Be Kind Bullies

The other day I found a message from years ago that I sent to a friend who had emailed me to tell me that they 'had to' unfollow me on Twitter because they didn't agree with things I 'liked' on there. (For those of you not on Twitter - shut up I'm not calling it X - you can press a button shaped like a heart which puts that tweet into a list of tweets you have 'liked', which you and others can see. Some people, like me, use the like button to not only express my approval of a tweet, but also to say 'yep, I've seen this' or 'I can't read this right now, I'd like to save this and come back to it' or 'this is so dumb I want to save it so I can crack myself up later' or for any number of reasons because it is MY account and I can organise it how I want to thank you very much...)

My memory of my feelings about this was INCANDESCENT RAGE. Why did this person feel the need to tell me this, to suggest that I am a terrible person because of what articles I bookmark and to try and shame me about which tweets I pushed a button under? I was soooooooo angry. My reply, however, read as calm, clear and measured. It made me think about our disconnect between how we feel (which at the time for me was PURE ANGER) and how we behave (even though I was angry, I replied to her directly and honestly, but with respect for her feelings) or even how we are perceived by others (I know how she received it because I saw her soon afterwards and we hugged, though I've since become 'evil' apparently).

I found that file of mine because I was looking for something I wrote on my old newsletter about my time in the late 80s/early 90s in the Rocky Horror fandom. I'd started the London shadowcast and had performed around 250 times as Frank N Furter before I was bullied out of the group.

We were all misfits and nerds in our late teens/very early 20s and like loads of groups of friends at that age there was… a lot of… drama. Drama. Drama. Drama.

I became the focus of the drama and no matter what I did, it just got worse and worse. And worse. In short, I was being bullied by a few of the people in the group and everyone else was unsure what to do (we were kids…). I was lied about, thrown on the floor during a performance, shunned. When I got ‘an anonymous’ threatening letter through the post, I knew it was time to disappear.

At the same time I was being bullied by a few people in my social group, I was being bullied at my job. I was working an entry level job in a very traditional and prestigious place. I was a dorky, gothy, poor kid, who bought my 'office clothes' at a secondhand market stall in Camden. Two of the women (at least 10 years older than I was) in the office ganged up on me and relentlessly teased me about my clothing, my hair, my accent... but all of the people I actually worked for - making tea, doing their photocopying, running errands - really liked me because I did my job well. More than once, one of those people told my boss how much they liked me. I wasn't sure what to do about it all.

I remember sitting outside with some Rocky Horror friends and telling them about what was going on at work. I don't remember using the word 'bully' - I don't think that was in common use then - but everyone was sympathetic and told me I shouldn't put up with it... including someone who soon after decided to join in with the bullies in my social circle.

The complication in my group of friends was that we were all very young and didn't know how to handle the situation. We all just wanted everything to be 'nice', we all just wanted to be 'kind'. We were weirdos and outcasts who for various reasons had all gravitated to a social group full of, well, weirdos and outcasts. We didn't want to exclude anyone... Why couldn't everyone just get along??? But life isn't like that. People are complicated. Some people are just dicks. And there isn't any amount of 'kind' you can be to bullies that will make them stop, if their intention is to 'destroy' you. Also, bullies don't think they are bullies. They think they are the victim or they are somehow standing up for what is 'good and proper' or they are simply defending their rights/friends/ideas or any number of ways they justify treating others badly ("they deserve it"). Most importantly though, bullies require others around them to support them, either by actively joining in or just not getting involved... and being in a group whose core ideal was 'accepting everyone' meant that no one really got involved.

I ended up quitting my job and quitting my group of friends (I moved across London without telling anyone, which in the early 90s was as good as disappearing) and dealing with a lot of emotional scarring for a long time. It definitely made me less trustful of people and very sensitive to people being bullies. It made me put my head above the parapet, step into harm's way and stand up for the bullied and against the bullies...

I started to think about when I was bullied after reading this post. So much of it rang true for me.

