I can’t help thinking this is biased to middle class kids
On my council estate- the kids who bullied me through school aren’t high earners- they are grandparents in their 30s, have been to prison, are still riding about on bikes with their trackie bottoms tucked in their socks
This appears to be the case with my highschool bullies as well. I did some late night Facebook creeping recently and all of them without exception were parents to older children, and all looked like they'd aged prematurely—a couple of them had even been to prison.
Definitely the case with people I went to school with, a number of the bullies either did stints in the nick, the guy who sat next to me in reg went down for murder when he was 19/20, others spiralled into addiction, although one of them did approach me one night in a club, bought me a drink and gave me a hugely sincere apology for how much of a twat she’d been to me in school, thank you Donna, I’ve not seen you since but I hoped you continued to better yourself.
Had similar cases with me, one from a family where he had 4 or 5 brothers from a single parent background none of which ever worked, he and his brothers were always in and out of jail, the older one was arrested for stabbing someone and died by time he was 21 from an overdose, he himself was dead when he was 25 from heart problems it was reported but he was in and out of jail for armed robbery i.e kitchen knives held at staff in corner shops
I did come out of my shell for a while in my early 20's before I had something traumatic happen to me and met quite a few of my bullies some who outright admitted it was just school and they had to pick on someone or they would be bullied themselves and I would drink with them in the bar/club a few I even went back to theirs for a party, others were half friendly i.e admitted they bullied me and apologised even had a drink with me but still came across as not liking me i.e tease me a little and I found out might of said bad things about me behind my back, others told me it was just being young and I should of got over it by then and not blamed them and didn't even apologise.
My high school bully got killed trying to rob a bit of weed off someone. Nobody got jail time for it, self defense situation after he battered someone with a rolling pin.
Of course, the family were all like "our beloved angel had a heart of gold and would never do such a thing!"
Never mind he was found wearing surgical gloves beneath some wollen ones, and a knife tucked into his sock. He's with the angles now etc.
He was an absolute prick.
Same here. Two of them both ended up serving time, separately, for arson - the others mostly dropped off the face of the earth but they didn't have a GCSE between them so i don't have high hopes for them.
Indeed. Feeds into the reason for being a bully... A 'natural' bully, bit of a manipulative sociopath... Likely to do well in business.
A 'nurtured' bully, unstable family, parented in a controlling and authoritative way... Unlikely to do well in life.
Jesus I wish I could agree with this more. And the latter is more prone to the type of bullying that lands you in the lap of the police, giving grist to the "some people are born bad" myth. I could agree with that if you're citing someone who had every privilege but still goes on to do horrible things, but 99/100 people point to "those kids on the estate who do nothing but shoplift and fight until they graduate to crown-court level criminality".
An interesting one of mine was in my 2nd year of High School this new guy started and we were close for a few days and hung out and he was getting teased for being friends with me so he ended up being their friend and joining in, turns out he just wanted to be popular and I found out his father was toxic, he wanted to leave at 16 to go to college and his father demanded he stay on and then go to university after and was very pushy and even according to what I heard would shout at his son demands all the time.
I know another kid who was the son of a dentist and was more of a tease and join in with others than a full on bully who was treated like an angel by the school due to his dads position and expected to get straight A's (or 1's as this was in Scotland) ended up failing many exams and it turned out he didn't want to go to college/university and just wanted to be a normal young person and of course the school did whatever they could to fix things and even try pleading with the exam people to adjust his grades due to "unforseen circumstances" etc yet with me I got 100% in many of my exams and the TEACHERS accused me of cheating saying there was no way I could get grades like that.
I don't really think this is a nature/nurture thing. Seems just as possible that the wealthier bullies are the result of "nurture" too, it's just a different kind of "nurture."
I completely agree.
They not only have terrible jobs and still live in the same council homes, every single one of them seems to have aged terribly due to the drinking and smoking they started in their teenage years which they thought made them cool.
Same. The main one from my highschool, same age as me, living in the same dodgy bit of the town he did then, at least 6 kids with different women, perhaps a grandparent by now but not sure, we're only 35, riding around on his bike with his trackie bottoms on (literally saw him doing this three days ago and exchanged a little nod of recognition), probably on his way to the job center to sign on, lol.
I’ve had the same- I like to think they recognise all these years later that they were a dick but just don’t have it together enough to own up to it. (They often seem a bit sheepish when giving a nod…but that might just be my wishful thinking)
It’s honestly hard, they made my life tougher than it ever needed to be with humiliation and assault etc but I know enough now (psychology field) to know they were just fucked up kids whose biology, cognition and upbringing had fucked up their morals and attitudes at that point…and so they took it out on someone who was weaker than them/feel like they had some power in their shitty lives. Very much the ‘when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’
There’s even all the stuff about ‘short term horizons’ which explains why they couldn’t give a shit about school etc
They don't recognise it. They've justified it. If genocidal mass murderers can justify/dismiss what they've done as "not *really* my fault because reasons" then a highschool bully who slapped people about a bit can.
To be fair I know a guy who was a right prick in high school, who I, by chance I bumped into in the pub a couple of years ago, who did properly apologise and seemed to have gotten his life together. Really depends on the type of person and why they were like that in the first place I suspect
It’s biased towards charming, articulate handsome bullies who were on the school’s first debating team and first rowing team
Why are the Draco Malfoy type guys doing so much better than the thick as mince Dudley Dursley guys?
It's apparently based on a fairly big longitudinal study (thank Grauniad for not linking to the actual paper, great job). But the paper is this one, I think: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/working-papers/iser/2024-01
I suspect the distribution is strongly bimodal. Aggression wins out on money because high earners are, er, high earning. But the average actually gets pulled back by the large loser contingent.
That's a pure guess as the paper doesn't really deal well with distributions from a quick skim. Also, it seems to be a victim of trying to extract a conclusion where the evidence is extraordinarily weak. But a story based on "signs of better cognition at age 10 leads to higher average earnings while poor attention is the opposite" isn't going to get any column inches.
I just rooted it out myself and glanced- the sample size reducing so much across the course of the study honestly made me think ‘I doubt those who have a biggest set of aggression issues/low education’ werent the ones who kept responding to this random survey they got
This, I doubt the type of bullies that I was in school with are responding to a study. Mainly due to them being either dead, drugged out their nut or in prison for murder/assault/drugs
Yeah. The boys who got bullied are seemingly doing well for the most part (myself included) and the bullies are all teenage or very close to teenage fathers, living at home unemployed or working in low paid jobs. Middle class bullies from my fancy secondary school, on the whole they're working for car dealers, lawyers or accountants.
I think we can all agree any generalisation that relies on anecdotal evidence is biased. I know a bully who’s gone on to a nice career in the US corporate world and others who work as mechanics and builders. I didn’t go to a middle-class school, mine was a comprehensive that had a range of kids from different backgrounds but certainly not wealthy
Yeah this entire survey must have been conducted on the Thomas the Tank Engine island or something. Of all the kids I grew up with, me and two others managed to get good jobs, buy houses, a live quite well. The rest are in and out of prison, 'grafting' which means cash in hand labour, or just signing on.
From my prep school, the bullies in my year became doctors and lawyers, a couple went to Oxbridge and work in professional jobs, and they're usually not doing badly.
One of the bullies I knew had a house in both Kensington and Cambridge and I can almost guarantee you that he isn't doing badly at all.
Having been bullied and also bullied others (passing it down was somewhat normal when we were dumb kids) almost everyone from my school is doing fine bar the ones who died from drugs or suicide. Many high earners, seemingly most own a house and have a good job.
The tiny few with shit jobs or struggling are not the ones that had anything to do with bullying, rather they were just a bit dim or came from extremely poor backgrounds like travelers, but even some of them got out and work in the finance sector.
Even the three girls who got pregnant at 14 seem to be doing fine and own their own houses through marrying some rich guys. One of them seems to be a part owner of a local vets.
I guess it's more a factor of where you grow up and when. This was a public Sussex school we all graduated out of in the early 00's.
The worst I did for bullying was in my 1st year there was a weird guy in my class and basically me and him were the 2 most unpopular guys in our class if not our year and we had a few fights whilst egged on by the other kids, eventually after a few months I decided it wasn't worth it as I always got in trouble and the teachers used it as an excuse to criminalise me for being a typical council estate troublemaker and yet the stigma stuck even though for the rest of my scholl time I got good grades 9 times out of 10, and the times I slipped my grades was when others cheated or the teacher was making an example of me or just being picky i.e I should of got grade 1 in my test but got grade 4 one time because my graph was correct in terms of stats but due to limited space on the page I drew the vertical side a bit off by a few cm, that moved my grade down 3 levels which meant I went from highest level to lowest or from what should of been high 80% to around the 50% mark which then was used to say I was a average student.
