their own status as well, or convinced that they themselves are so close to the bottom rung of status that it could be them on the receiving end.
So they're participating extra hard to ape or mimic that behavior as a defense.
Right.
So you're saying essentially that they would participate because that's the tactic to avoid the lightning, as it were.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's, I don't know.
It's got to strike somewhere today.
It's striking him.
And I guess I got to ride the lightning.
I think that's fair, right?
I mean, that's become the lightning.
If I really had to drill down into it, again, with the personal story that I shared, I would hazard a fairly educated guess that I was the latter.
I always sort of considered myself on the fringes of that social crew.
And I could have very easily seen myself being on the receiving end of that.
The sort of fringer's desperate desire to belong was a motivation for sure.
Not a justification by any means, but.
No, just a thing that explained the behavior, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have one critical question that to me is that the toughest question to even consider.
Whenever the topic comes up of bullying, it's meant to turn, you know, now in the world today, it's meant to turn people on the bully.
It's assumed across the board as a negative thing, wholesale negative thing.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask the question, is it always a bad thing?
Is there any positive to this behavior?
Or is there any way that this can or has been used?
That depends entirely, I think, on the arena.
Like the reason why we see bullying, like social bullying, as a bad thing is because that sort of social posturing is a throwback to a time when resources were limited and they're not limited anymore.
Let's say you're in negotiations with someone.
That's a naturally adversarial relationship.
You want to purchase something that they want to sell you.
You want to get it for as little money as possible.
They want to sell it for as much money as possible.
Bullying by many would be seen as an acceptable tactic.
Like if you got the feel that the person sitting across the table from you was maybe hungry for money, you might try lowballing, threatening to walk away if they didn't make up their mind in the next 30 seconds.
There's some that would call that a sound bargaining tactic.
Bullying is only bad when it's being used in an arena where we are expected to put a framework of morality around the behavior there.
And there's a lot about human interaction yet where I think we don't necessarily have to keep a framework of morality around it.
I worry about...
We're the same one, I guess.
The potential for this to become a definition where any time one person acts with a sense of dominance toward another person that we call that bullying.
Like that's, it's, it's difficult to find the exact line between those two behaviors.
You know what I mean?
What you described could easily just be one person exerting their, their advantage, their bargaining advantage.
Right it's, it's or there's another word for it like it's.
It can just be called being assertive, and I think the line, sort of ethically, would be, what is the power relationship between the for want of a better word aggressor and aggressive?
Yeah like, if they're fairly close in status, it's not necessarily bullying, it could just be jockeying or posturing, but if it's one who is clearly socially dominant over the other, they should have no need to show anything off.
I also worry that such a such an example isn't repeatable between the parties.
You know like typically bullying, like we mentioned earlier, is a thing that happens repeatedly.
Yep, you know, unless they're engaged in this negotiation regularly over the time, and the one no, but like someone like uh, you know say, a realtor or a deal maker for a salesman.
That could absolutely be who they are like.
That's just how they dicker and deal every day.
It's how they make their living.
Is it wrong if it's?
Buying and selling things is how they feed their family, and being really rough in and bullyish in negotiations is how they do it.
I can think of a couple guys I know that do that that are otherwise all right guys.
Right, they wouldn't think of behaving that way anywhere outside of their the framework of their workplace.
So I don't know if maybe these guys in this behavior that i'm, describing is perhaps a little too peripheral to the philosophical concept of bullying that we're trying to pin down, maybe we should package it up and set it aside.
I mean, I don't, I don't know if it's too far off the base either.
I've already mentioned i'm heavily biased about this whole issue.
I mean, I have committed acts that have lost me jobs because I was revolting against the actions of a bully as a boss.
Right, I mean, I i've, you know, sometimes to my great personal detriment, I I refuse to swallow the, the pill given in front of me.
Right, my first, my first foreman gig, I caught a layoff as soon as he could get done with me because I I couldn't, I couldn't, work under a guy who bullied his crew as bad as this guy did in adulthood.
Most of the bullying behavior i've seen in adulthood occurs from bosses.
Oh yeah, 100.
But my thoughts really, when I ask this question, I have to ask it because I feel I have to in order to feel that i'm really doing any kind of due diligence, but it's possible.
I'm not even giving it enough credence as a question because my first answer that I come to still leans against bullying pretty hard.
My thought here is that everyone who gets an advantage from this or any kind of positive from this could get that same positive using another tactic.
That's not bullying.
If they were more socially adept or better at their jobs in almost every case of the boss it's.
If they were more socially adept or better at their jobs, they could get the same or better impact.
