12. The Bullying Issue

The Bullying Issue

The world runs on authority, on force. The army, the police, schools, corporate hierarchies, parenting, parenting, parenting. Family structure. Punishment and discipline is a system by where we control unwanted behaviour by force, and punishment, which, punishment is defined as dishing out unpleasantness to the misbehavers in order to motivate them to change their ways.

This is pretty much a definition of bullying. The bully punishes the victim. The bully justifies this punishment by listing the victims’ misbehaviours, or the victims' family's, or race's, or faith's misbehaviours.

This is punishing behaviour, this is bullies doing what their parents did, doing what the police do, I mean the bully’s behavior is VERY CLOSE to that, closer than any of us would like to think. I'm saying the bully feels he is doing what he sees around him, that in the parlance of some schools of psychology, the bully is getting his power back, after some authority figure has taken his power from him.

So, parents, schools going to the bully kids and telling them to stop is a joke to these kids. They see it as just more 'do as I say, not as I do.' So do I, for that matter. I, for one, would love to see someone ask the kids if I’m right about that. Don’t take my word for it. Ask the kids.

Parents don’t think they are bullying. We have a consensus about what is acceptable punishing behavior, and we really cannot seem to draw parallels with our legitimate punishments and other similar behaviours. If we can’t, if we won’t see how bullying is an extension, an extrapolation of our punishing ways, then there is very little hope that any of our conversation about bullying, any of our attempts to combat it will get any traction, very little hope of our ever solving a problem if we refuse to understand it in the first place. Surely, someone has noticed that speeches that don’t acknowledge this difficult truth have not had any dramatic effect on the bullying phenomenon? I think any approach that doesn’t include this idea would be considered empty and hopeless, at least to any group that lives under threat or reality of punishment – like our kids.

 Long and short, if we don't stop ‘bullying’ our kids at home, we will never stop their bullying, that should be obvious. I don’t know why it isn’t.

Many nations have outlawed corporal punishment, in Canada, we are in the process of outlawing it, and I can see the next step, that we will someday realize that the damage caused by punishing behaviours generally outweigh any benefit, and when we all stop anything like bullying, so will our kids. Until then, we will fight this bullying thing in vain, fighting it in the schools, and causing it at home.

So now, there are programs, task forces, plans and research, all government money spent to figure out this embarrassing problem, and if we don't try to stop people from the use of punishment – corporal and otherwise - on our kids at home, we are wasting all those resources. And that is a sad, cruel joke, one that the parents don’t understand, and only our kids are laughing about. Not in a good way.

11. The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World.

11. The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World.

The ‘legitimate’ abuse that has a thousand names, punishment, correction, discipline, consequences, training, spanking, timeouts, quiet time, penance, detention, etc., this practice is done by nearly everyone. People of many races, religions, nationalities, creeds, sexualities, income levels, education levels, and both genders, most people hold with punishment’s basic, unquestioned, unacknowledged premise, that you can improve people, their behaviour, their development, their character – by hurting them. By somehow making life less pleasant for them when they stray from the caregivers’ idea of what is done and what is not.

Now, for me, this seems to contradict a great deal of psychological science, which developed, to some degree, by tracing suffering people’s lives to the unpleasantness that damaged them to the point of seeking a doctor’s help, in the early days, damaged them to the point of being committed to a sanatorium. For a dysfunctional patient, often after other causes had been explored, physical ailments, etc., often the next, or maybe last logical step might be the psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis has had some success, making connections between mental trauma and social dysfunction.

Of these two apparently opposing ideas, the latter seems the more logical, dare I say, scientific. So with this argument, and the ones in the preceding chapters, I’m going to push on, taking as a given, at least as my premise, that unpleasantness, only different from trauma by a matter of degree, damages people rather than improving them.

OK, the use of punishment has looked like it works, you punish someone and the unwanted behaviour appears to stop – but does it? Do we think a punished child becomes a model citizen forever afterwards? Do we think a punished adult ceases his criminal behaviour and goes on as a saint? I don’t think even the most energetic of my unconvinced audience thinks that, do they? So again, unpleasantness makes people worse, less functional, rather than improving them. Having said that, I want to extrapolate that whomsoever punishes a person the most, does the most damage.