The weapons intended to weaken and eliminate the target are:

• Public charming and amicable behaviour toward high status/proximity people/enablers to maintain loyalty and trust

• Private intimidation, threats, criticism and micromanagement of the target

• Public humiliation to put target in their place at the same time as sending a warning to the group of what to expect should they also cross a line

• Devaluation of target by reputation assassination, false accusations and emotional manipulation of enablers/bystanders to erode confidence and trust others have of the target

• Exclusion of the target from important communication, meetings, social gatherings to eventual shunning

• Deprivation of responsibilities and social interactions, constant criticism and questioning expertise/work activities to devalue the target and erode their own self-confidence and perception of competence

Anytime I read stuff about bullying I not only recognise it completely from my own experiences, but I see it in others around me on social media. I can spot a bully from a mile away and am very sensitive to enabling it. My instinct is to publicly challenge the person and let everyone within blogging distance know exactly what is going on...

... but things are more complicated than that.

Sometimes the bully has successfully convinced bystanders that they are a kind, friendly, empathic victim, while behaving terribly to individuals outside of the public gaze. Trying to claim that this 'kind', 'friendly' person is an aggressive or abusive jerk just makes you look like you are crazy (as many people in abusive relationships will understand very well). Sometimes the bully has simply surrounded themselves with people who really, really need to be a follower and they see the bully as a strong leader. Standing up to the bully (or even just questioning them) can make them or their 'followers' attack you... And maybe that is OK because you are strong enough to deal with it... but maybe you can't. That's OK, too. Maybe the best thing you can do is privately support the bully's victims. There is a lot of debate about this within UK feminism where many people are unhappy with others who only offer private support and refuse to publicly stand up for women who are being publicly smeared... I feel differently about this.

If in my group of Rocky Horror friends, most people in the group had privately come to me and said 'I just want you to know that I support you. I think [X] are treating you terribly. I'm too afraid to say anything to them though because I've seen what they've done to you and I'm just really scared', I would have been happy. Obviously, a few people had done that, but that wasn't enough. In a group of 20 people, if only a few people have told you they support you and everyone else has remained silent, then one can only assume that they support the bully. Had everyone in my friend group privately told me they supported me- and even better had they privately told EACH OTHER they supported me- then the bullies' power would have disappeared overnight... As it was, I moved across the city into a small flat on my own, cut contact with everyone (because I couldn't trust that they wouldn't betray me) and had to rebuild a life from scratch. It took me nearly 25 years before I would watch Rocky Horror again... but still...

Being told, even privately, that people support you can make you feel like you aren't alone, that you aren't losing your mind, that you are being bullied (they see it!!), that everyone doesn't hate you, that you aren't an awful, terrible, evil person... It can stop you from sobbing into your pillow alone for hours. It can stop you from lying awake for hours, days, weeks wondering what you did that was so wrong that it would put you here by your self, away from everyone you cared about. It can stop you feeling like the entire world thinks you are a dick.

So send someone that private message of support. It's important.

As for the people who bullied me way back when... I know that after I left my job, one of the women in the office was fired for unrelated reasons. Of the people in my friend group... well... One of them seems to have worked as a counsellor and the other seems to be a bit of a 'be kind-adjacent' person... so there's that intriguing twist...

I suspect neither of them ever believed that they were bullies nor would they believe that their behaviour towards me had such a deep and profound negative effect on me for years and that I still have the emotional scars from it. I doubt the counsellor would have ever admitted to herself during her training or afterwards that she had been nasty, vindictive, dedicated to 'ruining' me and that she caused me serious mental health issues. I don't think the 'be kind' one would have thought she was anything other than morally justified in her behaviour towards me all those years ago (apparently the lies about me continued for a long time after I left the group)...

