Coming to Terms with Bullying in the World

If you watched the Presidential debate, you caught a glimpse of a theme of bullying that reaches beyond the current political climate, into my own personal life and maybe yours as well. The President interrupted over a hundred times. As Megan Garber writes in the Atlantic, “To be interrupted—in a meeting, in a casual conversation, on a presidential-debate stage—is to be told, with blunt efficiency, that your voice is not as important as the voice of the person who is talking over you.” Experiences like these can have a deep impact on who we are.

How do we come to terms with bullying in our lives and communities? Here I’d like to share a technique common to many of the bullies I’ve known. I believe this issue is holding us all back from crucial healing. I’ve been the recipient of bullying, but as you’ll hear, I’ve also been a bully myself. Have you? I think we can always benefit from asking this question through another person’s eyes (see this previous blog post).

Recognizing patterns of bullying

How can we gain clarity on negative patterns in our lives? Experiences are cyclical, so we can use them to learn about ourselves. Synchronicities—meaningful coincidences—will appear again and again to illuminate our patterns and help us heal. 

One of these moments of recognition came for me while doing voter outreach during the current election. John is an intelligent, well-informed, and fiery guy. He was respectful but forceful in our dialogue. He works in the oil industry, but professed to be open-minded about climate change, wanting to understand my point of view. 

His behavior, however, confessed otherwise. Shortly after we began John sought to take control of the conversation by asking strategic questions. He said, “May I ask you a question? If we had to switch off of fossil fuels tomorrow, what would we use?”

His strategy was to frame the question in a way which benefited his stance. He was setting up a question for which he knew the response, which would allow him to then push his position.

I said, “Well, we can’t switch right away, it takes time. That’s why we need a mix of media, from solar to wind and others.” Predictably, he said, “Right, in other words we don’t have a viable alternative to oil. Let me ask you something else. Have you ever seen a solar plant in person?” To which I replied in the negative. He continued, “Have you ever seen an oil pipeline in person?” Again my answer was no. He was establishing his own credibility and undermining mine. He then asked, “So, which of these do you think you could plant crops under?”

Huh? My head was spinning. I had been dragged into a conversation that wasn’t making sense. I felt compelled to come up with an answer. “Are you trying to make the point that a pipeline can still be usable land, while a solar power plant is not multipurpose?” He said, “Right, you can use a pipeline for farmland, but not a solar power plant.”

He continued like this, asking questions that led to conclusions that just didn’t make sense to me.

Bullying and extremist thinking

Now, the equivalent of a solar plant is not an oil pipeline but an oil power plant. But his line of questioning made it hard for me to reason it out. All I was able to do was try to understand what he was saying and come up with evidence that would respond to his queries. I was pushed into a submissive role.

I saw this kind of behavior as a kid as well. Maybe you did too. I experienced adults who said things like “Don’t you know…” and tried to make me feel dumb for not reading their mind. I experienced it with peers as well, in implicit or explicit bullying. I’ve even done it myself.

The example with John illustrates how bullies take control of the narrative. The questions being asked were not really questions, they formed a line of attack. The questioner makes the debate about the person, not about the issue.

But why? And how? I don’t think the underlying goal of John or my own bullies was ultimately about being right, it was about being in control. Their questions are aimed at taking control of the narrative. They feel a need to maintain the upper hand. 

Research shows that people who have an increased level of psychological distress, or “a sense of meaninglessness that stems from anxious uncertainty,” are more likely to develop extreme stances on issues. It seems to me that bullying can be seen as a sort of “extreme stance.” McGregor, Prentice, and Nash find that “People psychologically compensate for feelings of uncertainty and fear through strong ideological convictions,” and according to research by Prooijen and Krouwel, “Political extremists—on both the left and right of the spectrum—report stronger anxiety (than moderates) about their economic future.”

According to Prooijen and Krouwel’s research, the leap to extreme thinking can follow three steps. The first step is over-simplification. The individual frames an issue in simplistic terms in their own mind. For instance, in our conversation John described a popular democratic politician as “evil” based on her litigation record in court. It was clearly an unjustified simplification. To John, the politician was simply evil—end of story. Kruglanski, et al, report “Feelings of distress prompt a desire for clarity, and extremist belief systems provide meaning to a complex social environment through a set of straightforward assumptions that make the world more comprehensible.”

Secondly, the person becomes over-confident in their judgements. It’s easy to be confident when things make perfect sense in our head. “While simplistic causal models of reality enable extremism by addressing the epistemic need to make the world more predictable (Kruglanski et al., 2006), they also enhance beliefs that one accurately understands reality. Put differently, people are more confident about judgment domains that seem simple.” 