If  one’s parents are active participants in the practice, the culture of punishment, then I feel  I must say, that the parent who does the more parenting, very often the most punishing, must be the parent causing the most unpleasantness, the most trauma, the most damage. And, sorry to say, in my world, probably in most of the world, it’s Mom doing most of the parenting. Certainly many fathers are responsible for horrible trauma, perhaps the more serious punishments are administered by the father in some families, but basically, day-to-day parenting and punishing, falls to mothers. This is especially trus during the earliest years of the child’s life. Uninvolved fathers are bad in many ways, of course. Neglect is a form of abuse, there is the lack of male modelling, but there is the other side too: if parenting means punishing to the mother, and if she overdoes it, then Dad’s neglect is downright dangerous, he can be rightly accused of not protecting his kids from some hands-on abuse. Also, if he’s not helping, then the mother can become stressed out, also not a good thing for a parent who already thinks punishing kids, that is, hurting kids, is good for them. So yes, that is what I’m saying: in the culture of punishment, your mother is probably doing you more harm than your father. Dad’s no saint, don’t get me wrong, he’s letting her do it, often participating . . . but the myth that needs busting here, is Mom’s sainthood. Having said THAT, the other ramifications of this are the more important thing. Blame is even, one does it, one allows it, and sometimes they trade off. I don’t make this point to place blame; this isn’t about the trauma of children.

This principle, that mothers raise the children, that mothers punish the children, this is the root of misogyny, the root of violence against women. We love our mothers, we love our system of punishment, we all hold the family unit as a sacred, ancient tradition, but that is the surface of it all. That is only what we say, what we think we feel, but the dark side is this:

We all know who punished us, we know who damaged us. Violence against women is a trend, a tendency, it is far more prevalent than the incidence of extreme abuse would indicate, the expression of infantile rage against the one who hurt us, that is the great secret. This is another piece of the great puzzle of life that falls into place when you work from the premise that punishment is violence.

The culture of punishment in which we live has turned the most natural, organic beautiful thing in the world, mother love, into a violent act, and one which brings a terrible vengeance to the half of humanity we should all hold sacred, our mothers. Now to blame. Women, putting the blame for misogynist violence on men isn’t working; stop spanking your sons. Men, you’re not fixing it either. Stop making your women “correct” your sons. This is the issue.  Violence breeds violence.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Women, your safety, the safety of your daughters and grand-daughters is in your hands. Hurting kids, dishing out unpleasantnesses, damages them, it doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help women. Help your kids, help yourselves, give up your punishing ways. Love looks like love, and it doesn’t invite revenge.

10. Original Sin

10. Original Sin

Mass-murderers like Charlie Manson and Andreas Brevik (spelling?) seem to think everyone is a psycho like them. They have it in common that all they thought they needed to do to start a race/faith war was to kill a few people, a few tens of people, and the war would be on, that all the average guy needs is for someone to start the killing and we’d all jump in and go on a mass mass-murder spree, a national, even global, bench-clearing brawl. They think everyone is like them, or at least that we all secretly want to be.

A core belief in people’s intrinsic violence, intrinsic evil, that’s what that is. Or to put it in other words, they hold with the doctrine of Original Sin.

Which is, of course, is a strong predictor for the nearly universal belief in the social tool known as punishment.

(This is what makes Charlie so captivating when he talks. He seems to know this, that he and we are not that far apart.)

It’s no secret that the religious, at least the Abrahamically religious make no bones about this, that Original Sin is a tenet, even with the non-Christian ones. They all began together, they all think it’s true, hence the need for God. And they mostly all follow the extrapolated idea from it, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But what of the disavowed, the atheists, the lapsed? Also true, for the most part. We can deny the church, we can deny the bible, but it is foolish to deny that the bible is the basis of our entire culture here west of  Afghanistan and east of Hawaii, (possibly excluding much of Africa) for the last 2,000 years. You atheists, you church-bashers, know this: use the rod, and you propagate the very thing you hope to extinguish!

This is a key part of the interaction between religion and our faith in punishment as a social tool. When everyone is punished, when we are all raised with punishments that begin long before we have any understanding of the world, then a vengeful god makes sense, the idea of a punishment awaiting us at the end of a mis-lived life seems, reasonable. It has precedent, at least in our minds. Of course, this idea is normally expressed the other way 'round, that God and his punishments are the model for our lives, as written into many faiths' texts. I don't hope to change any minds among the religious followers, but the atheist reader will have to admit that the actual function is arranged in the natural timeline of a human life: parents first, God second.

It seems that there is no getting around our cultural heritage, certainly not if we still cling to the most important and influential beliefs of that legacy while only disavowing ourselves of the less reality-based and purely theoretical ones.

