George Monbiot: We don't have to live like this. We don't have to suffer a world in which bullies dominate our lives. This week's column explores the implications of some fascinating new research. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

We don't have to live like this. We don't have to suffer a world in which bullies dominate our lives. This week's column explores the implications of some fascinating new research. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

From the playground to politics, it’s the bullies who rule. But it doesn’t have to be this way | George Monbiotwww.theguardian.com At every stage of our lives we are forced into destructive competition. It’s not natural, and it holds the best people back, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

It ties in to an earlier essay of yours: "if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school." www.monbiot.com/2011/11/07/t...

A guy doing research into psychopaths found that they have different brain patterns than the "norm." Surprisingly, he found that he had the same brain pattern and wondered why he hadn't killed somebody already.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

How I discovered I have the brain of a psychopath | James Fallonwww.theguardian.com James Fallon: I found I had the brain imaging pattern and genetic make up of a full-blown psychopath while conducting research – and yet, I turned out to be a successful scientist and family man

I always knew Jimmy Fallon was a psychopath

This guy is clearly a psychopath, in all the negative connotations of the word.

I spoke with a psychologist who specialised in helping organisations develop psychologically safe workplace. She talked about the challenges given many sectors (she used Law as an example) specifically recruit traits that are the antithesis of this.

I have talked to psychologists and have ended up giving them advice.

If you look at job postings for private firm lawyers in the U.S., they almost always use words like “aggressive” and “tough.” Of course most such jobs are not obtained through any kind of merit-based application processes but by personal connections, which gives sharp effect to social hierarchies.

A few years ago there was a Greenpeace action where they had to impersonate oil execs. To find out how execs behaved in private someone applied for a job at the company so they could sus them out. They discovered that they behaved even worse to their own staff than they did towards activists.

I feel like this article spends too long on the self-evident "it's the bullies who rule" bit, and not nearly enough on the "but it doesn't have to be this way" bit. What makes you think anything will change?

We need a lot more women and minorities running everything. It's time for equity.

This backs up my theory, based on 30+ years in the corporate world,that most of the people that rise to senior positions are there not because they are necessarily the smartest or hardest working, but the most competitive.

As a kid and teen I despised bullies since my father was one, and I despised him as well, kind of transference thing. Whenever I came across one or two I would beat the crap out of them. Fun times.

What about your industry? What about the bullies in the media who doorstep and monster people who they deem to be pubic enemies? What can be done about that?

Or bullying trans people, which obviously never happens at the guardian

The initial coverage of this research by the guardian contains multiple quotes from people presented as 'experts' claiming the results prove bullying is good and we should be meaner to kids.

bsky.app/profile/reco...

Such a gross exercise in rationalisation of abusive hierarchies here. Privilege drives the bullying and the success and the desperate need to believe it is all the immutable natural order of the world and there is no alternative.

Psychopaths run the world

I think we'll have to take the bullies down a peg

I volunteer as tribute

Asps. Very dangerous. I go first.

Not only did we know this over a decade ago the book written about it has a catchy title: www.baymarbooks.com/products/the...

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn'twww.baymarbooks.com The definitive guide to working with -- and surviving -- bullies, creeps, jerks, tyrants, tormentors, despots, backstabbers, egomaniacs, and all the other assholes who do their best to destroy you at

Are there examples of successful, large-scale organizations that are not structured to reward bullying?

The Chinese Communist Party

The company I work for is reasonably large (18,000 people). I don't see evidence that we reward bullying. To the contrary, we explicitly reward collaboration.

I can’t speak of your own personal experience, but companies often use talk about “empowering teams” to mask managerial power www.currentaffairs.org/2024/02/agai...

Against Managerialism ❧ Current Affairswww.currentaffairs.org <p>How management education promised a better workplace—and why it delivered nothing but more creative ways of exploiting people. </p>

Large companies absolutely reward bullying and shameless self promotion.

Christianity Oh

I dealt with bullies in a language they understood with my fists. Did I in turn become the bully? I don’t think so.

This reads a lot like wishful thinking. I don’t doubt the premise but the suggested solutions are only possible in another universe.

The future is a different place from the present. It isn't immutable.

Sure but maybe we ll all have five arms in the future is just as valid of a statement. (how does it happen? ¯\(°_o)/¯ ) I just think wishful thinking gives ppl an excuse to not focus on what can be done and instead just complain and wait.

It sounds like you just don't like people saying things can be different.

Not without some tether to reality no. Not without some idea of how that would come about then no. That’s a sci-fi novel not a political philosophy.

Sounds the same as you just want things to stay the same (or go back) and you don't like the idea of anything else.

Rather than wishful thinking, I think the author's problem is overstating the ubiquity of competition & bullies as winners. A lot of instances isn't the same thing as universality. If we move (gradually or quickly) to social disapproval for bullying, the balance of our society can change.

Societies truly differ in these things--what is valued in one place is anathema a few hundred miles away. (See Graeber & Wengrow's discussion of Pacific Coast Indians in *The Dawn of Everything*) Perhaps these changes make us into a different society--so be it.

I think the problem is the idea that winning proves that they are better. The study in question did show they were financially better off.

It is precisely these things that vary between societies. In our society these dynamics do happen--not universally, and not with universal approbation. Changing what is admired and approved of takes generations, probably. (It's become much more pronounced during my lifetime--it can shift back)

Monbiot in a nutshell - wishful thinking untethered by reality.

Thanks. Edifying.

📌

tell that to Jordan Peterson. He is of the opinion we are all just lobsters.

Except if he sees a lobster in make-up he sobs for 15 minutes about the Dragon of Chaos

@tcu.bsky.social

Maybe it's supposed to be this way.

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