An American Culture of Insecure Bullies
What we tell ourselves is strength is actually just the opposite
Most people already understand or wouldn’t be surprised to learn that schoolyard bullies are invariably emotionally wounded and insecure kids who try to make themselves feel better by making someone else feel worse. If they happen to be big and strong, they have a better chance of being able to get away with it, but kids who are happy and well adjusted don’t behave like this, no matter how big and tough they are. They have no reason to.
This dynamic doesn’t only take place on the playground, however. We’ve actually built our entire American culture around it and it takes place throughout the adult sphere as well. Might makes right and if you don’t win, you lose didn’t get invented in America, but this is a place where we’ve perfected those ideas, in part because they go well with the social Darwinism brand of capitalism that we practice, where only the fittest survive. By fittest, we essentially mean the most ruthless.
Our founding fathers were all landed, rich, white men. When they said, “All men are created equal” they essentially meant people who looked like them — not women, not blacks or Indians, and not the poor, not really. The electoral college was designed to make sure that the rabble would never be able to elect through popular vote someone who didn’t have the interests of the elite in mind. In the original 13 colonies, you had to own land to be able to vote and many states kept this provision in the early days of the Republic.
In other words, our social system was a patriarchal dominance hierarchy right from the inception. It was established from the get-go who the elites were and who was lower down the pecking order. In a dominance hierarchy, the structure is authoritarian and this takes place in both the family and society. The goal of nearly everyone is to maintain their ranking or to achieve a higher one by forcing someone else into a position lower than you are. This is typically done by creating fear, or threatening violence. Everyone from mean girls to workplace sexual harassers is trying to establish their dominance by making you aware of your inferiority.
Boys, in particular, are taught from an early age that they must perform traits and attitudes that establish them as tough, individualistic to the point of isolation, always in control, and willing to use violence to achieve their ends. Exhibit A is every blockbuster action movie ever made. The cultural myth of the Marlboro Man is Exhibit B. Vulnerability is considered to be a sign of weakness and an invitation to attack, like blood in the water to a shark.
But what this dog-eat-dog culture fails to understand about itself is that it cannot help but foster a society of insecure children wearing big-boy (and big girl) clothing. People are afraid to be vulnerable, afraid to admit they are wrong, afraid to admit they need help, or that they don’t know everything. They are consumed with always looking good and never looking bad, and are constantly looking over their shoulder to see who is nipping at their heels, ready to take their place on the rungs of prestige and power.
We’ve built an entire culture around comparing ourselves to other people. Who has a better car or more expensive shoes? Who has a vacation home or a boat? Who has most ruthlessly climbed to the top of the pyramid of power? There is no arriving in this scenario. No amount of money is ever enough. No accolades are sufficient. Someone is always coming for your position, so you’d better keep striving. You can never rest, never trust, never have any real friends, and if anyone challenges you, you’d better put them down!
This passes for strength, but it isn’t really and it undermines relationships, community, and society as a whole. Corporate performance reviews that rank co-workers against each other, rather than measuring how an individual’s performance is in relation to past performance, is a great example of how destructive this kind of behavior can be.
“When you’re pitted against your coworkers, you start to game the system. You don’t need to improve at all to get into the A bucket, you just need to make the others look bad. The success of one person means the failure of another. How likeable are you? How good are you at whispering and gossip? How big is your Christmas present to your boss? You can end up cutting others down to stand out as a star performer. But undermining the success of your coworkers ultimately means undermining the success of the entire organization.”
Researcher, Brene Brown, has ascertained, after years of study, that vulnerability is one of the most necessary traits in order to have not only real love and connection but also to have creativity, ingenuity, and courage. She once said to a room full of special forces soldiers, “Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Can you give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed in another soldier or experienced in your own life that did not require experiencing vulnerability?” She said the one response was from a man who had served three tours. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I can’t think of a single act of courage that doesn’t require massive vulnerability.”
When it’s parsed out like that, we can see it is the truth, but none-the-less, that isn’t what we are taught. We are taught that we should always be in control, even though vulnerability is having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome. Nothing new was ever invented by someone who was afraid to fail. But everything about our culture says, “Never let ’em see you sweat” and if someone threatens your sense of being in control, beat them into submission. Exhibit C is most political discourse or internet conversation.
But as everyone knows, but seems to forget when it applies to adults and not children on the playground, bullies are not strong people, they are not actually in control — they are grasping for a way to feel more so by securing their ranking of the moment or by feeling better about themselves by making those around them feel worse. We might actually view them as a little bit sad and pathetic if we weren’t still worried about them trying to work out their feelings of inadequacy on us.
The apex of the dominance hierarchy is not made up of strong, confident people who understand their own assets and challenges and are using them to lead in the positions they have earned through hard work and merit. It’s made up of people whose only self-worth comes from constantly evaluating how they rank in relation to those around them and quite often by the maintenance of traditional power conferred upon them by the dominance hierarchy.
They don’t know who they are or what they have to actually offer, because there is no room for self-reflection when you are constantly acting out a Clint Eastwood movie in your head. But they are darn well going to hold on to whatever trappings of power and prestige they can, by any means necessary.
It’s a system where no peers exist, which is another reason that it's so lonely and isolating. Since everyone is a potential competitor, you are either above or below the people around you, and you are always trying to joust for and ascertain which. This is not a culture of competent adults; it’s a society made up of insecure schoolyard bullies who don’t know how to take responsibility for their own emotions but are quite ready to make you pay for them.
What’s that old saying? The boss yells at you, so you come home and yell at your wife. In turn, she yells at your kid, and he goes and kicks the dog. That’s the society that we have created, courtesy of the patriarchal dominance hierarchy. There is no support for introspection, vulnerability, or humanity when your imperative is to achieve, dominate, and conquer at all costs. I don’t know about you, but that’s not really the world that I want to live in.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2022
