All of the following comes from The Targets of Aggression, David P. Barash (Chronicle Website). Please read the entire article. These are the main parts that are helping to form my thoughts on cyberbullying.
I am very interested in on one of the email lists I participate in, how much there is an encouragement for women who are suffering and in psychic or emotional pain to unleash on others and to payback others, sometimes, who have been felt to have been unsupportive or wronged them. This sometimes goes under the rubric of “not being silent” or compared to the activism of the suffragettes working for the women’s vote. Yes, really. There seems to be a dismissal of the idea that there can be a complexity in approach. That on the list, one must either rail against or one is being submissive, a good little girl. I am interested in the role of such a list dynamic in terms of fueling aggression and healing.
And now Barash:
When an individual suffers pain, he most often responds by passing it on to someone else. When possible, that “someone else” is the perpetrator, the original source of the pain. But if this cannot be achieved, then others are liable to be victimized, regardless of innocence.
Usually the wheels of mayhem are set in motion when someone is wronged, and typically the deeper the wrong, the more bloody the response. It is noteworthy that even here, in works of the imagination (where, one might think, anything goes), only rarely are bad guys presented as doing evil for evil’s sake: the mustache-twirling villain who gleefully ties the heroine to the railroad tracks because he is simply cruel, and that’s that. Almost inevitably, for a bad character to be believable, he or she must be shown to have suffered some injury. Then it all makes sense.
Redirected aggression — the passing of pain from one victim to another — is not merely the stuff of literature and drama. Art reflects our world, and sadly, the urge to pass along pain lurks behind modern warfare no less than it did behind medieval pageantry, leaving its mark in the genocidal wars of the 20th century as well as those that threaten to overwhelm the 21st. It underlies many of the most prominent, enduring themes of literature, history, anthropology, psychology, and religion. It haunts our criminal courts, our streets, our battlefields, our homes, our hearts. There is nothing new about the phenomenon. Much is new, on the other hand, in our ability to understand it.
When animals respond to stress and pain by redirecting their aggression outside themselves, whether biting a stick or, better yet, another individual, it appears that they are protecting themselves from stress. By passing their pain along, such animals minister to their own needs. Although a far cry from being ethically “good,” it is definitely “natural.”
Redirected aggression does not simply derive from irrationality or human nastiness, but — along with retaliation and revenge — is entrenched in the very fabric of the natural world, part of a continuum involving nature’s response to pain. The biology of redirected aggression goes a long way toward explaining not only its apparent senselessness but its universality as well. It shows up across the ages, as we’ve seen, across cultures, and across social units, from individuals to communities to nations.
It feels bad to be a victim, but the pain can often be somewhat assuaged by victimizing someone else in turn.
Recently physiologists have uncovered the hormonal basis for such behavior. Animals and people subjected to attack or threat experience “subordination stress,” as a result of which their adrenal hormones go up, along with blood pressure and the probability of developing ulcers. But — and this is crucial — when given the opportunity to “take it out” on someone else, victims show no sign of stress. By passing along their pain, they modulate their own internal distress while generating trouble for the next ones down the line. Think, the biologist Robert Sapolsky suggests, of the fellow who doesn’t get ulcers but causes them!
As to the evolutionary advantage of such a system, it seems clear that individuals who respond to painful situations by striking out at someone else have been more successful than those who sit back and “take it,” because such individuals are less likely to be victimized the next time around. In social species, including our own, individuals are exquisitely sensitive to a variant of Lenin’s dictum “who, whom?” The cost of being victimized includes a loss of reputation; that is, being seen as exploitable: Who did what to whom, and what happened as a result? Evolution would most likely reward victims who — even if unable to retaliate against the actual perpetrator — conspicuously “take it out” on someone else.
To understand how and why people engage in redirected aggression is to gain insight into seemingly disconnected events. For example, the power and ubiquity of scapegoating are revealed afresh: from Old Testament accounts in which the transgressions and sins of the people were placed upon the head of a goat, which was then slaughtered or driven away, to current psychological theory whereby families often establish a “designated transgressor” who is blamed for any dysfunction. At the societal level, African-Americans have undoubtedly been the foremost recipients of that dubious honor: In a now-classic study, the psychologists Carl Hovland and Robert Sears found that they could predict the number of Southern lynchings occurring during any given year between 1882 and 1930 simply by knowing the price of cotton. When cotton went down, the frequency of lynchings went up. Not that white Southern racists literally blamed African-Americans every time cotton prices declined; rather, a bad economy led to an outpouring of anger, resentment, and frustration, which was then turned against a conspicuous and powerless minority. The economic and social pain of poor whites was passed on to blacks, without any conscious awareness of the scapegoating involved. The situation was clearly cultural, the process all too “natural.”
