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Do we have a predisposition to bully? One that is as primal as survival of the fittest?
As teachers prepare for a new school year, covering hallways with anti-bullying slogans—including “respect for all”—we must ask ourselves why these campaigns seem inadequate, given all the attention, support, and money they have attracted. In fact, if public civility is any gauge, we appear to have reversed course. Numerous media reports chronicle disrespect and incivility, challenging the efficacy of this programming.
What should we make of this?
Over 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud penned a classic which is, sadly, out of fashion. In Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud described two instinctual drives that motivate humans: the pleasure principle (Eros) and an aggressive instinct (Thanatos). He explored both in terms of the tension they create for society. As he understood it, civilization requires control over these individual impulses. They must be bridled and harnessed in the name of the key survival strategy of our species: community/civilization.
Yet their ongoing repression creates perpetual discontent. The desire for sexual gratification and the predisposition toward (violent) aggressions foment below the veneer of civilization, time and again threatening to bubble over.
Freud, a Jew who lived through WWI and fled Germany prior to WWII, had first-hand experience of the incivility that threatened to undo civilization. Although psychologists cringe when experts from other disciplines reference Freud, culture is our biological strategy. And as parallels between the intolerance that characterized pre-WWII Germany and the ones that color our post-2016 world continue to be drawn, it would seem we are, again, threatened by a privileging of socially aggressive impulses seething just under the surface, portending a major eruption on the horizon.
Only consider recent headlines: "The bully who attacked/hospitalized the mother of his victim" or "The adults who broke into a brawl over a little-league game."
The question is, must that cataclysm occur?
Or can the past guide the creation of pressure valves to release those tensions, before they ‘blow’ on a grand scale?
This question might be translated as “Can the court of public opinion rein in the pleasure we take in aggressive spectacles?” Only consider the popularity of WWE, violent video games, or the countless ‘home-made’ YouTube videos documenting violence that have gone viral. It might be argued that these spectacles ‘give vent’ to aggressive impulses, but—even if that is the case—the very volume of, and amusement over, these displays simultaneously normalize violence. More than that, they inure us to the sight of harm and suffering by rewarding our ability to inflict it.
Asking whether there can be social accountability in an age of social media, where postings are tumbled and sucked into the rip-tide of relentless new (Jerry Springer-esque) tweets, postings, and video uploads, is not new. But perhaps Freud can once again inform our understanding of the dynamics in play when the restraints of civilization are loosened.
Freud was dubious about the ability of moral codes, rooted in the superego, to successfully bridle the instincts. According to him, the superego develops as we internalize the demands of authority figures: the restraints required by parents, clergy, and the police. We so fear disappointing (and being punished by) these individuals that we internalize their interdicts, and make them our own.
But what happens when authority breaks down? When there are no authority figures we fear disappointing, or whose threat of punishment keeps us in line?
The last bastion of moral authority lies with community, with the collective power to sanction aggression, to demand accountability, and even, to shame. However, the anonymity in which social media can be cloaked, in conjunction with the multi-culturalism that guides public morality, erodes the power of community.
What authority can define behaviors as inappropriate, unsuitable (let alone socially liable aggressions), and who will enforce sanctions? What ‘voice’ has enough authority to rein in the spectacles woven into the fabric of modern culture? (and/or be internalized, and occasion self-restraint?) Worse yet, what if public figures give free rein to impulses, precluding the development of a cultural conscience—and perhaps the potential for individual empathy—altogether?
As we feel increasingly threatened by the chaos that is the end-result of unbridled individualism, freedom, and technologies that alter the firings of our brains, we look to restore the safety of community.
Can we really choose, at this point, for the portended upheaval to be bloodless? Can we choose to limit freedoms and circumscribe anti-social impulses by willingly embracing codes of morality? Whose morality? It would seem that the murderous capacity of the instincts (freed by the overthrowal of the superego, the demise of public accountability, and even laws derived from the Constitution itself), presage much more bullying in the hallways (and fighting in the streets) before ‘respect for all’ becomes the norm.