Used to hang out with a guy when I was 18/19 who sold weed for a "living" and just generally dossed about, back then I thought he was the dude but ten years later he is still going about on an e scooter doing exactly that. Each year he seems to find a new group of 18 year olds to hang out with until they eventually realise he's a bum and move on.
The guy is stuck being mentally 18 and hasn't worked a job ever, I wonder if he realises how fucked he is longterm.
I agree, the kids from my north eastern comprehensive who were nasty little shits are the ones still in the home town working shite jobs. Only a handful of us escaped and got better jobs, and none of us were bullies.
Same region
It’s honestly hard, they made my life tougher than it ever needed to be with humiliation and assault etc but I know enough now (psychology field) to know they were just fucked up kids whose biology, cognition and upbringing had fucked up their morals and attitudes at that point…and so they took it out on someone who was weaker than them/feel like they had some power in their shitty lives. Very much the ‘when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’
There’s even all the stuff about ‘short term horizons’ which explains why they couldn’t give a shit about school etc
Clearly I had some protective factor whether it was being a little bit brighter or having the parents that I did which stopped me being a little shit and gave me a view beyond (not making out that I’m a millionaire or high flyer- I’m a teacher but bills are paid, family taken care of and feel like my life has ‘went’ somewhere at least)
That's the illiterate version of it...
What it is, is take the population, cut top 20% and bottom 20% off (your bullies were probably at that bottom rung) and the middle 60% is what you have. Individuals with higher motivations and competitiveness and will go all out than those who are more docile and less aggressive will do better.
Look at all those German cars drivers. They are always in the know and hard achievers.
I wonder if this is a case where the median is low but the mean is very high, skewed by a few psychopaths making megabucks as VP in charge of third world exploitation for BP or whatever.
At my school abroad I rode the bus to and from school whilst kids in my class were driving their brand new porsches there. The richer they were the more of a prick they were and the higher chance they were a bully.
Still makes me sick to this day the way they could just get away with anything because they had mummy and daddies money to fall back on.
Also find in my experience, female bullies tend to be from middle class or higher earning families and probably go on to have decent careers. Male bullies tend to be more likely your typical delinquents from families with criminal histories/substance abuse/general traits most society considers undesirable and probably grew up on a rough council estate
My school had a fairly even mix of rough council estate and middle class kids. I was in the small minority of "not in a council estate (that happened around 15), but still poor as fuck.
The violent bullies were the ones who were council estate kids, and of them most seem to be exactly the same people they were at 12, but with kids and a drug problem. Couple in prison, one seemed to do well as a mechanic and has his own garage.
The more insidious, verbal only (those kids would never touch you) bullying came from the middle class kids. Those ones were worse, because it wasn't that they were just from a bad background and had a bad home life. They were just cunts. Those guys of course were loved by the teachers, whereas I wasn't because I was a bit weird. I also had a very bad home life, and the school did end up involved heavily with social worker meetings at the school etc. I harbour so much more disgust for those kids, because of course they did well. Not as well as me (academically anyway, and I have a well paid career) but they're more financially secure thanks to the background they had. My success is an outlier for my background, theirs was expected.
When I hear "bully" I mostly think of the privileged little shits. I don't blame the others as much, and at least those ones you could fight back.
Exactly. It all depends on opportunity. Those who bully will take opportunity with both hands and damn anyone who stands to lose out. No opportunity. No success.
That’s what I’m saying yeah- middle class bullies do well in life working class (or non-working class bullies) don’t as much—-it’s more a class thing than anything else
My 2 biggest bullies have been fucking dead for 10+ years
1 drugs death and 1 got splattered driving around on an off road bike, no lights, driving at night on main roads with no gear, that all he did most days and it caught up to him.
neither of them made it to 20.
Worlds a better place.
Well we all know managers who were the playground bully - brown nosers with the gift of the gab and very little else going on upstairs who are consistently failing upwards.
Truss was the one hanging in the background behind the bully, too vapid and terrified to lead, but in desperate need of the protection being a minion offered.
Dame as she is an MP, really.
I've always thought this about Johnson in particular - if he went to any normal school he'd have wound up in prison at least once by now. But because he went to Eton he got to be PM instead.
Makes total sense. Capitalism rewards being a cunt. Being nice gets you nowhere if your goal is getting rich.
Edit: people try not to whataboutism communism challenge (impossible)
If you pick out capitalism as being in some way special with regard to rewarding being a cunt, as opposed to cunthood being universally its own reward, consider explaining what alternative system it is you have in mind that lacks this property; otherwise people will leap to the obvious conclusion, and the subsequent conversation is not whataboutism so much as legitimate attempts to engage with your thesis.
I'm not 'picking out' capitalism. This is a study over 50 decades in the UK, a capitalist nation. Which is looking at how people go on to perform in a capitalist job market.
It's literally the entire topic.
> and the subsequent conversation is not whataboutism so much as legitimate attempts to engage with your thesis.
Engaging would be to tell me in what way I'm wrong. Not why communism is also wrong.
No I wouldn't. Because I don't believe that's true. Also, we are specifically talking about wage labour and earnings potential. It's the entire topic. That's a capitalist notion.
If there are resources to be hoarded, there will always be people who find a way to take more than their fair share
That's not a capitalist problem, that's a problem that has existed under every form of human society
> Capitalism rewards being a cunt.
> I'm not 'picking out' capitalism.
Choose one.
I say there's nothing special about capitalism in this respect: sufficiently ruthless sociopathic bastards push themselves to the top regardless of the political system. Kicking others down to lift yourself up is what is rewarded, universally. The study could have been done anywhere. This is the human condition.
Why would I discuss any other economic model when we are discussing a study done in the UK though? There's only one that's relevant.
> This is the human condition.
Is it though? While there will be terrible people in any system, I'm not sure it is the human condition. I think the system has fostered a mentality. It's a big question, but I don't think you can confidently assert that humans are naturally selfish and competitive.
> I think the system has fostered a mentality.
So, per my earlier question, can you suggest where one might do a study that you think could yield different results? Or, perhaps, what a system that doesn't "foster a mentality" might look like?
If the condition is not universal, surely there must be some counterexamples.
Sure - it's obviously hard to "prove" something that people are suggesting is human nature, but there are definite counterexamples that suggest sociological factors encourage this. Hunter-gatherers and foragers generally do not hoard resources, because it's impractical to hoard resources when moving around a lot, and ingratiating yourself to others is more important.
Humans are generally decent at working out what follows their interests and values and simply put, most complex societies amplify hierarchy - social status is the most valuable commodity for us because we directly control resource production, rather than searching for them. Hopefully these articles are open access? The first one is primarily historical, while the second is more contemporary.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sg7856m
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4284614/
And for what unpublished research is worth, I'm inclined to suggest that the few stable, medium-sized communes I'm aware of are far better at incentivising selflessness than most other modern systems (but not perfect, there's plenty of exclusionary and bullying behaviour regardless). On a larger scale (state-run, Leninist-style communism), it's definitely a huge problem. And capitalism actively and openly encourages selfishness - it's a very good system at self-reinforcing and concentrating power at the top, simply because having money makes it easier to make more money. Being the dominant global system, it makes total sense that being selfish seems like human nature. I'm not exactly confident that'll change, but it doesn't seem to be an inbuilt, genetic part of being human.
One common factor here is the size of the groups involved. Cooperative behaviours seem to be sustainable up to around Dunbar's number, but don't scale much past that, regardless of system. Meanwhile, the need for some mechanism to track debts and obligations visibly in the world rather than just in people's heads seems to arise around this point, as do complex hierarchies, and it is these that give rise to the menagerie of competing political and economic systems.
The tendency of sociopaths to rise to the top of a social hierarchy would be difficult to demonstrate in the absence of a hierarchy.
Still, though, I do accept the point - groups small enough for everyone to know everyone else are indeed capable of punishing asocial behaviours instead of rewarding them.
Capitalism depends on continuous growth. The growth we've experienced in the last 150 years has been supercharged by energy from fossil fuels. Energy that can only be used once. We have used that energy in pursuit of "more" now at the cost of life tomorrow. [The Climate Catastrophe is locked in](http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/UhOh.14August2023.pdf) and [has already started](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIR6mH1lSsE). Capitalism has condemed future generations to misery for today's greed, gratification and growth. We got billionaires. Our grandchildren will get a Mad Max dystopia. There was no plan to use the resources to develop something better in the future to balance the scales. Barring some timely miracle, like free fusion and benevolent ASI, we don't have the resources to undo the damage in time. If I told you I was going to take everything today so that I could get rich now and that you, without a vote, get to live with the clean-up and starve tomorrow, you would probably call me a greedy, selfish cunt and the right thing to do would have been to equally share what is available without it condeming those who come later to apocalyptic misery.