We might also want to reconsider “justice” and ask what is really going on when victims demand punishment, nearly always claiming, of course, that they are not out for revenge. But, in fact, aren’t they insisting — although not in so many words — that their pain be offloaded onto someone else? Once the wheels of pain have begun to spin, what really seems to matter is that someone — anyone — must suffer, must be made to “pay.” By the same token, consider the fact that crime victims typically resent the presence of exculpatory evidence, which is likely to lead to an acquittal: If their interest were simply in seeing justice done, shouldn’t they applaud any information that makes it less likely that an innocent person might be punished, and thus more likely that the criminal-justice system will instead spend its energy on finding the real culprit? It appears that the accumulated burden of physiology, evolution, and cultural expectation is so great that redirected aggression typically feels better than no response at all. Revealingly, there is a deep insistence on the part of victims and their families that — by virtue of their suffering — they are entitled to a defendant’s punishment, almost without regard to the matter of guilt. Moreover, the urge among victims to redirect their aggression is so strong that society steps in to make sure that this powerful impulse is handled decorously.
Modern science may even owe its existence to scapegoating, or, rather, to those who were able to overcome the urge to redirect their anger and pain. The argument, in brief, is that when bad things have happened to innocent people, there has been a powerful tendency for those people to seek someone, or some group, to blame. And so Jews were slaughtered during the Great Plague, and accused witches were especially likely to be burned whenever times were hard. By taking out their pain on such supposed transgressors, a burden was lifted from the suffering survivors. Today, of course, we know that people get sick because of disease organisms, not the “evil eye.” The point is that in order for science as we now understand it to have developed, it may well have been necessary for people to stop looking for the causes of disasters — and thus of their pain — in scapegoats and to begin searching in the natural world. In short, we didn’t so much stop burning witches because we had developed science, but ra-ther, we developed science only when we were able to get beyond burning witches.
Denying this impulse has been harder than one might think, since it not only invites physiological and evolutionary distress but also opens other vulnerabilities. (“To err is human,” quipped S.J. Perelman, “to forgive, supine.”) Thus it is one thing to espouse compassion and nonviolence, but we live in the real world, which contains threatening, dangerous, and hurtful individuals, requiring that we ask some hard questions. Such as: What should be done about violent transgressors, notably sociopaths and other perpetrators of evil, those with “poisonous personalities” who act upon their venom? If it is not acceptable to pass along our pain, how should we respond? What will provide order, security, and personal satisfaction, as well as minimizing subordination stress, without simply passing along the pain of the victimized? And without creating new victims?
That leads to another difficult question: If people who seek to hurt others are doing so because they have themselves been hurt, does that diminish their responsibility or guilt? Should we pity the poor perpetrator? Are all victimizers themselves previous victims? And what if they are? Does that let them off the hook? When does passing the pain become passing the buck?
Fortunately, there are ways out of the pain-passing trap. Redirected aggression — and to some extent, violence generally — isn’t inevitable, even though, because of our deeper inclinations, forgiveness is difficult. The world’s great ethical systems have long struggled to define an acceptable defense of victims that preserves personal and collective security without falling into excess. That challenge is particularly appropriate at a time when the word “evil” is bandied about by politicians and extremists to condone war and terrorism, no less than wars against terrorism. Hence we might all be well advised to explore not only how pain and aggression are typically misplaced or displaced, but also how they should be placedwhich is to say, the same way that porcupines are reputed to make love: very carefully.
The world’s oldest wisdom traditions have long been concerned with just that. Pain is prominent in Buddhism, which is founded upon the recognition that suffering is ubiquitous and unavoidable, yet can be minimized. The first of Buddhism’s “Four Noble Truths,” that life inevitably entails pain, is followed immediately by specific methods to reduce suffering, called the “the Eightfold Path.” In addition, among the fundamental teachings of Mahayana Buddhism is the kshanti paramita: “the capacity to receive, bear, and transform the pain inflicted on you by your enemies and also by those who love you.”
Christian tradition, too, venerates and validates the role of pain. Christ’s agony is widely taken as crucially related to God’s redemption of humanity. Hidden within dense layers of theology is this equation, one that is, however, rarely made explicit: the more pain (the more suffering on the part of Jesus), the more redemption for the rest of us. But why? Perhaps because the crucifixion of Christ, who is considered the epitome of innocence, provides an especially potent example of scapegoating as a route to social cleansing. Insofar as Christ suffered (“for our sins”), does that suffering enhance the social, personal, and even biochemical status of the rest of us, helping to overcome subordination stress among his followers?
In a masterpiece of painfully accurate revelation, G.K. Chesterton once wrote that Christianity hasn’t been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been found difficult and left untried. Never has that been more true than in cases of personal pain and our reaction to it. Thus, Jesus urged us to love our enemies, and, if slapped, to turn the other cheek. But for millennia — before Jesus and after — hu-man beings and their animal brethren have been far more likely to respond to pain and injury with a retaliating barrage of the same sort, generating yet more injury, more pain.
Perhaps Jesus did not entirely appreciate the magnitude of the demand he was making upon Homo sapiens, because in asking his followers to refrain from retaliation — to absorb pain without passing it on to someone else — he was asking people to inhibit one of their most widely shared, deep-seated inclinations. Nonetheless, potential solutions are all based on an equally deep, equally shared truth: that human beings, perhaps unique among animals, are capable, at least on occasion, and once the issues are made clear, of acting against the promptings of their often troublesome bio-logic.
