Working in the disability field, bullying is a topic that comes up very often and the surprising aspect of it all is that despite this being the 2020s and bullying no longer being close to cartoon stereotypes, that is still where the discourse is. It is still football players giving wedgies to nerds and I think to myself “You can’t seriously be this stupid”. As said before in this blog the most common form of bullying I experienced was “circus monkey” bullying where my lack of social awareness was exploited for others’ amusement, a form of bullying with consent and plausible deniability.
To answer the question. Did football players bully me? Kind of but nothing close to a 1950s cartoon stereotype. The football players tended to not be around me enough to bully me directly but, as per the stereotype, they were the most popular males at my high school and their primary concern was social capital. They may have been teenage boys but they thought like teenage girls. The one party I got into I was kicked out of by the captian of the football team and the same captain kicked me off of a bus to a prom party. Why did he do these things? Because of the law of supply and demand.
What made him popular was having physical and other assets whose relative scarcity imparted to him social capital. The moment people with other assets, like my Asperger’s ass, get social capital then the value of his assets goes down because a larger number of assets can get social capital. I don’t know if he was being a bully but he was a being a douche. Their aim was to keep the economics of social capital as libertarian as possible and to fight off the socialists and Keyenesians who would redistribute their social capital.
When I was physically bullied, it was in part due to the low social capital I had, it never happened on campus, and never involved the most popular students. Yet, while they did not lay a hand on me, they kept a system alive which made me easy prey for others. Through mostly abstract laws of sociology, they got me urinated on miles away from where any of them were. When I was urinated on it was on an ethical pretext because my Asperger’s ass had made a social mistake and I could not tattle or I would be tattled on. So, it would never get to an administrator’s desk which is another way they were stupid. People will avoid reporting a felony so as to not get in trouble for a lesser crime and words like “creepy” are highly subjective.
The most popular students did not bully me in a physical or explicit sense. When they did bully me, they had plausible deniability. Yet, the most important thing they did was maintain a system with absolutely no redistirbution of social capital. A lack of social capital which the faculty contributed to a few ways. One, they gave me a special needs escort and when I took a test outside of the classroom they had me leave from class and not just not show up at the SPED room. They went out of their way to ensure everyone was reminded I was in special ed. This was the second way they contributed as in the prior paragraph, they were the extortion weapon of counter-tattling.
The point is that what was happening was way more sophisticated and abstract than the faculty, who were very stupid about the entire thing, could comprehend. Their epistime was that bullying was the stereotype and this epistime made them incapable of addressing the issue. They could totally get someone in trouble for shoving someone into a locker but they were clueless as to the social economics and power dynamics transpiring to keep the weak down and the strong in power. The ultimate causes were abstract and the proximate were either “circus mokney” and therefore consensual and with plausible denaibility or they involved implicit extortion of counter-tattling.
Their anti-bullying policies were completely useless because their epistime was stupid. It was not real. It was fictional. The bullies were more sophisticated than them and always eleven steps ahead. The lesson is that to solve a problem requires intelligence and creativity. The Dunning-Krugegr Efffect and WYSIATI are powerful biases and they must be fought. Epistimes must align with reality or there will be major human suffering. The only way a bully could get in trouble at my schools was if the bullying was explicit, obvious, and to a perfectly sympathetic victim. If it was a dogwhistle to someone with a conduct record, the system was too dumb and too vindictive to be of any use.
The Autistic Resistance 