These days in my sphere, I often notice 'be kind people' not practicing what they preach. There seems to be a lot of upset from them about how other people are 'angry' or 'bitter' or 'cynical' and how everyone just needs to be more 'empathic', 'caring' and 'kind', but so often they behave as if they are the angry, bitter or cynical ones. They sneer, they mock, they rage about 'the right', about 'culture warriors', about 'centrists', about their wives, their colleagues, their parents, their landlord... It's not often I get the feeling that 'be kind' people are actually, well, kind. They certainly don't seem like they are fun to be around.

It's really the hypocrisy that bothers me the most. This includes the 'be kind' privately educated middle-class man who pretends he is 'a man of the people'; the 'be kind' heterosexual people pretending they understand the "LGBTQIIAA+" community more than anyone; the 'be kind' middle class woman who owns and earns money from a rental property claiming she's a socialist and saying I am a terrible human for not being a socialist; the 'be kind' men who say they are feminists...

And, of course, I include the 'be kind' people who think it's acceptable to try and cancel people because they have different beliefs; to sneer at those whose cares and concerns aren't "progressive" like theirs; to laugh at people who are suffering in some way simply because those people, I don't know, drive a car, eat meat or believe in god. There doesn't seem to be any attempt to actually empathise with anyone other than people who already think exactly the way they do. Saying they are 'kind' is more important to them than 'being kind', saying they are 'empathic' on social media is much better than actually having to do something in the real world, I guess.

Several years ago, I was friendly with someone who was all 'be kind'. This person had told me about an extremely minor issue they were dealing with. I say 'extremely minor' because the solution to this problem was trivial. It was similar to someone saying "Ugh. All the windows are open, it's winter and my house is FREEZING. It's terrible. I'm so cold. I can't warm up at all. My feet hurt, they're so cold. I feel awful and so upset. I just don't know what to do..." And my reply was the equivalent of "Why not just shut your windows?" This apparently wasn't the 'kind' thing to do. I was simply supposed to offer sympathy, not possible solutions.

I was told I had no empathy.

It's as if saying 'be kind' or repeating the word 'empathy' is magic. That all we need to do is close our eyes, spin around 3 times and repeat 'be kind' over and over and all of the problems in the world will disappear. We don't need to think of practical solutions. We don't need to think of, you know, REALITY. We just need to say that we are feeling 'empathy' and that's good enough. 'Who cares if you have frostbite?? I have an entirely hidden feeling of empathy for you. That's enough...'

But IN THE REAL WORLD, if your windows are open, it's freezing and you are unbearably cold, I don't just say ‘I'm super empathic and I just feel so sad for you that you are cold.’ I CLOSE THE FUCKING WINDOWS. I don't need to express any feeling for you either way (though I may think you're a moron for keeping your windows open...). I don’t even need to actually feel anything for you, I could just think ‘Room cold. Close window.’ and you would feel better when you warm up. It could be that I do feel compassion for your suffering and that motivates me to offer or provide a real world solution to your pain and discomfort, even if I don’t express that feeling of compassion. And the same goes for whatever it is that the open window is an analogy for... But nope. Apparently, if I want to be a 'good person', I just need to feel as bad as you do about 'your cold feet' and leave it at that.

I've been very wary of people who bandy about the word 'empathy' and bang on about 'being kind' ever since. I've not yet been convinced they are good people.

I was so annoyed by the accusation - it was an accusation - that I didn't have any empathy, that when soon after I saw a book called 'Against Empathy', I bought it. It made me realise that I wasn't wrong in thinking that 'empathy' wasn't magic and, in fact, had the potential to cause people to behave in pretty terrible ways, like during this experiment described in the book:

Subjects were told about a math competition for a twenty-dollar prize between two students, described as strangers, who were currently in another room of the laboratory. They then read an essay purportedly written by one of the students, which described her financial problems—she needed to replace a car and pay for class registration. The subjects were then told that they were involved in an experiment that explored the effect of pain on performance, and to make everything random they would get to choose how much pain to administer—by choosing a dosage of hot sauce—to the student the financially needy student was competing with.