Psychological distress feels terrible, but “being certain” feels good. Serotonin gives us a buzz! Individuals with the same amount of actual data but differing levels of psychological distress will show different levels of confidence in their views. “Results revealed that left and right-wing extremists did not differ from moderates in their domain-specific knowledge...yet they did experience increased judgmental certainty.”

Thirdly, once we have labelled an item as simple and we feel confident in our view, we have the basic ingredients for intolerance. It seems like we have the only reasonable conclusion. If someone doesn’t agree, they must be morally compromised. This sense of belief superiority, however, “is a poor predictor of actual knowledge...and predicts a tendency to select agreeable but ignore disagreeable information (Hall & Raimi, 2018).”

My own experience bullying

We can see the dynamic of ideological extremism at work in the behavior of bullies too. I have been in those shoes myself. 

Last year I was at an open mic music event. I felt overqualified, because I had decades of experience. Yet I also felt insecure—embarrassed actually—that I was unknown in my career as a musician.

An older man came on stage and proceeded to talk about his song for a long time. He had technical difficulties when he started to play, and instead of handling it professionally he used up clock time by repeatedly starting over. 

It was a tightly scheduled evening, and I was concerned there wouldn’t be time for me. Finally I blurted out, “Just play us your song!” Although half-joking, my message was clear: I’m more important than you. The host hurried over to me and whispered “Please don’t heckle the performers!” I was mortified. I hadn’t associated what I’d said with heckling, but I immediately realized she was right. 

Why did I act like a bully that night? I was scared about losing my turn, but not only that, I was wounded by hundreds of past rejections and so I puffed myself up. I was over-confident because I was insecure. 

Prooijen and Krouwel say “an important reason why people become radicalized is a quest for significance—the need to feel important and respected by supporting a meaningful cause.” That is how I felt that night at the open mic. I desperately needed to feel relevant. 

I resorted to bullying for the same reason that a person may resort to extremism. Would John’s feeling of significance be threatened if he were to come to terms with the reality of climate change, due to the fact that he works in the energy sector? Webber et al say “a loss of significance increases extreme beliefs on both the left and right.”

It’s about managing feelings

The findings of Prooijen and Krouwel showed that “political extremists—on both ends of the spectrum—are overconfident in their beliefs.” This is not about the issues themselves but about the underlying psychological needs of people.

In short, taking extremist views or bullying others is a strategy for managing feelings, not for seeking truth. The desire to feel good is at least as compelling as the desire to see clearly. According to research by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, “fitness beats truth.” In other words, interpretations of data that increase the feeling of well-being of the subject are more “fit” than those which reflect the reality of the situation.

This is a message conveyed urgently in my book, Leap to Wholeness. We all have feelings, all the time. If we like watching football, that’s a feeling. If we value strength over weakness, that’s a feeling. If we hate talking about feelings, that’s a feeling. They cannot be escaped. We all make decisions based upon our feelings. 

How do we get out of this trap? What the book suggests, counter-intuitively, is to be open to your feelings. The part of us that feels strong emotions can be likened to a young child. While children clearly should not be in charge of big decisions, they do need comforting. By listening to and being compassionate toward our own strong feelings, we can avoid getting thrown out of the boat when our emotions get strong.

For instance, we can tell we are frustrated if we hear ourselves say “argh!” We can use this as a reminder. First, Accept the circumstances you find yourself in. Then, Recognize your pattern of thinking or feeling. What is it that feels familiar? Next, instead of being caught up in your fears about what has gone wrong, choose to value Growth over accomplishment. It’s more valuable to learn from the situation and experience a long-lasting shift in your thinking than it is to fix this situation. From this shift, allow yourself to Heal the old pattern and develop a different response to stress.

We could all be more open

Is this a global dynamic? Can we attribute the lack of progress on many important issues to our difficulty in coping with psychological distress, our desire to simplify so that we feel better, and the resulting close-mindedness that we have? We can learn more about the patterns of behavior that motivate us by paying close attention to the circumstances we are in. Circumstances that seem random often contain valuable information that we can use to learn about our own patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. With proper reflection these circumstances can be useful for our personal growth. We may realize some blind spot that we hadn’t noticed before. We are reminded of the aphorism “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Maybe the cosmos we live in is rich with meaning and programmed to operate this way. If so, it seems like the perfect training ground for the global growth spurt we are experiencing right now.