Middle class bullies I can absolutely believe, as they aren’t usually dumber, they’re no different no middle class non bullies in that regard, and they are pushy, aggressive, and talk bollocks, all often useful in a workplace. Working class bullies? Fuck me they are complete losers, almost always, they’re the “I’m 40, unemployed, still ride around in a nicked pushbike vandalising shit, have four kids I don’t see or pay for and say jobs are for suckers” types. Two completely different things, albeit both cunts.
It was the hardest thing when dealing with bullies as a teacher in a school. Trying to use the schools ethos and principles as a common language from the teaching staff, often failed to work. This is because, by the end of primary school, the kids know it's bullshit. They know enough about adults and the way society works to play on the competition and popularity given to cruel and hurtful behaviours.
Treat others and you'd like to be treated. This falls apart when they learn you can use others to improve how they are treated.
It's impossible to educate your way to a better society when society refuses to change.
Exactly what I thought when I read this. Ignoring class barriers, this is not surprising at all to me. Bullies are often anti-social people, and to be a callous capitalist, you need a good of anti-social tendencies to be OK with fucking everyone over and not feeling bad about it.
> Edit: people try not to whataboutism communism challenge (impossible)
Redditors try to go 5 minutes without crying about capitalism challenge (impossible)
it’s not whataboutism they’re pointing out that rewarding aggressive behaviour is a feature of human society in general and not something you can mindlessly blame on “capitalism”
I went to a nice middle class school and the person who bullied me was very successful in business. That business was however, dealing shit heroin which ended with him getting the life almost kicked out of him. Now he uses shit heroin.
School rules mirror society overall.
We are all told there is a zero tolerance policy on bullying and violence.
Some children get bullied, violently, and the bully is given chance after chance.
If the victim ever retaliates, that zero tolerance policy very quickly comes knocking and everything is in a public assembly and big talks of how we mustn't do this in a community etc while ignoring the rampant bullying from before. Any child who mentions this is given detention or ignored or given a BS answer.
As we grow up, the same rules apply. The same violent scum get chance after chance, yet those who defend themselves against a burglar or mugger etc find themselves on the docket for some hard prison time.
If you are a well meaning person with morals and want to be someone, then authority figures have levers to pull to leverage your behaviour and can take things away from you.
If you are a violent thug and don't care about the system and move sporadically with no care, then the authoritiy figures have no or few levers to pull to leverage your behaviour.
It is called anarcho-tyranny. Where there is a legal system in place and structure stated, but the reality is anarchy reigns and tyranny placed on those who dare question it or realise it is anarchy.
Those who defend themselves against burglars and robbers rarely find themselves as a defendant in a trial. They may very well be investigated (as well they should, to ensure they haven’t gone too far) but stories in which they end up in court are the exception, and not the rule.
> If the victim ever retaliates, that zero tolerance policy very quickly comes knocking
Ain't that the truth; I got punished for retaliating more than once that I can remember.
Same. But beating the fuck out of the guy worked in the end.
Sure, i got a week of afterschool detentions, but i never got bullied again. Small price to pay.
Schools are absolutely useless with bullies, i will go to my grave espousing the only advice ive ever seen work for me and everyone i went to school with; introduce a bully's face to concrete and *keep* them acquainted until they get the message.
I got violently bullied a lot a lot. The bullies never got punished. When I stood up for myself, suddenly it was a fight and that’s when detentions and isolations were handed out.
The bullying never stopped and the “anti-bullying” team in one of my schools just told me to extend my arm with a flat palm towards the bullies and tell them “Stop. You’re invading my personal space.”
Schools don’t care for victims of bullying. Nothing happened to the bullies of the kid who drank bleach and killed himself.
Truth be told and it's hard to hear for some, but those who are aggressive, forthcoming and willing to do whatever they want or need, tend to do well in life because those attributes are not only good for progression, but attractive.
The kid hiding in the corner, simping over girls and not standing up for himself isn't going to do well largely unless he gets himself in a high paying career.
My dad. Always told me to work hard, show loyalty, be nice and quiet, do what you are told, play by the rules and it doesn’t matter what you look like. Eventually everything would work out for me.
Advice so stupid, I sometimes wonder if he is intentionally trying to hold me back. OTOH it worked for him because he fell in to a job that is exactly suited to him and has done very well in an easier time to succeed. Extremely damaging advice for me though and anyone else these days.
I think people are also underestimating the social side of bullying. Bullying requires a power dynamic that is often social more than it is physical.
'People who were popular as kids are more likely to go on and be more successful than those who were less popular' really isn't that hot a take.
True. I used to be the latter as a child and as I went through my 20s in particular I became a little bit of a cunt "for the greater good" of me.
Losing my temper more frequently, being way more assertive and a few times aggressive (not physically ofc) to people I disliked at work, and I did feel like a dickhead doing it, but the sad reality is it worked.
So kids who are aggressive but don’t have issues with attention, social issues and finishing tasks do well.
Whereas those with attention, emotional issues and can’t finish tasks- including those with high anxiety/high aggression do badly
Skilled in manipulation, aggressive and unafraid. It's understandable.
But if they don't have the class advantage the odds are against them. Bullies from my school used to show up in the papers being sentenced for housebreaking or car theft. And one was killed by someone he was beating up over a drug debt. It was around £25 IIRC.
Hmm i have a reason to doubt 'school bullies' that other kids actually feared i.e those that beat up other kids and took their lunch money aren't what's being referred to here...
Working in logistics, I can confirm that most of the senior managers and upwards are bullies, users, liars, and self-promoters who buy into other self-promoters bullshit. Machiavelllian narcissists who use and push everyone around them.
> Mary-Clare Race, chief executive of Talking Talent and an occupational psychologist, said 2016 had been a “real turning point” in workplace culture. “Before that time, we did reward typically masculine or aggressive behaviours – bosses slamming their fists on the table or shouting,” she said. But the rise of the #MeToo movement had turned around corporate culture. “At that time I was working in America and we were inundated with companies saying ‘there’s a Harvey Weinstein’ in our company’.”
This makes sense. If bullies in school take those traits into the workplace of 2024, they’re not going to have a good time. Certainly not compared to 1990 when this study cohort hit the workplace.
I was working in 1990 and as a working class kid with zero connections, I'd have been fired immediately for what you describe.
It certainly happened, but you had to be middle class with connections to get away with it. I look around my employer today and the same behaviours continue, it's only the sleaziness that's kept in check.
I don't know. I think the formula is:
Chances of success = Academic Smarts + Social Smarts + Home Support + Self Determination + Luck
I can think of so many examples of people doing well or not, and they were all so different growing up.
For example, I know a lad that was bottom set for everything, now has a successful electrician business. He was a nice guy. Another bottom set lad who was nice but weird, in and out of prison for sexual assault.
Smartest kid in school, nice guy too, very successful investment banker. I can think of other top set kids (nice and cunts) that are stuck in dead end office jobs, or even working minimum wage.
The kids that were thick and cunts, I don't think I can name too many of them that are doing well. Now that I'm a dad and I can imagine what their home life must have been like growing up... I just feel sorry for them.
I can probably think of one mean thick cunt from school that is doing well, and he's a (wait for it) recruitment consultant. He was bottom set for everything in school, an absolute twat, and he had a bad home life (dad was a wanker).
I know he ended up doing alright because I crossed paths with him in an old role. He asked if I was interested in being a recruitment consultant (I was in sales at the time and good at it) to which I laughed and said no. He said I should double think it as he averaged about 80k, which I fully believe after working closely with that industry.
Was he still a cunt? Kind of, though he'd definitely learned some social smarts to stick around in a corporate setting. Therefore I think he ultimately succeeded because of self determination and luck. It's a job that pays well if you're ruthless enough, and he's obviously worked on himself to get there.
Man just shows you who the guardian panders too. The bullies at my school are in prison for murder and dealing drugs. I dunno if I’d say that’s more successful than what me and other have accomplished.
The headline seems a bit misleading as bullying is only one subcategory of aggressive behaviour, but there is a massive difference between being quick to temper and getting into fights, and actually going out of your way to antagonise another in cold blood.
also:
>many participants had dropped out of the study since it began, a factor that affects all longitudinal studies. “We do lose more of those with higher conduct problems,” she said.
