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.”

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.

My friend Jon Garfunkel is doing some research on milblogs. Naively thinking that milblogs were about the authentic voice of soldiers, I thought it would be edifying to check a few out. To my horror and outrage (or was it “shock and awe” - President Bush’s favorite weapon against the citizens of his own country…?), the first thing I found was that milblogs were being brought under the arm of the vast U.S. military PR campaign. Taking a page out of the Wal-Mart book, U.S. Central Command has been cultivating bloggers as part of a viral marketing strategy to drive traffic to CENTCOM’s own web site. It’s certainly a lot easier to push a message if all the buzzy-bees come to you! And if that doesn’t work, the military has a project to create the illusion of American support to fall back on.

Employers have been testifying to Congress that U.S. citizens refuse low status jobs. However, hiring managers and HR personnel are routinely telling job applicants that they are overqualified. What we most need in this country is a better way to connect workers to employment opportunities. Employers shouldn’t run to congress and complain about not being able to find employees when they’ve set up a system that rejects, discourages, and deflects most jobseekers.

Today I was checking out the asian sculpture at the wonderful Ring of Fire Imports in Berkeley, and it reminded me that I once had a brush with what may be a bodhisattva. A few years ago I moved to a new place. Moving is especially difficult for me: I was working sporadically as a temp, I had no savings, I had no family and few friends in the area, and I don’t drive. After making some elaborate arrangements for exchange of services, I put together a group of friends who were supposed to help me move. Since helping someone move is one of the top ten most onerous duties of friendship, everyone who had agreed to help found an excuse to back out. Since someone else was supposed to be moving into my old place that week, I had no idea what to do.

Then a miracle happened. Another temp that I barely knew, heard me calling my friends and begging for help - and out of nowhere, he volunteered to help me. He had a car, and he spent a day doing a lot of heavy lifting and making multiple trips. I asked him what motivated him to help a stranger this way when all my supposed friends had ducked out of it. He explained that he was a Buddhist, and his religious beliefs guided him to act selflessly and reach out to anyone who needed his help.

After I met this person, I read a bit about Buddhism, and one of the things I learned is that the role of the Bodhisattva is to help other people reach enlightenment. The person who helped me move certainly played that role for me. To this day when I’m faced with a difficult ethical question, I ask myself what this guy would do. He’s the person who represents what it means to Do the Right Thing in my mind.

I’m bringing up this story because this is one model for building a dignitarian society. Rankism often results from people putting their own convenience before anything else and excluding the people who most need their help. The Bodhisattva seeks out those who need help and embraces the inconvenient as an opportunity for selflessness. Look for the potential Bodhisattvas around you and recognize that they are the leaders in creating a dignitarian way of life.

Recently the U.S. has been facing significant challenges to one of the fundamental principles of our Constitution, the separation of church and state. As pundits and litigators rattle swords over beachhead issues like prayer in schools and Intelligent Design, it’s edifying to consider the logical outcome of theocracy. Afghanistan has provided a timely demonstration in the form of a Christian convert that faced the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. While the Afghan court system cheated the question by tossing the case on a technicality, Muslim religious leaders prayed for the death penalty and threatened to whip up the anger of the people to tear the man who dared to turn away from their god “to pieces”.

Because Afghanistan is a theocracy, their government may not be able to adhere to their agreement to abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They can’t let all converts off on a technicality. Perhaps they will try a variation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell - though Afghan policymakers should take a hard look at how well that’s working for the U.S. armed forces first. Or should the U.S. offer amnesty for all?.

Given the collapse of the Human Rights Commission and the failure of the U.S. to incorporate Universal Declaration into its domestic legal system (not to mention our willingness to resort to torture), there may be no genuine defenders of freedom of conscience left. It may be only a matter of years before we see people on trial for their religion in the U.S., complete with lynchings, witch burnings, and crucifixions. It’s time to call on the U.S. government to restore the principle of separation of church and state in our own country, and lead by example in order to promote the wisdom of freedom of conscience throughout the world.

In Britain there’s currently a debate about whether a tough-talking celebrity should be leading the effort to stop bullying. The case of Jodie Marsh brings into focus a number of questions that usually get sidestepped in public conversation about bullying. First, is the person who fights back also a bully? My sense is that there is considerably social pressure not to fight back. Most of the conceptualizations are patently negative: “two wrongs don’t make a right”, “you can’t fight rankism with more rankism”, “revenge”, and even “terrorism”. It seems to me that this predictable social response supports bullying.

What happens when bullying occurs, and the public fails to support the target when the target fights back? This sends the message that it’s better to take the initiative in a conflict because the public will help pin the victim down. This invigorates bullies with the confidence that they will get away with aggressive action. Also, when other victims see that they will be punished with social disapproval and ostracism if they try to fight back, they will be less inclined to try: their only choice will be to comply. This is exactly the situation that bullies want.

