(12-30-2019, 09:52 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(08-14-2019, 08:18 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: Also, there was this idiotic idea (coming from Silents and Boomers) that a) it's the perpetrators who need help, not the victims, and b) bullies just suffer from the fact that they feel low self-worth. Today, we've finally seen that the opposite is the case: Bullies have an inflated self-worth, that's why they think they were allowed to do anything. It was like trying to extinguish a fire with gasoline.
One can have low-self esteem in some area (e.g. sucks at maths) and inflated self-esteem in another (e.g. ability to win in a brawl).
It seems bullies have problems with feeling too much shame:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...elf-esteem
Then, most bullies I've encountered were generation X.
Math has commercial value. Brawling is worthless. Math is worth the effort.
To be sure, people good at fighting might be good soldiers or prize fighters, but those good at either are well-disciplined people who know when to start and quit and follow certain rules (in boxing) and obey orders (in war). Prize fighters rarely get involved in fights out of the ring, and military officers loathe pointless brawls. I suspect that I am the norm in that I have run from plenty of fights before they start. In the military, brawlers face official discipline even harsher than in civilian life. Even if I am neither a soldier not a prize fighter I have no desire to break a fist on someone else's jaw, and I don't want someone to break my jaw.
There was a time when many problems allegedly related to low self-esteem. People who have known personal or social abuse, cultural marginalization, handicaps badly mishandled (I am an example of this as I never knew that I had Asperger's syndrome until I was 60; with some appropriate guidance and support early, I might have gotten away with it) and economic hardship uncharacteristic of their society can have low self-esteem; at times resolving the deficiency of self esteem solves much.
Bullies seem to operate on the basis of "I'm OK, you're not OK", in contrast to what Thomas Harris suggested by the title I'm OK, You're OK in his pop-psychology book (1972) by that name. If seeing Humanity as a whole as largely competent and good -- including oneself -- is the healthy position according to Harris because such is good for bringing out the best in people, "I'm OK, you're not OK" is a position of abuse, exploitation, and humiliation. Such goes with criminality, abuse of the helpless (including spouses, children, and elders or socially-identified pariahs), swindling, and oppression as a perpetrator. When one's self-esteem or expression of such is excessive or unjustifiable, "I'm OK, you're not OK" implies at the least a need for humbling the person. Such can operate on a national scale, as with Nazi Germany in which people designated as "life unworthy of life" due to handicaps could be murdered... and we know what followed. Military defeat can do wonders for shaming a nation, and confinement in prison can have such an effect on a personal scale.
The position "I'm not-OK, you're OK" is one of helpless subordination often as the victim of abuse, oppression, and exploitation. Escape is a cure, but that can be risky. It might be temporarily safer to acquiesce in complicity with an abuser treating someone else even worse, but that itself may be criminal. Finally, "I'm not OK, you're not OK" is a position of complete distrust of everyone, including oneself.
...I suspect that most of the bullies that most of us have seen are of our own generations. Many people grow out of it. Those who don't often end up facing the nastiest bully of all: the penal system.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.