1. Work: Take the trouble to understand how co-workers contribute to getting the job done and acknowledge their contribution.
If you are a boss, it’s not enough to avoid treating your employees in a rankist manner (though the example you set will reverberate through the entire organization) ; you are also responsible for making sure that your subordinates treat their subordinates with dignity. Dignitarian companies are not only happier workplaces, they are also healthier, more creative, and more productive ones.

2. Education: Create “Indignity Free Zones.”
Teachers are increasingly sensitive to the harm done to students by indignity. If you’re an educator, you can bring this awareness into the open and communicate it to those students whose bullying and humiliation of peers unconsciously mirrors that of adult society. A threat to a student’s dignity is more than a discourtesy. It is an attack on one’s status in the “tribe,” and carries an implicit threat of ostracism and exclusion. Status has historically been a matter of life and death and remains a determinant of whether we prosper or decline, so an attack on status is experienced as a threat to survival. Rankism poisons the learning environment.

3. Healthcare: Enlist your patients as partners.
If you are a healthcare provider, you can help your clients make the awkward transition from patients to partners. Ridding healthcare of its legacy of dehumanization and infantilization is good medical practice. You can also insist on respect throughout the organization in which you work. If you are a patient, have compassion for doctors, too. It’s not easy to give up one’s “deity status,” and many physicians are doing so with remarkable grace. Moreover, remember that they’re victims of rankism themselves at the hands of HMOs that often treat them less like the professionals they are and more like pieceworkers on an assembly line.

4. Sports: Have respect for the other team.
If you’re a coach, you can forbid trash talk, on and off the court, among your players and to your opponents. Show your team that they are capable of more—not by humiliating them but by teaching and inspiring them. Rent the 1973 film Bang the Drum Slowly and show it to your athletes. Its punch line—“I rag on nobody”—puts it in the anti-rankist hall of fame.

5. Religion: Exemplify rather than exhort.
If you’re a religious leader, you can refrain from pulling spiritual rank. You can do more for your flock by listening and providing them with a personal example worthy of emulation than you can by invoking higher authority, which is often little more than a claim that God shares your politics.

6. Guardian professions (policing): Bring dignity to law enforcement.
If you’re a policeman or woman, protect citizens’ dignity as you already protect their lives. Any kind of profiling is rankism.

7. Military: One part of a strong defense is not giving offense in the first place.
Indignity is the source of indignation, so to avoid escalation or revenge, take care to spare your foes gratuitous indignities.

8. Politics: Restore civility to politics
If you’re in electoral politics you can point the way to a dignitarian society, even if your colleagues aren’t yet ready to embrace your ideas. Treat your opponents with dignity. Don’t sneer, mock, or condescend. Avoid patronizing or posturing. When politicians lay claim to moral superiority, they extend rankism’s lease. Since rankism is an attack on both liberty and dignity, denounce it along with the other isms. Explain to your constituents why you’re against it—in all its forms—and then go after them one by one. Be the leader you wanted to be when you first imagined running for office. Be willing to lose an election for your dignitarian convictions. If you do lose, run for office a few years later, and win! To paraphrase Victor Hugo, dignity is an idea whose time has come.

9. Other professions: Show the world dignity through your profession.
If you’re an artist, expose rankism; put dignity on exhibit. If you’re a philosopher, define and deconstruct dignity. If you’re a psychologist, demonstrate the consequences of malrecogntion. If you’re a comedian, make us laugh at the double standards that apply to somebodies and nobodies. If you’re a filmmaker, give us heroes who overcome rankism without resorting to rankism. If you’re a songwriter, write an anthem for the dignity movement. If you’re a TV producer, stop exploiting humiliation and celebrating rankism. Sooner than you think, the staple of TV entertainment—humiliation—is going to feel as off-key as racism, sexism, and homophobia do today.

10. Be a Susan B. Anthony of the Dignity Movement.
In the 19th century, Susan B. Anthony traveled a million miles by train and gave 20,000 speeches advocating the enfranchisement of women. Sadly, she did not live to see the success of the suffragette movement she spearheaded (but her image is on the dollar coin). If you’re an organizer, create a chapter of the dignitarian movement in your area. Coordinate with other chapters and make them a national force under the slogan “no rankism” and the banner “dignity for all.” Programs to help the poor or end poverty will continue to fall short until those trapped in the underclass have found their voice and together insist on respect and equity. Do what Susan B. Anthony did for women and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. did for African-Americans: help the victims of chronic indignity find an effective way to give voice to their plight and change the status quo.

If the results from a University of Maine study can be construed as representative of university life in the U.S., more than one in five students have witnessed hazing. A quick glance at the news reveals a surprising number of hazing incidents (including the hazing murder of an Iraq veteran), and efforts to protect the victims through enlightened policies and legislation. Here is a good general resouce on hazing.

Apart from protecting the victim, I think the high numbers of witnesses who apparently do little or nothing call for a renewed public discussion about the bystander effect. This is a difficult topic to bring up, especially if you’re trying to point out and prevent the Bystander Effect in progress. In my experience, anyone who is part of the Bystander group will have a knee-jerk defensive reaction to the implied accusation rather than using the information to redirect their attention and help the victim. Perhaps what we also need is a social pact that makes it safe for people to bring up a Bystander issue: i.e., no hostility, retaliation, ostracization, or attempts to turn the group against the person who dares to point out Bystander behavior. The Bystander Effect is real, and a quick glance at all the news stories about hazing shows that people are getting hurt and even killed because of the social obstacles to intervention.

An interesting Wisconsin State Journal article argues that the Left and the Right are uniting in opposition to the Bully video game. It would be interesting to see if there’s a line between supporters and opponents that can be drawn elsewhere. For instance, would the positions reflect a generational divide? Or perhaps the battle over Bully is defined by economic as opposed to political positions: is this a free market vs. planned economy showdown?

I’m personally still in favor of parents choosing not to buy the game instead of banning it. I think it’s providing a terrific focus for conversation about bullying.

Also, I learned today that 160,000 students have reported skipping out on school because they fear being bullied. I wonder how this number would look if other strategies to avoid bullying were factored in. For instance, my father drove me every day to a school in another town for my senior year in high school to dissuade me from dropping out of my hometown school. I was bullied extensively as a classic chess nerd – though it was probably more of a problem that the social status of my family and my dollar store clothes didn’t match my upper class-ish abilities and interests. Nothing drives people crazier than a person that’s difficult to categorize.

I often wonder if the mass unsettling of categories isn’t the root of a lot of reactionary politics today. A lot of people have attempted to assert equality without any financial ground to stand on since the 60s: this probably looks like chaos from the perspective of the traditionally privileged. No wonder our government and the media are looking for any rationale – scientific or religious or judicial – to put people “in their place”. A banner example is Tom Delay’s shifty agenda for moral fitness. For the reader’s benefit, here’s a defition of “moral fitness” from a philosophy web site:

Moral fitness theory is a rationalist theory that includes the notion that the human mind is able to grasp the various moral relations that result from the essential natures of things in the universe; e.g., the nature of humans and God creates a relation that necessitates the allegiance of humans to their superior (this view was made most famous by Samuel Clarke).

The idea of “moral fitness” probably sounds comforting to the people dismayed by the confusion and contradictions of the modern world. However, I imagine it’s a lot more comforting for those who deem themselves to be the “superiors” than those who are shoved into the class obliged to proffer a natural “allegiance.”

When black children are bullied by other black children, do administrators disregard the violence as normal behavior?