The trick here concerned how the essay purportedly written by the student ended. [...] some of the subjects read a passage designed to elicit empathy (“ I’ve never been this low on funds and it really scares me”), while others did not (“ I’ve never been this low on funds, but it doesn’t really bother me”).

As predicted, greater amounts of hot sauce were assigned to the competitor when the person was described as distressed. Keep in mind that this competitor didn’t do anything wrong; he or she had nothing to do with the student’s anxiety about money.”

So, the test subjects who felt more empathy for the student who wrote the essay were pretty happy to inflict pain on someone else. The other person hadn't done anything to the student who supposedly wrote the essay, they were just 'in competition' with her for some money. The test subjects weren't given an essay to read by this other student, they didn't know their story or their reasons for needing the money. They had only one bit of information that got their empathy flowing and they were ready and raring to 'torture' the competitor.

This empathy stuff isn't all that simple, is it?

Then I read another book called 'The Dark Sides of Empathy':

Empathy can lead to perceiving the social world in black and white, thinking in terms of friend and enemy. [...] conflicts may emerge not despite, but because of empathy. Human beings tend to quickly take sides in conflicts and use empathy to glorify their chosen side while condemning and demonizing the other side. [...] we do not act morally because we feel empathy; rather, we moralize to justify our quick and empathetic side-taking.

This is saying that ‘empathy’ can lead to some dangerous thinking: 'I read an essay about how someone needed money. I felt bad for her. You are competing against her for some prize money. This is wrong. She needs that money. I feel badly for her that she needs that money. I think you are an awful person for trying to steal money from her. Yes, by taking part in this competition, you are trying to steal money from her. No. No, I don't want to hear about why you too might need some money. You are clearly a terrible person, if you are going to compete against a wonderful person like, well, I don't know the other person's name, but I read an essay and she seems really wonderful. How DARE you compete against her! I'm going to destroy your life. I don't care if it's an annual mathematic competition that is held every year and is open to all students. If you were decent, you would pull out of the competition. But you aren't decent. It doesn’t matter if you have bills to pay. You're immoral. You're cruel. You're evil. I heard that your grandfather was a Nazi. I understand that you support Nazis. I'm telling your employer that you are a Nazi. I'll get the competition to remove you because if they don't it means they support Nazis. I punch Nazis...'

Et cetera.

This was what it was like being bullied. Just relentless hounding and accusations and lies that got worse and worse and I was unable to defend myself because how do you prove that you aren't 'evil'? You can’t just ‘be kind’ because the bullies will say that you are lying or disingenuous or just pretending to be kind in order to dupe everyone. And I 100% believe that the people who bullied me thought they were 'the good guys'...

So why are some people so insistent that just 'being kind' or 'having empathy' will transform the world? It feels to me that the be kind/empathy people don't differentiate their internal, subjective emotional state from the exterior world that we all share. They seem to think that if they feel it, it is as real as it needs to be and if they say it, well, that's as good as it can be.

This gets back to what I said at the top: "our disconnect between how we feel and how we behave or even how we are perceived by others."

If someone keeps repeating 'I'm happier than I've been in years' or ‘Having empathy for others is the most important thing you can do’, but every tweet is full of bile about different groups of people ('Journalists!' 'Centrists!' 'Elites!’ ‘[X]-phobes!’) or every video they post of themselves online is a scowling, sneery and angry diatribe about some new thing or other they're upset about now or every conversation you have with them is about how terrible this, that or the other thing is; if someone keeps banging on about 'being kind', but 'jokes' about people who have different beliefs to them being murdered ('Haha! They're only Tories/Trump supporters!'); if someone tells you that you are 'immoral' because you don't like their favourite politician and then you find out they've been cheating on their partner while claiming incapacity benefit from work (sideeye.gif)... you are seeing this 'disconnect' in action. They (claim they) feel and are good and moral and happy and kind and empathic, but they behave like jerks.