9. the Normal Viewpoint

9. The Normal Viewpoint

I'm going to use this chapter as a sort of a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section. But first, a rant:

Believe me, folks, these things I have heard before, these are things most people believe. Hearing them from you is not going to change my thinking. If you want to correct me, find the weak points in my posts, and debunk them, debate them. Do not attempt to toss my entire philosophy out the window with an explanation of your idea of child-rearing, which is, most likely EVERYONE'S idea of child-rearing, and EVERYONE has already told me about it.
I wasn't raised according to my theory. I had a normal upbringing, authoritative, hierarchical, punishment based. My anti-punishment stance was novel to me, too. When I first found myself in the role of parent, I was exactly like everyone else. I believed children needed discipline, punishment. I thought I knew what was what, and therefore was just the right person to make judgements and hand out punishments. I spanked my little rent-a-kid (my live-in girlfriend's son). Too bad for that kid, lucky for my own kids later that I had a re-organization of my thinking that started before my first was born. So, I've been what I call "normal." Been there, done that, didn't like it. I never wear that T-shirt.
So here's the list, things I've heard before, many times. Things MOST PEOPLE think:

Kids need to be corrected, they need to learn what's right.

Answers:
1. People need: food, water, shelter, love, and sometimes, medical care.
2. Most people are not perfectly correct themselves. We aren't all qualified to CORRECT anyone. If we were all perfectly correct - well, then the world would be a perfectly correct place, and we wouldn't have these sorts of problems to work out.
3. Is that a universality, kids need to be corrected? Do you know where that idea comes from? It comes from the Church. It is the idea of "Original Sin," one of the Church's greatest marketing ideas. All people are born evil, and they need the Church to save them from Hell. Of course, good and evil are human constructs. We are not all born evil, we do not require some intervention that will keep us all from naturally developing into evil, murderous villains.


A little spanking doesn't hurt them.

Answers:
1. Then what's the point? How is it an effective deterrent or a punishment if it doesn't hurt? This is a logical fallacy: "You hurt them a little, so they learn not to mis-behave. But it doesn't hurt them."
2. So, if a little doesn't hurt them, and the point of punishment is to hurt them a little, to deter them next time, well, maybe they need more than a little. Punishment is often doomed to escalate, sometimes right out of control.
3.

I was punished, and I'm OK.

Answers:
1. If you're really OK, you're a rarity. Most of us have problems.
2. For all I know, you really ARE OK, except for one thing. You believe hurting little kids is good for them.
3. How OK? How bad off would you have to be before the punishments you received were too much? Would you have to be suicidal? Unemployable? Institutionalized? Homicidal? A wife-beater? An alcoholic, a junkie, a whore, a thug? Is just being a normal person, with normal amounts of sadness, anger, alcoholism, fear, frustration, poverty, divorce, these sorts of problems are as good as it gets, so that we needn't question our parents or our methods of child-rearing? You know, the first group of people I mention, the ones with extreme problems, that is a pretty large group. The second group, the functional ones are a range, from the first group types, all the way to some reasonably happy, very functional people. But most of us have problems. It's weird, in many situations, people will cry and bemoan their lot, their guilt, their powerlessness to make their life what they want, but ask them about their childhood punishments - I'm OK. Don't worry about me, I'm fine.
4.

This one is a work in progress. I'll be adding to it . . .

8. Give up the Power

Parents today are caught in a terrible bind. I hear it from young parents a lot. They want to be different from their parents, they all remember parental mistreatment, they all want to be nicer to their kids, they want to avoid the mistakes they see their parents as having made. When it comes down to it, though, they can't help it, they still want their own kids to behave, and they can't find a different way to make it happen.

So when little Samantha won't get into her car-seat, or little Nathan keeps pulling off his shoes making them late for dinner at Grandma's house, they try talking, begging, distracting. When none of that works, they look into their parenting toolkit, and there's only one thing left in there, and guess what it is. Only the club left. Force.

Of course, it works, usually. That's part of the problem, but it gets worse.

The big problem here is, it's over. It can go either direction, but what I hear most is, that this is the end of the young parent's non-violent dream. This is when many parents give up the idea, and end up saying, OMG, my parents were right.

Of course there is a world of reinforcement for this "realization." And there seems to be no way out of this dilemma, except one, and it's bad news.

Of course, some parents go the other way. Some, after resorting to force, after forcing Samantha into the car-seat or whatever, will stubbornly hold onto their dream, and try to find another way, and they will move toward what I have already mentioned, non-violent punishments, or what are euphemistically called “consequences.” Of course, non-violent punishments rest, ultimately, on the other kind. (See section 3.) So that is not really the way out, either. Again, the news is not good.

We have to give up. If we want to raise our kids without force, without punishment, we have to lose. Little Nathan is not going to wear his shoes and you're going to be late for dinner at Grandma's. I know: inconceivable. Ludicrous. But that's it, a big part of it at least. If we want to stop the cycle of violence, we need to stop making the control it provides our non-negotiable priority. In terms of the psychology of abuse, we need to not get our power back. I'm afraid that's our job, if we want to make this huge change, to lose to our authoritarian parents - and LOSE AGAIN to our children. We need to sacrifice our power, we need to not win, in order to break the cycle.

I never said it was going to be easy.