A little while ago, I was watching a Chris Williamson podcast with a guest who studies bullying. One interesting thing about it was the finding that bullying is primarily among popular people. Which makes sense, if you think about it, because they are actually a threat to the status of others and so putting them down can actually accomplish something. But the thing I found really curious was the discussion of how to get people to stop bullying, because both of them didn’t seem to notice that within a secular framework, this is basically impossible.

It’s impossible for the simple reason that bullying works. When you are vying for social status with other people, bullying can discourage them and get them to stop trying to be popular too, paving the way for you to be popular. This isn’t the thing one typically sees in movies where a big guy picks on some small kid. It’s not that that never happens, but it doesn’t usually happen like in the movies. That kind of thing really is just simple theft—you don’t threaten to beat a kid up for his lunch money because it brings you a warm glow of satisfaction or makes you popular with others, you do it because you want more money and don’t want to put in the effort to get it honestly. In movies, mostly the bullies are just externalized versions of a person’s own conscience, and pick on him for his vices or at least the things he doesn’t like about himself because Hollywood writers are bad people and their consciences frequently bother them so they want to externalize their conscience so that they can eventually beat it up to the cheers of onlookers.

In real life, bullying is primarily done among popular kids because they have something of value—social status. Bullying them makes them feel bad and retreat from the things that make them popular. This kind of bullying is covert—in real life you don’t get crowds cheering for you when you bully someone, so you have to do your best to keep anyone from knowing what you’re doing. (Or else tell them stories which justify what you’re doing as protecting yourself or, at the worst, justice for what was done to you.)

In this context, bullying works. You can, through bullying people, make them feel bad. People who feel bad are not as charismatic. They don’t always show up to parties. People stop liking them as much. When you’re around and as charismatic as ever, your popularity goes up.

Worse for the people who want to stop bullying, bullying is one of the more subtle activities human beings engage in. If you try to have any kind of official anti-bullying campaign, some of the first people to use it will be the bullies. They will accuse their victims of bullying them, or the more sophisticated ones will provoke their victims into some kind of retaliation then bring that retaliation to the anti-bullying authority to get the victim punished.

All of this is especially true of female bullies, since females tend to take advantage of other females’ extreme sensitivity to rejection by females. Skilled girls and women can be artists with this kind of subtle signaling which is virtually undetectable to anyone else.

For these and other reasons, bullying is something that authorities (for the most part) can’t directly stop. But what you can’t directly stop you may be able to indirectly stop—you can try to persuade people to not bully others. The problem with this is that bullying works. Asking people to not bully others amounts to asking them to forgo a benefit. Why should they do this?

Within a secular context, now that quasi-religious feelings for nations have been discredited and no one cares, the only viable way of getting people to change their behavior is to show them why it’s to their own benefit to do or not do whatever it is you want them to do or not do. Hence, with drugs, you clearly communicate all of the many side-effects of drug abuse. To try to stop kids from having children out of wedlock, you try to persuade them that having children will suck and tell them in detail about every STD you can think of.

But bullying works and, if the bully isn’t caught, it has no immediate side-effects for the bully. All you can do is to ask them to forgo a benefit to themselves for the sake of another. But the idea that you should love people who can’t give you anything is a religious proposition; it stands or falls on the truth of metaphysical propositions such as God loving us and creating us to love each other (where love is defined as willing the good of the other for his sake). That’s not exclusively a Christian idea, but it is very far from a universal idea.