“You Should Die”: Bullying, ambivalence, and the tyranny of expectations
By Kirby Farrell | October 10, 2013
The idea of “ambivalence” is out of favor. People confuse it with “ambiguity” or “equivocation.” In an earlier essay, I offered a theory of why the term may be in eclipse. It’s stressful to acknowledge ambivalence, because it means having contrary ideas or feelings about things. You love growing up, say, even as you loathe prospect of adult restrictions, loss of childhood, and proximity to death. Ambivalence may be manageable, but it’s also unavoidable. It’s the way we’re built. If you try to escape the tension by embracing one side of your ambivalence, you’ll be tempted to blame the negative side on a scapegoat. That can simplify life, but it makes you a bully.
Here are three stories recently “in the air” in American culture. In different ways each of the stories shows bullying and ambivalence interacting. In the first, schoolmates bullied a 12 year old Florida girl, Rebecca Sedwick, and she killed herself. In the second story, a documentary film called “Blackfish,” directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, recounts how a “killer whale,” a 6-ton bull orca named Tilikum, killed two trainers while in captivity at SeaWorld. In the third, Washington was trying to rouse public support for an attack to punish Syria’s use of nerve gas to slaughter over 1400 people, a third of them children—even though any US attack would probably kill some civilians too.
Accounts of Rebecca Sedwick’s death follow a familiar scenario. Teenagers gang up on a scapegoat, whose suicide dramatizes a crisis of self-esteem and rouses public sympathy and indignation. Bullying behavior can be understood as a tragic battle for self-esteem. The bullies attribute to a scapegoat failings they would hate in themselves. Consigning her to social death, they’re heroically driving out their own “bad” qualities. They behave like vigilantes pursuing an “outlaw.” The self-intoxicating hunt blurs into fantasy, as when someone wrote “You should die” to the 12 year old Rebecca Sedwick. As a group, often under a ringleader, they form an army invading the life-space of an “enemy,” rewarding one another for their heroic victory.
Bullying is fueled by ambivalence. From childhood, society pressures everyone to be better than they are. Parents, bosses, teachers, preachers—virtually everyone encourages—or demands—more success, a better you. Teenagers are acutely ambivalent about it. They dream of, and rebel against, the idea. As bullies, they “kill off” failings through a scapegoat, pumping up nervous system “fight” to counter depressive “flight.” In reaction, the scapegoat acts out the fears, helplessness, and self-hatred that the bullies want to expel from themselves. Bullies enjoy the comradeship of soldiers, and also the exaltation of survivors. And social media arms them with “smart weapons.” Safe behind a social network screen, one kid can tell another to die, as in Rebecca Sedwick’s case, exploding the “enemy’s” self-esteem. That death-wish is a curse, and cursing originated in the belief that powerful words can kill.
Meanwhile, the victim may be driven to bully herself, punishing herself to kill off the “bad” qualities attributed to her. Carrying out the bullies’ fantasies, she may also be ambivalently retaliating against them, since her self-sacrifice will get them censured. This is the sort of heroic martyrdom romanticized in Romeo and Juliet, whose suicides supposedly end their parents’ feud.
Tragic though it is, bullying acts out tensions present everywhere in culture. Everybody pressures the young to “grow up,” “shape up,” and be successful. But adult encouragement masks an implicit threat of social death for losers. And adults, too, are bullied by bosses and other authorities. It’s a system, and treacherous when adults goad each other with impossible photoshopped ideals—what Karen Horney called “the search for glory.” Bullies act out this dark side of adult expectations. They caricature frustrated parents “disinheriting” a failed or bad child. As tacit siblings, bullies drive out the “loser,” leaving more parental approval for themselves.
Bullying warps society because it’s unrealistic and dishonest. Bullies emulate the adult demands that they also hate, and then hide their aggression knowing that it’s a shameful rebellion. As Karen Horney understood, unrealistic expectations turn into a “tyranny of the should” that warps cultures as well as individuals.
This ambivalence is echoed in the SeaWorld audience that resents but also rejoices at the captivity of the whale Tilikum. The 6-ton beast’s awesome stunts dramatize nature’s ability to overpower us, but also our ability to tame nature. The spectacle honors the beast as a cooperative ally, heroic like the lion “king” of beasts. At the same time, we sympathize with the whale and detest the business tyranny that enslaves Tilikum like King Kong, Spartacus, Nat Turner, or victims of the Holocaust. The film “Blackfish” argues that the orca killed his two trainers in protest. We sympathize with the rebellion, though the trainers were in part scapegoats for invisible executives and business culture. This is a poignant conflict at a time when the rich advertize freedom while using corporate power to trap working people in debt and in jobs that no longer pay a living wage.
There’s a lot going on here. Like Moby Dick or Jonah’s whale, Tilikum has mythic potency. He’s nature incarnate, and his rebellion has uncanny overtones. You can see his violence as “mother nature” protesting against abusive humans. And yet as whale, Tilikum is all heft and mouth, a caricature of us humans, who live by killing and consuming living things. So in human eyes, the bullied victim is also a formidable predator.
The fact is, we’re tragically ambivalent about underdogs. We sympathize with them, but a twist of the lens also reveals them to be losers threatening us with contagious failure. These days the cruelty of this contrary mentality is brutal. Tea Party folks envision themselves as victims of “big government” even as they scapegoat the working poor as “illegal immigrants” and “welfare bums.” The faux underdogs can be ruthless about stripping food stamps, not to mention unemployment and medical insurance, from the despised poor.
The recent controversy over whether to bomb Syria also resonates with this ambivalence. Bill Maher nailed the analogy in an article titled “The US: World’s Policeman or Schoolyard Bully?” Here’s where the association of bullies with armies strikes home. At least since the Vietnam War, the righteous “global policeman” has bullied a number of embarrassingly weak “enemies” to counter president Nixon’s propaganda that the US is a pitiful, helpless giant” (like a 6-ton captive orca). When diplomacy preempted the bombing of Syria, Fox broadcasting screeched that the nation was being (I kid you not) “castrated,” thanks to the demonized Russian PM Vladimir Putin.
Although the Assad regime in Syria has a long history of atrocities, many superhawks are contemptuous of the black US president who proposed the attack, and therefore some ironically took an antiwar stance. But it’s also likely that after the tragic waste and folly of the “war on terror,” ordinary people were using critical judgment to say no. As in all bullying, the president claimed an attack onSyria would be moral: to save children (SeaWorld presents itself as ecologically friendly, saving endangered species). But “smart” weapons, rocketing out of the aether like vengeful messages from social media cyberspace, are likely to kill innocents too. Stories of drones accidently killing kids and neighbors are so common they’re familiar material for comedians.
The point is not that these three public stories are equivalent. Rather, they’re variations on a preoccupation with victimization and aggression that is particularly strong these days in the US. The fantasy’s power isn’t new, though it may seem especially acute because of the economic stress afflicting all but the “1 percent” of wealthy Americans. With living standards under pressure, you can feel less selfish and less guilty about the neighbors’ distress if you can harass them for their imagined failings.
It helps if we can recognize and understand ambivalence in the stories in the air around us. To minimize bullying in the cafeteria, schools need to put more anthropology and psychology on the menu. With some help from a voiceover, even the “killer whale” jumping through hoops in TV clips of SeaWorld could encourage self-awareness and reality-testing in his fellow creatures—us.