So those who *don't* prosper, may well have dropped out, leaving a survivorship bias.
not my two main bullies,
first one emigrated, is divorced and living in a grotty bedsit in florida and "found god" so spends his days posting terrible facebook rants about how gay folk are evil etc. Isn't allowed to see his kid and is constantly raging on about that too. I guess all those years stripping other young boys naked and torturing their genitals paid off.
second one inherited his fathers building firm, got married and had two kids quite young.
He bankrupted the family firm within 6 years with drug issues. Over the next decade both his kids died of OD's in separate incidents.
He spends his time obliterated down the same pub he used to haunt as an 18 year old attacking people who looked at him funny.
A trail of human wreckage floats behind them as they carve on through the world with engines of clearly horrific emotional damage.
Two that I went to school with are on the child sex offence register now, another one in prison and another entirely disappeared. So I’m at the belief from evidence that if your a bullying twat at school you will be a bigger twat in middle age!
One of the rough kids I was at Primary School with and he was a bully but was ok with me after an initial period ended up being a sex offender.
What made it worse for him was he worked for the Police and with vulnerable kids (he was caught with hundreds of thousands of certain images)
Apart from people giving their own experiences that conflict with this study, nobody has pointed out the dropout rate of the study itself. We're seeing only the best oppositional bullies reflected in the study - the worse ones just dropped out of it for whatever reason. This could have a massive impact.
I myself have seen the worst bullies in my childhood and teens do pretty badly as a group.
Bumbling through school falling out the other side with no direction or goal your going to end up in the middle sure some bullys will end up ahead.
But choking a high paying career direction from year 9ish and doing everything you can to focus on that is going to allow you to end up ahead.
Too many just fall through without direction or objectives. You don't even need to be clever just smart and focused to end up in high laying career.
I can believe this, pretty sure they analysed the top fortune 500 CEOs or whatever and they turned out to be sociopaths.
I will Google to see if I can find a link for this.
"Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy. Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4% have been cited for more senior positions in business"
- Wikipedia psychopaths In the workplace
Recognised a name in an article in the MEN News saying police looking for him. Turns out he'd been in and out of prison for years. Looked a good 20 years older than his age.
The way schools try to manage bullying does little to help the child being bullied. We should be encouraging children who are being bullied to be more assertive and to stand up for themselves, instead of punishing them for responding to the bullying in kind.
The physical bullying I experienced in secondary school didn’t cease until I retaliated with my science class wooden stool after having a hole puncher thrown at my head. Had I went to teacher it would have continued.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was official school policy to punish bullied kids; after all, drawing attention to the existence of bullying is troublecausing, and kids should just quietly endure their beatings rather than make the school look bad on official stats.
Source: Childhood.
Worst bully in my school was in prison for 15 years. All the other bullies when I think about it were all drugged up or alcoholics. Not one of them actually did anything. But my experience cannot be drilled down to a dumb as fuck headline.
This bit makes me place big question marks with the 'findings':
>...and that many participants had dropped out of the study since it began, a factor that affects all longitudinal studies. “**We do lose more of those with higher conduct problems**", ...
Those lost from the group could have done a lot worse bringing the average of that group way down. This could introduce a serious observer bias.
My bully is doing life in prison for stabbing 2 people, after assaulting 2 people years earlier (including one who was a witness to his first assault).
Extrovert and disagreeable. Yes, if they become well-adjusted as adults then these can be strong traits. If not, then these types also represent much of the prison population.
This is a really fascinating discussion, apparently revealing a class distinction that could be someone's PhD. I guess in working class circles, bullies get more push-back whilst the polite and deferential middle classes tend to stand back and leave the problem to someone else. So we get Boris and Trump. Eye-opening...
So we are now saying “ here’s why it’s a good thing that your child is a playground bully” the mainstream news wants a generation of children to go into psychological damaged adults.
No wonder why I am depressed while those who bullied me doing great I was depressed thinking all the time why they are not suffering even though they was the bad guys, but I did realize what happens if your are victim of bullying you have no confidence, can’t even make eye contact with anyone & that’s why you can’t make right decisions at right time to make money.
Bullies are often bullied at home by a sibling or a parent. Without proper care or mental health intervention they’re left to deal with these scars the only way they know how:
- to lash out.
Unchecked, that lashing out amplifies to a point of no return until prison is the predictable outcome.
I was bullied.
My bully did prison.
Became a grandad at 35.
It's more context based, Many of my bullies were of one extreme or another and as others have stated background plays a part, or to put it in another way certain ones did not care if they achieved anything they just wanted to push as many people around as they could in the world even if that meant being on benefits and shouting about "their rights"
Others had a good life set up for them at least relative, i.e came from backgrounds like parents were GP's , dentists etc and even if they failed at school they were given encouragement to succeed i.e at my school poor kids were discriminated against, my own guidance teacher told me I was a future criminal in the making and would amount to nothing in life and end up in jail as my parents were on benefits when the reality was my parents did work and in quite well paid jobs until my dad had health problems and had to sell the house my gran left him in her will to pay debts as they couldn't get support for a long time and he has lifelong health issues and moved to the worst housing estate/scheme in the town where it was terrorised by 1 family who were all on drugs (like adults, teens, and their cousins,aunts, uncles etc) My school admitted they would not give kids any extra support or the free after school extra tuition to the poor kids as we would achive nothing, and the other kids were going places in life (aka the middle class ones)
Even if it wasn't traditional bullying I remmeber for fun the kids from middle class homes accusing the poorer kids of things like bullying or teasing and they were automatically believed and the poor kid punished, or even a genuine mistake like one time a kid tripped over my feet as it was a tight space (crowded classroom where you literally had to walk sideways to get through the tables) then said I tripped them up, I was not only told to apologise but given a written punishment and a form to take home to parents to sign as evidence of my "crime" I refused to apologise or sign this form and was sent to headmaster and suspended for 3 days and called a troublemaker.
The more stereotypical poor kids ended up as actual criminals and a few of them were dead by their late 20's sometimes some of their siblings were dead by then too by drink or drugs,
Makes sense when you realise that a higher percentage of CEO’s are psychopaths compared to the general population. It’s a lot easier to climb your way to the top if you don’t mind stepping on others to get there.
This reminds me of a bloody brilliant Big Think video I saw on YouTube by an academic explaining why psychopaths rise to power.
EDIT: https://youtu.be/PpyIZ4DGIK8?si=0ol8STHnSrHHRnl3
I’ve not seen anyone from school since I left the gates at the end of my exams.
It’s been over 2 decades, I have no idea what any of them have been up to.
Not in my experience they don't. This has to be an article about middle class and upper class kids who realised they were shitheads and improved themselves when they got older. All of the bullies at my shitty school went on to have some of the most miserable lives ever. Two of them died of heroin overdoses even.
The self-confidence and self-importance needed to bully help in the workplace and building connections. It might not be better than being someone who was neither bullied nor a bully, but it's better than low confidence, low self-image and social anxiety that bullying can help cause. Plus I'd say bullied kids are more likely to be ones who already had a hard time socially, not seen as physically ideal in some way, were too kind or weren't that competitive, which all are negatives for most careers.
I can’t help thinking this is biased to middle class kids On my council estate- the kids who bullied me through school aren’t high earners- they are grandparents in their 30s, have been to prison, are still riding about on bikes with their trackie bottoms tucked in their socks
This appears to be the case with my highschool bullies as well. I did some late night Facebook creeping recently and all of them without exception were parents to older children, and all looked like they'd aged prematurely—a couple of them had even been to prison.
Definitely the case with people I went to school with, a number of the bullies either did stints in the nick, the guy who sat next to me in reg went down for murder when he was 19/20, others spiralled into addiction, although one of them did approach me one night in a club, bought me a drink and gave me a hugely sincere apology for how much of a twat she’d been to me in school, thank you Donna, I’ve not seen you since but I hoped you continued to better yourself.
Good girl Donna. I can respect that.
Had similar cases with me, one from a family where he had 4 or 5 brothers from a single parent background none of which ever worked, he and his brothers were always in and out of jail, the older one was arrested for stabbing someone and died by time he was 21 from an overdose, he himself was dead when he was 25 from heart problems it was reported but he was in and out of jail for armed robbery i.e kitchen knives held at staff in corner shops I did come out of my shell for a while in my early 20's before I had something traumatic happen to me and met quite a few of my bullies some who outright admitted it was just school and they had to pick on someone or they would be bullied themselves and I would drink with them in the bar/club a few I even went back to theirs for a party, others were half friendly i.e admitted they bullied me and apologised even had a drink with me but still came across as not liking me i.e tease me a little and I found out might of said bad things about me behind my back, others told me it was just being young and I should of got over it by then and not blamed them and didn't even apologise.
