David Graeber's "The Bully's Pulpit": Some Reflections

Some years ago David Graeber published a remarkable essay in The Baffler, "The Bully's Pulpit," in which, as an anthropologist, he examined the matter of bullying. In doing so Graeber himself admits that "[t]his is difficult stuff," and tells us that he does not "claim to understand it completely." Still, one of the essay's virtues is a fairly clear conception of what bullying involves--what separates it from other sorts of conflict or aggression, which might be reduced to three interrelated aspects:

1. A significant disparity in power between the bully and their victim. (People who are, in the ways that matter, equals, and know it, cannot be said to bully each other.)

2. The complicity of Authority in the bully's behavior--whether by "looking the other way," or tacitly approving their conduct.

3. The inability of the victim to respond to the bully through means which are both societally approved and effective--and the victim indeed condemned no matter what they do. The victim is unable to flee; and cannot respond to the bully in kind because of the disparity in power; and so is reduced to either ignoring the bullying, resisting ineffectively, or "fighting unfairly." If they ignore the bully (apt to be a painful and humiliating course) the bully escalates their abuse to the point at which they cannot ignore it; if they resist ineffectively they demonstrate that they are weak, and are held in contempt for being weak; and if they resort to something unconventional they are held in contempt for that, too, and likely to be punished as everyone rallies around the bully.

Sanctimoniousness is thus a hallmark of such situations.

In Graeber's analysis the third aspect, the victim's reaction, and the sanctimoniousness toward it, is the point, "[b]ullying creat[ing] a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself." Putting it another way, central to bullying is propagandizing for the view that the oppressed deserve to be so. (Thus do they abuse someone past the limits of their endurance, and then when they lash out, say "Evil, evil, evil! That's why we have to keep their kind down.")

It is absolutely vile, and I might add, vile in a particular way. While Graeber remarked his having not read Veblen some time after this piece was published, it seems to me that such ritual is yet another reminder of the endurance of what Thorstein Veblen identified as barbarism into our times--with the pervasiveness and severity of such ritual, and the tolerance of it and justification of it, very telling of how much such barbarism lingers in a particular society.