It seems like only their internal, subjective feelings matter to them. If they say the 'correct' words or say they feel good about themselves, that's all that matters. It isn't their concern if their real world behaviours run contrary to what they (are trying to convince themselves they) believe. Repeat the catechisms. Chant the mantras. Say the prayers asking for your sins to be absolved... as you add hurt, pain and negativity to the world and try to destroy the people who actually try to have an effect, to make a change, to do something in the real world. Keep telling yourself you are ‘the good guy’ because that’s what you feel. We always find a way to justify our bad behaviour to absolve ourselves of any guilt.

From 'Against Empathy':

"The moralization gap” [is] the tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to the acts of others. You can see this in reports of violent criminals who are puzzled why people are making such a big deal of their crimes. The most extreme example is Frederick Treesh, one of a group of three “spree killers,” who allegedly told a police officer, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol-whipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.”

This is why my bullies could justify forcing me out of my group of friends and onto my own; why internet bullies can believe they are in the right when they lie about people, instigate pile ons and encourage people to complain to someone's employer and causing deep distress, exacerbating mental health issues, ruining the happiness of everyone around their victim... and why the 'be kind' people can continue to happily ignore all of the internet bullies ‘on their side’ destroying people’s mental health all over the place by effectively plugging up their ears and repeating 'bekindbekindbekind'... They cannot see they are doing anything that bad at all.

If, however, you (we) try to confront the bullies or do something about it, you run the risk of becoming -or being perceived as - a bully yourself. Just because someone seems 'powerful' and that they can and should take the consequences of their actions, doesn't mean they aren't in fact in a precarious state of mind.

What can we do?

I don't know. I'm not an expert. My default position is to ignore them. Like, who CARES if [person who always says really fucking dumb things] said something really fucking dumb today? What in the world are you going to change by tweeting about it? Other than making yourself and everyone around you just a bit more angry. Just shut up. Don't try to get other people angry about them. Don't try to get them 'cancelled'. Don't try to get them fired.

Of course, sometimes it's not as easy as ‘ignore them’. When one of my old Rocky Horror bullies popped up on my horizon several years after I left the group, I DESPERATELY wanted to tell everyone what she was 'really like'. (I didn't.) When she turned up in 'the news' a few years ago for doing something dumb, I DESPERATELY wanted to tell everyone what she was 'really like'. (I didn't.) Because, frankly, I don't know what she is 'really like'. All I know is how she treated me and how that made me feel. The only thing I know, the only thing I'm in control of, are my feelings. And my feelings are not ‘reality’.

Telling everyone that she was a manipulative, lying, Single White Female jerk does nothing other than release a little bit of my pain and anger into the world (as it just did! Weeeee! I feel lighter!), it isn't telling people 'what she is really like'. It isn't what SHE thinks she is like. It isn't what her family or friends think she is like. She isn't some kind of pure evil witch, like a character out of a fairy tale. She is a person. I know that. Which is why I just stayed silent. And if you actually have empathy, you will understand that 'your enemies' are people, just like you. They, like you, think they are behaving like a good, decent person...

From Against Empathy:

If you want to think about evil, real evil, a better way to proceed is this: Don’t think about what other people have done to you; think instead about your own actions that hurt others, that made others want you to apologize and make amends. Don’t think about other nations’ atrocities toward your country and its allies; think instead about the actions of your country that other people rage against.

Your response might be: Well, none of that is evil. Sure, I did some things that I regret or that others blame me for. And yes, my country might have done ugly things to others. But these were hard choices, tough calls, or perhaps honest mistakes, never the consequence of some sort of pure malice. Precisely. This is how people typically think of their past evil acts.

This is why I learned a long time ago never to expect an apology from someone who has hurt you, because they think they are ‘the good guy’… Maybe the best way to proceed is by ACTUALLY being the Good Guy. Maybe instead of shouting at people online do one small act of kindness for someone in the real world AND THEN DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT. Just do it. Who cares if no one else knows about it. You will.