Without trying to make people feel shitty in that arena, in sort of the world that we've built As adults, away from the potentially rancid petri dish that is high school, we've turned this into a place where, I mean, it is seen with a social stigma.
It is still tolerated by some, but we're starting to recognize it as a thing that shows essentially a lack of social awareness, the presence of a number of social weaknesses, because they can't get the same result using better tactics.
That's essentially a lot of those cases.
I think in a lot of those cases, it's because they have never been taught those tactics.
Well, sure.
Access to those tools is limited to them.
I mean, everyone who has a deficiency has the deficiency for a reason.
It doesn't make it any less a deficiency.
But it's while you recognize the character deficiency and the bully that causes it to be that way, and resolving that deficiency would at face value be the most efficient cure to the disease.
I see no successful routes that way in the options you'd have for discourse.
Anytime I've seen it successfully dealt with, it's usually because the rest of the social circle circles up and ostracizes the bully.
When I've seen it as a situation where a manager or a boss was acting that way, it only resolved itself ever or had a hope to if someone who was on the hierarchy above that person ever got involved.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
But again, like in a workplace environment, you're dealing with an entirely artificial hierarchical structure that you are forced to.
Right.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
No, but like, yeah, fair enough.
But like, it's more clearly defined and on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's exactly much more clearly defined with clearly defined clearly defined static pecking order that does not change until people are officially promoted and given the new titles and told where they are on the tree, right?
We can maintain the sort of parallel discourse on the subjects of like workplace bullying and more broader societal bullying, as long as we acknowledge that like status and societal bullying is a lot more mutable.
Fluid.
Yeah.
It's 100% based on perception of the group as a whole.
So if you can motivate the group as a whole to collectively ostracize or turn their back on the bully, the bully loses his pasture.
He's got nowhere to practice his trade and he's gone.
I have seen that happen successfully.
Those are the situations I see where a bully gets successfully dealt with.
You're absolutely right, though.
In a work environment, it still takes the intervention of somebody who outranks the bully, but that intervention rarely comes until the crew as a whole is in a state of near revolt because of his behavior.
That kind of leads me directly into kind of my final thought on this topic, which is that, you know, most people say that, you know, if you're being bullied, you have to stand up for yourself and everything.
Everyone tries to say that, you know, if you're being bullied, stand up.
You know, I mean, that's great.
But, you know, when I mentioned earlier that the most interesting behavior about bullying is from the bystanders, I mean that here too.
Bullying doesn't stop until the bystanders step in.
Yeah.
That's that's when that's when bullies learn that they're not getting a social advantage from engaging in that behavior.
That's when it's no longer talk about taking away the bully's pasture.
That's no longer a social tactic as soon as the regular people won't.
And as soon as any one of the bystanders steps forward, that becomes the new target for the bully.
That's why it's so scary to do.
But that's when another bystander has to step forward and say, also no.
I mean, this, this thing isn't a thing that goes away when one caped hero comes in and stops it.
It's kind of thing where the whole mentality has to change.
I have seen it where one Cape Tarot comes in and stopped it, but it's usually the Cape Tarot is acting because they have gathered from the collective that somebody needs to act.
Rallied somebody.
And they just have, yeah, exactly.
They are aware that what they are doing has the consent of the group and that's why they're doing it.
Yeah, right.
But really, this thing doesn't stop or even slow down until all of us realize what's happening and work to oppose it.
I mean, that's the real point, really, is that bullies have to be opposed.
They have to know that the everyday things that they do are not accepted and that people will speak up and say, hey, that.
On the upside, I think like in the workplace, in a great deal of industries, not all of them, but in a great deal of workplace industries, we're getting there.
The behavior, like I worked in the building trades, right, for 12 years now, like, and stuff that was accepted even when I was an apprentice would like get you run off the job site today.
We're much more aware of any flavor of bullying or harassment in the workplace and much more conditioned to not condone it in any way.
Take, for example, the tremendous prevalence of like, you know, someone gets caught engaging in really crappy bullying behavior on social media or online.
Pick any of your freedom rallies or anything like that, like participating in looting or, you know, hurling racial slurs, caught on camera, being racist in Disneyland stories like that.
We've all heard them.
And then the punchline is the guy lost his job.
Not all of these people have gotten jobs where they have, you know, signed an agreement of employment that includes a morality clause.
So in a lot of these cases, there's actually no legal foothold for the employer to fire them for their admittedly reprehensible behavior.
And yet they do and it sticks.
And there's a reason why.
And it's, it's because I think in Western society anyway, we're evolving to the point where that's no longer seen as the acceptable means of doing business.
Well, that's hope for the future then, right?
Yeah, but, you know, there's still lots of industries where it is still quite prevalent.
And even the ones that have made progress have a long way to go.