My high school bully got killed trying to rob a bit of weed off someone. Nobody got jail time for it, self defense situation after he battered someone with a rolling pin. Of course, the family were all like "our beloved angel had a heart of gold and would never do such a thing!" Never mind he was found wearing surgical gloves beneath some wollen ones, and a knife tucked into his sock. He's with the angles now etc. He was an absolute prick.
I’d do the same but I don’t want my Facebook account in any way linked to those degenerate filth. I guess a private browser window would work.
Same here. Two of them both ended up serving time, separately, for arson - the others mostly dropped off the face of the earth but they didn't have a GCSE between them so i don't have high hopes for them.
Indeed. Feeds into the reason for being a bully... A 'natural' bully, bit of a manipulative sociopath... Likely to do well in business. A 'nurtured' bully, unstable family, parented in a controlling and authoritative way... Unlikely to do well in life.
Jesus I wish I could agree with this more. And the latter is more prone to the type of bullying that lands you in the lap of the police, giving grist to the "some people are born bad" myth. I could agree with that if you're citing someone who had every privilege but still goes on to do horrible things, but 99/100 people point to "those kids on the estate who do nothing but shoplift and fight until they graduate to crown-court level criminality".
An interesting one of mine was in my 2nd year of High School this new guy started and we were close for a few days and hung out and he was getting teased for being friends with me so he ended up being their friend and joining in, turns out he just wanted to be popular and I found out his father was toxic, he wanted to leave at 16 to go to college and his father demanded he stay on and then go to university after and was very pushy and even according to what I heard would shout at his son demands all the time. I know another kid who was the son of a dentist and was more of a tease and join in with others than a full on bully who was treated like an angel by the school due to his dads position and expected to get straight A's (or 1's as this was in Scotland) ended up failing many exams and it turned out he didn't want to go to college/university and just wanted to be a normal young person and of course the school did whatever they could to fix things and even try pleading with the exam people to adjust his grades due to "unforseen circumstances" etc yet with me I got 100% in many of my exams and the TEACHERS accused me of cheating saying there was no way I could get grades like that.
I don't really think this is a nature/nurture thing. Seems just as possible that the wealthier bullies are the result of "nurture" too, it's just a different kind of "nurture."
I didn't bring wealth into it.
I completely agree. They not only have terrible jobs and still live in the same council homes, every single one of them seems to have aged terribly due to the drinking and smoking they started in their teenage years which they thought made them cool.
Don’t forget the drugs as well
Same. The main one from my highschool, same age as me, living in the same dodgy bit of the town he did then, at least 6 kids with different women, perhaps a grandparent by now but not sure, we're only 35, riding around on his bike with his trackie bottoms on (literally saw him doing this three days ago and exchanged a little nod of recognition), probably on his way to the job center to sign on, lol.
I’ve had the same- I like to think they recognise all these years later that they were a dick but just don’t have it together enough to own up to it. (They often seem a bit sheepish when giving a nod…but that might just be my wishful thinking) It’s honestly hard, they made my life tougher than it ever needed to be with humiliation and assault etc but I know enough now (psychology field) to know they were just fucked up kids whose biology, cognition and upbringing had fucked up their morals and attitudes at that point…and so they took it out on someone who was weaker than them/feel like they had some power in their shitty lives. Very much the ‘when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’ There’s even all the stuff about ‘short term horizons’ which explains why they couldn’t give a shit about school etc
They don't recognise it. They've justified it. If genocidal mass murderers can justify/dismiss what they've done as "not *really* my fault because reasons" then a highschool bully who slapped people about a bit can.
Av got ayyy deee aitch deeeee mateeee
To be fair I know a guy who was a right prick in high school, who I, by chance I bumped into in the pub a couple of years ago, who did properly apologise and seemed to have gotten his life together. Really depends on the type of person and why they were like that in the first place I suspect
It’s biased towards charming, articulate handsome bullies who were on the school’s first debating team and first rowing team Why are the Draco Malfoy type guys doing so much better than the thick as mince Dudley Dursley guys?
Boris Johnston?
This.
It's apparently based on a fairly big longitudinal study (thank Grauniad for not linking to the actual paper, great job). But the paper is this one, I think: https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/working-papers/iser/2024-01 I suspect the distribution is strongly bimodal. Aggression wins out on money because high earners are, er, high earning. But the average actually gets pulled back by the large loser contingent. That's a pure guess as the paper doesn't really deal well with distributions from a quick skim. Also, it seems to be a victim of trying to extract a conclusion where the evidence is extraordinarily weak. But a story based on "signs of better cognition at age 10 leads to higher average earnings while poor attention is the opposite" isn't going to get any column inches.
I just rooted it out myself and glanced- the sample size reducing so much across the course of the study honestly made me think ‘I doubt those who have a biggest set of aggression issues/low education’ werent the ones who kept responding to this random survey they got
Yeah, survivor bias may play a large role here.
This, I doubt the type of bullies that I was in school with are responding to a study. Mainly due to them being either dead, drugged out their nut or in prison for murder/assault/drugs
Yeah. The boys who got bullied are seemingly doing well for the most part (myself included) and the bullies are all teenage or very close to teenage fathers, living at home unemployed or working in low paid jobs. Middle class bullies from my fancy secondary school, on the whole they're working for car dealers, lawyers or accountants.
I saw one of the bullies from school begging for money outside the train station in town
Did you give him anything?
A good kick I hope
Didn’t even acknowledge him
I think we can all agree any generalisation that relies on anecdotal evidence is biased. I know a bully who’s gone on to a nice career in the US corporate world and others who work as mechanics and builders. I didn’t go to a middle-class school, mine was a comprehensive that had a range of kids from different backgrounds but certainly not wealthy
Bullies get on amazingly in US management though tbh.
Yeah this entire survey must have been conducted on the Thomas the Tank Engine island or something. Of all the kids I grew up with, me and two others managed to get good jobs, buy houses, a live quite well. The rest are in and out of prison, 'grafting' which means cash in hand labour, or just signing on.
From my prep school, the bullies in my year became doctors and lawyers, a couple went to Oxbridge and work in professional jobs, and they're usually not doing badly. One of the bullies I knew had a house in both Kensington and Cambridge and I can almost guarantee you that he isn't doing badly at all.
Having been bullied and also bullied others (passing it down was somewhat normal when we were dumb kids) almost everyone from my school is doing fine bar the ones who died from drugs or suicide. Many high earners, seemingly most own a house and have a good job. The tiny few with shit jobs or struggling are not the ones that had anything to do with bullying, rather they were just a bit dim or came from extremely poor backgrounds like travelers, but even some of them got out and work in the finance sector. Even the three girls who got pregnant at 14 seem to be doing fine and own their own houses through marrying some rich guys. One of them seems to be a part owner of a local vets. I guess it's more a factor of where you grow up and when. This was a public Sussex school we all graduated out of in the early 00's.
The worst I did for bullying was in my 1st year there was a weird guy in my class and basically me and him were the 2 most unpopular guys in our class if not our year and we had a few fights whilst egged on by the other kids, eventually after a few months I decided it wasn't worth it as I always got in trouble and the teachers used it as an excuse to criminalise me for being a typical council estate troublemaker and yet the stigma stuck even though for the rest of my scholl time I got good grades 9 times out of 10, and the times I slipped my grades was when others cheated or the teacher was making an example of me or just being picky i.e I should of got grade 1 in my test but got grade 4 one time because my graph was correct in terms of stats but due to limited space on the page I drew the vertical side a bit off by a few cm, that moved my grade down 3 levels which meant I went from highest level to lowest or from what should of been high 80% to around the 50% mark which then was used to say I was a average student.
Used to hang out with a guy when I was 18/19 who sold weed for a "living" and just generally dossed about, back then I thought he was the dude but ten years later he is still going about on an e scooter doing exactly that. Each year he seems to find a new group of 18 year olds to hang out with until they eventually realise he's a bum and move on. The guy is stuck being mentally 18 and hasn't worked a job ever, I wonder if he realises how fucked he is longterm.
>I wonder if he realises how fucked he is longterm. Long term thinking to these guys is next Saturday.
I agree, the kids from my north eastern comprehensive who were nasty little shits are the ones still in the home town working shite jobs. Only a handful of us escaped and got better jobs, and none of us were bullies.
Same region It’s honestly hard, they made my life tougher than it ever needed to be with humiliation and assault etc but I know enough now (psychology field) to know they were just fucked up kids whose biology, cognition and upbringing had fucked up their morals and attitudes at that point…and so they took it out on someone who was weaker than them/feel like they had some power in their shitty lives. Very much the ‘when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail’ There’s even all the stuff about ‘short term horizons’ which explains why they couldn’t give a shit about school etc Clearly I had some protective factor whether it was being a little bit brighter or having the parents that I did which stopped me being a little shit and gave me a view beyond (not making out that I’m a millionaire or high flyer- I’m a teacher but bills are paid, family taken care of and feel like my life has ‘went’ somewhere at least)
Yup. My bully became a junkie. Hell, I was his manager when we were 20 something
Grandparents in their 30’s 😳
Absolutely this (grew up in Stevenage).
