One of the most consistent tenets of the growing movement against bullying is to advise bystanders to side with the victim. While supporting targets of aggression is one of the core principles I live by, I’m concerned there is a certain amount of magical thinking involved since there is little to no honest discussion of the cost of standing against rank-based power.

In most occasions where I overtly supported the target of rankism, I became a target myself and suffered adverse consequences. The person in power perceived me as participating in a coalition “against” them and responded as if there was some growing threat. I once resigned for a job where the manager had started to find subtle ways to punish me when I refrained from supporting his attack another employee. The manager detected a pattern in which I always attempted to balance his criticism with a positive comment and dismissed my attempts to support the target as a sign of “special friendship”. A few years later, I was fired from a good job because I attempted to avoid being used in one manager’s scheme against another: just by trying to remain neutral, I was perceived as potentially disloyal and soon became the target of the manager’s scheming myself. In that same job I never received any acknowledgement for my attempts to advocate for mistreated people at the bottom of the heap.

Leading a life that’s dedicated to “siding with the victim” requires a great deal of self-sacrifice. Because of my choices, I’ve never made it past entry level jobs: skills, experience, and work ethic simply aren’t enough if you don’t cultivate the good will of those in power. I don’t have health insurance or any retirement savings (though I’ve been responsible about saving whenever I have work, I’ve need to tap these savings during periods of unemployment). I haven’t had a vacation, in the sense of being able to travel some place special, since 1993, when I had the good luck to be able to attend a 3-day academic conference in Santa Fe. I’ve been publicly smeared as well as materially harmed, so I don’t even get the reward of a public reputation for good works.

There are many things I would have liked to do with my life that I will never be able to do because I have made a habit of siding with the victims. I made all these choices with my eyes wide open. I knew that I would have to sacrifice my own interests to uphold my belief in what needs to be done to create a dignitarian society.

I’m the first to agree that encouraging children to side with the victim of bullying will help create a better society. It would be great to see more people practice siding with the victim in cases of workplace rankism as well: not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it models the behavior they want to pass on to their children and helps build a culture that will protect other people who dare to stand up for an underdog. However, the first step in promoting this behavior is being honest about the consequences.

Doing the right thing can be very costly, and there’s not always a karmic force or a greater community understanding that will compensate for that cost. If parents and teachers lie to children about these costs, and, worse, fail to model the behavior they preach, they will be perceived as hypocrites. This won’t create a culture that transcends rankism: it will create a culture of cynicism that treats the weak and the vulnerable in worse ways than ever before. Think about it: will children who learn through experience to associate doing good and maintaining their integrity with a life of ongoing punishment necessarily choose to stick with the “moral high road”? More realistically, they will end up in therapy complaining about how their parents lied to them and perhaps start indulging in ruthless Machiavellianism as the cure.

If we really want to alleviate rankism in society, the first thing to do is create institutional protections and occasional rewards for siding with victims and advocating for minority viewpoints. We need to reform the legal system so it once again functions as the recourse for justice for all citizens instead of a corporate tool. Just exhorting people to “side with the victim” and hoping that the spirit of good will ultimately trump power is an exercise in magical thinking.