Another question is whether a person who fights back is a good role model for children. It seems to me that there are different kinds of role model. Jodie Marsh is not a role model for turning the other cheek and passively accepting bullying. She is a role model for assertive responses to bullying, and at this point she can provide the victims of bullies with some insight to the bully’s point of view. It all comes down to how society views role models: are they there to reinforce hierarchy or are they there to help children think for themselves and stand up for themselves? Jodie Marsh is obviously a flawed human being. But we are all flawed human beings. Maybe children would be better off talking about the decisions Jodie made than feeling obliged to live up to the example of someone who is presented to them as perfect.

The ideal situation would be to explore at least three scenarios: the person who triumphs by repaying bullying with generosity, the person who repays bullying with more bullying, and the person who ended up in the hospital because they internalized the social pressure not to fight back. Without incorporating at least those three points of view, the anti-bullying movement will soon be mired in platitudes, without a sliver of hope for effective policy or social change.

A few days ago I touched on how the press was exploiting parental anxieties by only presenting the case against the videogame Bully. Yesterday I read another article portraying a mom’s plea against cyberbullying. I’ve also seen a lot of articles lately where HR gurus warn that people are being denied jobs because of Google, bolstered by the frenetic scare-mongering over privacy.

I want to stop bullying as much as anyone, and I’ve also had my experiences with cyberbullying, but it seems to me that corporate and government interests are now manipulating the issue of bullying to shut down or censor the Internet. Politicians and PR departments know that nothing creates an emotional climate for “safety” measures like the image of abused children or grieving parents.

What gives me the chills here is that the Internet is also one of the last frontiers of free speech and public participation. An environment of free speech may include bullies, but it also gives people a platform to speak out against bullies. In the offline world bullies often enjoy enormous control, and victims are easily silenced. On the Internet, the victim can speak out from behind the shield of screenname: this enables the victim to find other people that share his or her experience and may even sow the seeds of public protest, or even a social movement.

If the government establishes control of the Internet in the name of “public safety”, it will be the weakest and most vulnerable members of society who will be stopped from speaking. The powerful will continue to injure and abuse with the same impunity they enjoy in the real world social structure. When protest is contained in free speech zones, there’s no point in bothering to protest. The action is ineffective and the threat fails to inhibit. Power with no effective challenge is totalitarian power.

I’m starting to suspect that there is a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to stage a governement coup against Internet. It will probably work: our country has a sad history of giving away freedoms in the name of security. When it finally happens though, I think the true victims of bullying will be the first to see the mistake.

The most tragic symbol of America’s failure to expand human rights in Afghanistan was the parade of women who set themselves on fire as a last ditch way to communicate their despair. The news cycle for the burning of women seems to have ended, and the horror conveniently forgotten by fickle Americans. Today Kevin Sites managed to recapture a hefty chunk of attention with the story of an abused child bride. When I checked the story over 11,500 people had recommended it, and almost 7000 had commented. Thanks to the gift of news coverage, one abused child will receive an abundance of help, and perhaps a few others will benefit from some spillover generosity. It’s heartening to see there are some abuses that can still get past the American “that’s your problem, don’t drag me into it” mentality.

The only thing that bothers me is that the thing that’s clearly moving Americans to action is the picture of Gulsoma’s scars. Does that mean a person has to have extreme scarring to prove their status as a victim of abuse? Just as Gulsoma’s tormentors deliberately avoided her face, the truly clever abuser will avoid physical scars all together, and instead seek to inflict maximum social or psychological violence. Injuries that can never be proven are perhaps the most damaging of all.

A Florida lawyer is trying to block the distribution of a videogame that features a schoolyard bully. So far the press seems to be focused on portraying parental fears that the game will encourage bullying.

After reading the description of Bully, I’m not so sure that it lionizes bullying. It seems to me that the game models the bully as a bad guy, and it might even help keep the problem of bullying part of the public discourse. I read another blog comment that suggested that getting a chance to play the bully might be therapeutic for the victim: while no one wants to encourage feelings of revenge, it might cause even more problems to deny such feelings. Perhaps the stress of bottling up anger to meet the standards set for social perfection could erupt into real violence. In that case a game like Bully might help *avert* another Columbine.

I’m not advocating for Bully - I just don’t know enough about the game to form an opinion. I do think the way the press is presenting the issue - with caring parents on one side and amoral gamers on the other - is misleading. I doubt that the hand-wringing parents are representative of mainstream feeling, and I know adult gamers are the first to speculate on the social obligations of their favorite games. It’s probably wisest to reserve judgment and just let Bully hit the free market. Parents don’t have to buy it, and, better yet, the controversial nature of the game will continue to create opportunities to talk about bullying and find new ways to address the problems that stem from bullying.