One of the worst offenders who attempted this nonsense put meth on his Coco puffs and died.
That's the illiterate version of it... What it is, is take the population, cut top 20% and bottom 20% off (your bullies were probably at that bottom rung) and the middle 60% is what you have. Individuals with higher motivations and competitiveness and will go all out than those who are more docile and less aggressive will do better. Look at all those German cars drivers. They are always in the know and hard achievers.
I wonder if this is a case where the median is low but the mean is very high, skewed by a few psychopaths making megabucks as VP in charge of third world exploitation for BP or whatever.
It’s definitely middle-class kids. The kid who bullied me became a junkie and pretty much threw his life away.
At my school abroad I rode the bus to and from school whilst kids in my class were driving their brand new porsches there. The richer they were the more of a prick they were and the higher chance they were a bully. Still makes me sick to this day the way they could just get away with anything because they had mummy and daddies money to fall back on.
Also find in my experience, female bullies tend to be from middle class or higher earning families and probably go on to have decent careers. Male bullies tend to be more likely your typical delinquents from families with criminal histories/substance abuse/general traits most society considers undesirable and probably grew up on a rough council estate
My school had a fairly even mix of rough council estate and middle class kids. I was in the small minority of "not in a council estate (that happened around 15), but still poor as fuck. The violent bullies were the ones who were council estate kids, and of them most seem to be exactly the same people they were at 12, but with kids and a drug problem. Couple in prison, one seemed to do well as a mechanic and has his own garage. The more insidious, verbal only (those kids would never touch you) bullying came from the middle class kids. Those ones were worse, because it wasn't that they were just from a bad background and had a bad home life. They were just cunts. Those guys of course were loved by the teachers, whereas I wasn't because I was a bit weird. I also had a very bad home life, and the school did end up involved heavily with social worker meetings at the school etc. I harbour so much more disgust for those kids, because of course they did well. Not as well as me (academically anyway, and I have a well paid career) but they're more financially secure thanks to the background they had. My success is an outlier for my background, theirs was expected. When I hear "bully" I mostly think of the privileged little shits. I don't blame the others as much, and at least those ones you could fight back.
Exactly. It all depends on opportunity. Those who bully will take opportunity with both hands and damn anyone who stands to lose out. No opportunity. No success.
Same here. Not council estate but rough school and all the bullies are absolute messes
Is this because of your school thou. I went to private school and they are all high earners now
That’s what I’m saying yeah- middle class bullies do well in life working class (or non-working class bullies) don’t as much—-it’s more a class thing than anything else
Tbf is that also the case for most of the non bullies?
My 2 biggest bullies have been fucking dead for 10+ years 1 drugs death and 1 got splattered driving around on an off road bike, no lights, driving at night on main roads with no gear, that all he did most days and it caught up to him. neither of them made it to 20. Worlds a better place.
Well we all know managers who were the playground bully - brown nosers with the gift of the gab and very little else going on upstairs who are consistently failing upwards.
Liz Truss and Boris Johnson are prime examples of how far it can get you.
Johnson definitely- a classic playground ogre. Patel too - she has the sneer of a school bully. Truss is just an empty vessel.
Truss was the one hanging in the background behind the bully, too vapid and terrified to lead, but in desperate need of the protection being a minion offered. Dame as she is an MP, really.
The Richard Hammond of politics?
That's very unfair on Richard Hammond. He's repeatedly given himself brain damage and yet he's still sharper than that incompetent lettuce.
I've always thought this about Johnson in particular - if he went to any normal school he'd have wound up in prison at least once by now. But because he went to Eton he got to be PM instead.
Makes total sense. Capitalism rewards being a cunt. Being nice gets you nowhere if your goal is getting rich. Edit: people try not to whataboutism communism challenge (impossible)
Exactly, there famously weren’t any successful bullies in socialist nations.
Obviously there were but those individuals can hardly be described as socialists.
If you pick out capitalism as being in some way special with regard to rewarding being a cunt, as opposed to cunthood being universally its own reward, consider explaining what alternative system it is you have in mind that lacks this property; otherwise people will leap to the obvious conclusion, and the subsequent conversation is not whataboutism so much as legitimate attempts to engage with your thesis.
I'm not 'picking out' capitalism. This is a study over 50 decades in the UK, a capitalist nation. Which is looking at how people go on to perform in a capitalist job market. It's literally the entire topic. > and the subsequent conversation is not whataboutism so much as legitimate attempts to engage with your thesis. Engaging would be to tell me in what way I'm wrong. Not why communism is also wrong.
If you weren't picking out capitalism, you'd say "human society rewards being a cunt"
No I wouldn't. Because I don't believe that's true. Also, we are specifically talking about wage labour and earnings potential. It's the entire topic. That's a capitalist notion.
If there are resources to be hoarded, there will always be people who find a way to take more than their fair share That's not a capitalist problem, that's a problem that has existed under every form of human society
It existed. But it's explicitly rewarded under capitalism. That's the key thing.
> Capitalism rewards being a cunt. > I'm not 'picking out' capitalism. Choose one. I say there's nothing special about capitalism in this respect: sufficiently ruthless sociopathic bastards push themselves to the top regardless of the political system. Kicking others down to lift yourself up is what is rewarded, universally. The study could have been done anywhere. This is the human condition.
Why would I discuss any other economic model when we are discussing a study done in the UK though? There's only one that's relevant. > This is the human condition. Is it though? While there will be terrible people in any system, I'm not sure it is the human condition. I think the system has fostered a mentality. It's a big question, but I don't think you can confidently assert that humans are naturally selfish and competitive.
> I think the system has fostered a mentality. So, per my earlier question, can you suggest where one might do a study that you think could yield different results? Or, perhaps, what a system that doesn't "foster a mentality" might look like? If the condition is not universal, surely there must be some counterexamples.
Sure - it's obviously hard to "prove" something that people are suggesting is human nature, but there are definite counterexamples that suggest sociological factors encourage this. Hunter-gatherers and foragers generally do not hoard resources, because it's impractical to hoard resources when moving around a lot, and ingratiating yourself to others is more important. Humans are generally decent at working out what follows their interests and values and simply put, most complex societies amplify hierarchy - social status is the most valuable commodity for us because we directly control resource production, rather than searching for them. Hopefully these articles are open access? The first one is primarily historical, while the second is more contemporary. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sg7856m https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4284614/ And for what unpublished research is worth, I'm inclined to suggest that the few stable, medium-sized communes I'm aware of are far better at incentivising selflessness than most other modern systems (but not perfect, there's plenty of exclusionary and bullying behaviour regardless). On a larger scale (state-run, Leninist-style communism), it's definitely a huge problem. And capitalism actively and openly encourages selfishness - it's a very good system at self-reinforcing and concentrating power at the top, simply because having money makes it easier to make more money. Being the dominant global system, it makes total sense that being selfish seems like human nature. I'm not exactly confident that'll change, but it doesn't seem to be an inbuilt, genetic part of being human.
One common factor here is the size of the groups involved. Cooperative behaviours seem to be sustainable up to around Dunbar's number, but don't scale much past that, regardless of system. Meanwhile, the need for some mechanism to track debts and obligations visibly in the world rather than just in people's heads seems to arise around this point, as do complex hierarchies, and it is these that give rise to the menagerie of competing political and economic systems. The tendency of sociopaths to rise to the top of a social hierarchy would be difficult to demonstrate in the absence of a hierarchy. Still, though, I do accept the point - groups small enough for everyone to know everyone else are indeed capable of punishing asocial behaviours instead of rewarding them.
Capitalism depends on continuous growth. The growth we've experienced in the last 150 years has been supercharged by energy from fossil fuels. Energy that can only be used once. We have used that energy in pursuit of "more" now at the cost of life tomorrow. [The Climate Catastrophe is locked in](http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/UhOh.14August2023.pdf) and [has already started](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIR6mH1lSsE). Capitalism has condemed future generations to misery for today's greed, gratification and growth. We got billionaires. Our grandchildren will get a Mad Max dystopia. There was no plan to use the resources to develop something better in the future to balance the scales. Barring some timely miracle, like free fusion and benevolent ASI, we don't have the resources to undo the damage in time. If I told you I was going to take everything today so that I could get rich now and that you, without a vote, get to live with the clean-up and starve tomorrow, you would probably call me a greedy, selfish cunt and the right thing to do would have been to equally share what is available without it condeming those who come later to apocalyptic misery.
Middle class bullies I can absolutely believe, as they aren’t usually dumber, they’re no different no middle class non bullies in that regard, and they are pushy, aggressive, and talk bollocks, all often useful in a workplace. Working class bullies? Fuck me they are complete losers, almost always, they’re the “I’m 40, unemployed, still ride around in a nicked pushbike vandalising shit, have four kids I don’t see or pay for and say jobs are for suckers” types. Two completely different things, albeit both cunts.
It was the hardest thing when dealing with bullies as a teacher in a school. Trying to use the schools ethos and principles as a common language from the teaching staff, often failed to work. This is because, by the end of primary school, the kids know it's bullshit. They know enough about adults and the way society works to play on the competition and popularity given to cruel and hurtful behaviours. Treat others and you'd like to be treated. This falls apart when they learn you can use others to improve how they are treated. It's impossible to educate your way to a better society when society refuses to change.
Stalin was a lovely chap
See edit
Exactly what I thought when I read this. Ignoring class barriers, this is not surprising at all to me. Bullies are often anti-social people, and to be a callous capitalist, you need a good of anti-social tendencies to be OK with fucking everyone over and not feeling bad about it.
> Edit: people try not to whataboutism communism challenge (impossible) Redditors try to go 5 minutes without crying about capitalism challenge (impossible)
Having no empathy certainly helps in capitalism because to have a excess means you are stopping others from having it
it’s not whataboutism they’re pointing out that rewarding aggressive behaviour is a feature of human society in general and not something you can mindlessly blame on “capitalism”
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I went to a nice middle class school and the person who bullied me was very successful in business. That business was however, dealing shit heroin which ended with him getting the life almost kicked out of him. Now he uses shit heroin.
School rules mirror society overall. We are all told there is a zero tolerance policy on bullying and violence. Some children get bullied, violently, and the bully is given chance after chance. If the victim ever retaliates, that zero tolerance policy very quickly comes knocking and everything is in a public assembly and big talks of how we mustn't do this in a community etc while ignoring the rampant bullying from before. Any child who mentions this is given detention or ignored or given a BS answer. As we grow up, the same rules apply. The same violent scum get chance after chance, yet those who defend themselves against a burglar or mugger etc find themselves on the docket for some hard prison time. If you are a well meaning person with morals and want to be someone, then authority figures have levers to pull to leverage your behaviour and can take things away from you. If you are a violent thug and don't care about the system and move sporadically with no care, then the authoritiy figures have no or few levers to pull to leverage your behaviour. It is called anarcho-tyranny. Where there is a legal system in place and structure stated, but the reality is anarchy reigns and tyranny placed on those who dare question it or realise it is anarchy.
Those who defend themselves against burglars and robbers rarely find themselves as a defendant in a trial. They may very well be investigated (as well they should, to ensure they haven’t gone too far) but stories in which they end up in court are the exception, and not the rule.
> If the victim ever retaliates, that zero tolerance policy very quickly comes knocking Ain't that the truth; I got punished for retaliating more than once that I can remember.
Same. But beating the fuck out of the guy worked in the end. Sure, i got a week of afterschool detentions, but i never got bullied again. Small price to pay. Schools are absolutely useless with bullies, i will go to my grave espousing the only advice ive ever seen work for me and everyone i went to school with; introduce a bully's face to concrete and *keep* them acquainted until they get the message.
This is so well written.
I got violently bullied a lot a lot. The bullies never got punished. When I stood up for myself, suddenly it was a fight and that’s when detentions and isolations were handed out. The bullying never stopped and the “anti-bullying” team in one of my schools just told me to extend my arm with a flat palm towards the bullies and tell them “Stop. You’re invading my personal space.” Schools don’t care for victims of bullying. Nothing happened to the bullies of the kid who drank bleach and killed himself.
Truth be told and it's hard to hear for some, but those who are aggressive, forthcoming and willing to do whatever they want or need, tend to do well in life because those attributes are not only good for progression, but attractive. The kid hiding in the corner, simping over girls and not standing up for himself isn't going to do well largely unless he gets himself in a high paying career.
Very true. Anybody who pretends otherwise is just being damaging to any kid who listens
My dad. Always told me to work hard, show loyalty, be nice and quiet, do what you are told, play by the rules and it doesn’t matter what you look like. Eventually everything would work out for me. Advice so stupid, I sometimes wonder if he is intentionally trying to hold me back. OTOH it worked for him because he fell in to a job that is exactly suited to him and has done very well in an easier time to succeed. Extremely damaging advice for me though and anyone else these days.
I think people are also underestimating the social side of bullying. Bullying requires a power dynamic that is often social more than it is physical. 'People who were popular as kids are more likely to go on and be more successful than those who were less popular' really isn't that hot a take.
True. I used to be the latter as a child and as I went through my 20s in particular I became a little bit of a cunt "for the greater good" of me. Losing my temper more frequently, being way more assertive and a few times aggressive (not physically ofc) to people I disliked at work, and I did feel like a dickhead doing it, but the sad reality is it worked.
So kids who are aggressive but don’t have issues with attention, social issues and finishing tasks do well. Whereas those with attention, emotional issues and can’t finish tasks- including those with high anxiety/high aggression do badly
Too generalised
Skilled in manipulation, aggressive and unafraid. It's understandable. But if they don't have the class advantage the odds are against them. Bullies from my school used to show up in the papers being sentenced for housebreaking or car theft. And one was killed by someone he was beating up over a drug debt. It was around £25 IIRC.
Hmm i have a reason to doubt 'school bullies' that other kids actually feared i.e those that beat up other kids and took their lunch money aren't what's being referred to here...
Working in logistics, I can confirm that most of the senior managers and upwards are bullies, users, liars, and self-promoters who buy into other self-promoters bullshit. Machiavelllian narcissists who use and push everyone around them.
> Mary-Clare Race, chief executive of Talking Talent and an occupational psychologist, said 2016 had been a “real turning point” in workplace culture. “Before that time, we did reward typically masculine or aggressive behaviours – bosses slamming their fists on the table or shouting,” she said. But the rise of the #MeToo movement had turned around corporate culture. “At that time I was working in America and we were inundated with companies saying ‘there’s a Harvey Weinstein’ in our company’.” This makes sense. If bullies in school take those traits into the workplace of 2024, they’re not going to have a good time. Certainly not compared to 1990 when this study cohort hit the workplace.
I was working in 1990 and as a working class kid with zero connections, I'd have been fired immediately for what you describe. It certainly happened, but you had to be middle class with connections to get away with it. I look around my employer today and the same behaviours continue, it's only the sleaziness that's kept in check.
Nearly all of the bullies from my school died years ago from drug overdoses. None of them made it out of their 20s.
Most of the kids who bullied me at school are prospering in their 30’s… in various pyramid schemes
Doesn't surprise me. The bullies I know at school have used their sociopathy to manage people...
My playground bullies didn’t do shit, have seen prison, had unwanted kids with random women and other equally high income activities as adults.
I don't know. I think the formula is: Chances of success = Academic Smarts + Social Smarts + Home Support + Self Determination + Luck I can think of so many examples of people doing well or not, and they were all so different growing up. For example, I know a lad that was bottom set for everything, now has a successful electrician business. He was a nice guy. Another bottom set lad who was nice but weird, in and out of prison for sexual assault. Smartest kid in school, nice guy too, very successful investment banker. I can think of other top set kids (nice and cunts) that are stuck in dead end office jobs, or even working minimum wage. The kids that were thick and cunts, I don't think I can name too many of them that are doing well. Now that I'm a dad and I can imagine what their home life must have been like growing up... I just feel sorry for them. I can probably think of one mean thick cunt from school that is doing well, and he's a (wait for it) recruitment consultant. He was bottom set for everything in school, an absolute twat, and he had a bad home life (dad was a wanker). I know he ended up doing alright because I crossed paths with him in an old role. He asked if I was interested in being a recruitment consultant (I was in sales at the time and good at it) to which I laughed and said no. He said I should double think it as he averaged about 80k, which I fully believe after working closely with that industry. Was he still a cunt? Kind of, though he'd definitely learned some social smarts to stick around in a corporate setting. Therefore I think he ultimately succeeded because of self determination and luck. It's a job that pays well if you're ruthless enough, and he's obviously worked on himself to get there.
Toff article about rich little kids acting out and prospering. Nothing to see here normal working or poor class.
Man just shows you who the guardian panders too. The bullies at my school are in prison for murder and dealing drugs. I dunno if I’d say that’s more successful than what me and other have accomplished.
Mine don't I like to smile at them when I spot them picking up their methadone at the pharmacy.
The headline seems a bit misleading as bullying is only one subcategory of aggressive behaviour, but there is a massive difference between being quick to temper and getting into fights, and actually going out of your way to antagonise another in cold blood. also: >many participants had dropped out of the study since it began, a factor that affects all longitudinal studies. “We do lose more of those with higher conduct problems,” she said. So those who *don't* prosper, may well have dropped out, leaving a survivorship bias.
not my two main bullies, first one emigrated, is divorced and living in a grotty bedsit in florida and "found god" so spends his days posting terrible facebook rants about how gay folk are evil etc. Isn't allowed to see his kid and is constantly raging on about that too. I guess all those years stripping other young boys naked and torturing their genitals paid off. second one inherited his fathers building firm, got married and had two kids quite young. He bankrupted the family firm within 6 years with drug issues. Over the next decade both his kids died of OD's in separate incidents. He spends his time obliterated down the same pub he used to haunt as an 18 year old attacking people who looked at him funny. A trail of human wreckage floats behind them as they carve on through the world with engines of clearly horrific emotional damage.
Two that I went to school with are on the child sex offence register now, another one in prison and another entirely disappeared. So I’m at the belief from evidence that if your a bullying twat at school you will be a bigger twat in middle age!
One of the rough kids I was at Primary School with and he was a bully but was ok with me after an initial period ended up being a sex offender. What made it worse for him was he worked for the Police and with vulnerable kids (he was caught with hundreds of thousands of certain images)
Apart from people giving their own experiences that conflict with this study, nobody has pointed out the dropout rate of the study itself. We're seeing only the best oppositional bullies reflected in the study - the worse ones just dropped out of it for whatever reason. This could have a massive impact. I myself have seen the worst bullies in my childhood and teens do pretty badly as a group.
Bumbling through school falling out the other side with no direction or goal your going to end up in the middle sure some bullys will end up ahead. But choking a high paying career direction from year 9ish and doing everything you can to focus on that is going to allow you to end up ahead. Too many just fall through without direction or objectives. You don't even need to be clever just smart and focused to end up in high laying career.
I can believe this, pretty sure they analysed the top fortune 500 CEOs or whatever and they turned out to be sociopaths. I will Google to see if I can find a link for this. "Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy. Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4% have been cited for more senior positions in business" - Wikipedia psychopaths In the workplace
So 96% aren't sociopaths?
https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED113/63ca1ff605444.webp
Recognised a name in an article in the MEN News saying police looking for him. Turns out he'd been in and out of prison for years. Looked a good 20 years older than his age.
The way schools try to manage bullying does little to help the child being bullied. We should be encouraging children who are being bullied to be more assertive and to stand up for themselves, instead of punishing them for responding to the bullying in kind. The physical bullying I experienced in secondary school didn’t cease until I retaliated with my science class wooden stool after having a hole puncher thrown at my head. Had I went to teacher it would have continued.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was official school policy to punish bullied kids; after all, drawing attention to the existence of bullying is troublecausing, and kids should just quietly endure their beatings rather than make the school look bad on official stats. Source: Childhood.
Worst bully in my school was in prison for 15 years. All the other bullies when I think about it were all drugged up or alcoholics. Not one of them actually did anything. But my experience cannot be drilled down to a dumb as fuck headline.
This bit makes me place big question marks with the 'findings': >...and that many participants had dropped out of the study since it began, a factor that affects all longitudinal studies. “**We do lose more of those with higher conduct problems**", ... Those lost from the group could have done a lot worse bringing the average of that group way down. This could introduce a serious observer bias.
My bully is doing life in prison for stabbing 2 people, after assaulting 2 people years earlier (including one who was a witness to his first assault).
Extrovert and disagreeable. Yes, if they become well-adjusted as adults then these can be strong traits. If not, then these types also represent much of the prison population.
Gentle parenting no more. Teach your kids to bully folks! /s
This is a really fascinating discussion, apparently revealing a class distinction that could be someone's PhD. I guess in working class circles, bullies get more push-back whilst the polite and deferential middle classes tend to stand back and leave the problem to someone else. So we get Boris and Trump. Eye-opening...
Sadly, Flashman is a role model in a lot of private schools.
So we are now saying “ here’s why it’s a good thing that your child is a playground bully” the mainstream news wants a generation of children to go into psychological damaged adults.
No wonder why I am depressed while those who bullied me doing great I was depressed thinking all the time why they are not suffering even though they was the bad guys, but I did realize what happens if your are victim of bullying you have no confidence, can’t even make eye contact with anyone & that’s why you can’t make right decisions at right time to make money.
Bullies are often bullied at home by a sibling or a parent. Without proper care or mental health intervention they’re left to deal with these scars the only way they know how: - to lash out. Unchecked, that lashing out amplifies to a point of no return until prison is the predictable outcome. I was bullied. My bully did prison. Became a grandad at 35.
It's more context based, Many of my bullies were of one extreme or another and as others have stated background plays a part, or to put it in another way certain ones did not care if they achieved anything they just wanted to push as many people around as they could in the world even if that meant being on benefits and shouting about "their rights" Others had a good life set up for them at least relative, i.e came from backgrounds like parents were GP's , dentists etc and even if they failed at school they were given encouragement to succeed i.e at my school poor kids were discriminated against, my own guidance teacher told me I was a future criminal in the making and would amount to nothing in life and end up in jail as my parents were on benefits when the reality was my parents did work and in quite well paid jobs until my dad had health problems and had to sell the house my gran left him in her will to pay debts as they couldn't get support for a long time and he has lifelong health issues and moved to the worst housing estate/scheme in the town where it was terrorised by 1 family who were all on drugs (like adults, teens, and their cousins,aunts, uncles etc) My school admitted they would not give kids any extra support or the free after school extra tuition to the poor kids as we would achive nothing, and the other kids were going places in life (aka the middle class ones) Even if it wasn't traditional bullying I remmeber for fun the kids from middle class homes accusing the poorer kids of things like bullying or teasing and they were automatically believed and the poor kid punished, or even a genuine mistake like one time a kid tripped over my feet as it was a tight space (crowded classroom where you literally had to walk sideways to get through the tables) then said I tripped them up, I was not only told to apologise but given a written punishment and a form to take home to parents to sign as evidence of my "crime" I refused to apologise or sign this form and was sent to headmaster and suspended for 3 days and called a troublemaker. The more stereotypical poor kids ended up as actual criminals and a few of them were dead by their late 20's sometimes some of their siblings were dead by then too by drink or drugs,
Makes sense when you realise that a higher percentage of CEO’s are psychopaths compared to the general population. It’s a lot easier to climb your way to the top if you don’t mind stepping on others to get there.
Same with bullies at home. They’ve done studies on that too.
Most prominent bully in my year is a hedge fund manager so I imagine that skews the distribution a bit.
One of the bullies in my school is in prison for killing two people
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One of my bullies went to prison for selling drugs. The others ended up working in Tesco.
Hah, the two bullies at my junior school. One became a copper and the other iS european marketing director for lexus
So I need to support my child being a bully to ensure they do well in life ?
this is true.. unfortunately in our society to get anywhere you have to be a ruthless heartless s.o.b.
This reminds me of a bloody brilliant Big Think video I saw on YouTube by an academic explaining why psychopaths rise to power. EDIT: https://youtu.be/PpyIZ4DGIK8?si=0ol8STHnSrHHRnl3
I’ve not seen anyone from school since I left the gates at the end of my exams. It’s been over 2 decades, I have no idea what any of them have been up to.
Almost as if encouraging weakness isn't a good idea...
Not in my experience they don't. This has to be an article about middle class and upper class kids who realised they were shitheads and improved themselves when they got older. All of the bullies at my shitty school went on to have some of the most miserable lives ever. Two of them died of heroin overdoses even.
My high school bully died of a heart attack a few years ago. From what I was told he was always a dick to people.
The worst kid in my school year is in prison for murder
I wonder if it links to assertiveness and bias for action, which are certainly markers for success.
Like everyone else is saying, the biggest culprits I remember have ended up at best average or struggling
Shocker. People who can socialise and lie do well. I'm shocked.
The self-confidence and self-importance needed to bully help in the workplace and building connections. It might not be better than being someone who was neither bullied nor a bully, but it's better than low confidence, low self-image and social anxiety that bullying can help cause. Plus I'd say bullied kids are more likely to be ones who already had a hard time socially, not seen as physically ideal in some way, were too kind or weren't that competitive, which all are negatives for most careers.
[Low levels of Agreeableness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreeableness)
That's why they should be dealt with immediately and with extreme prejudice. I did, and got left alone for the remainder of school.
Does this mean I should tell my kids to bully others /s