Alarge and impressive study of children’s progress into adulthood found that those who display bullying and aggressive behaviour at school are more likely to prosper at work. They land better jobs and earn more. The researchers claim to be surprised by their findings, but is it really so remarkable? The association of senior positions with bullying and dominance behaviour will doubtless come as a shock to many.
He does get the study right – it’s the character traits that cause both.
But the bullies’ triumph is also an outcome of the dominant narrative of our times: for the past 45 years, neoliberalism has characterised human life as a struggle that some must win and others must lose. Only through competition, in this quasi-Calvinist religion, can we discern who the worthy and unworthy might be. The competition, of course, is always rigged. The point of neoliberalism is to provide justifications for an unequal and coercive society, a society where bullies rule.
And that’s idiocy. Think of a collective system where we elect people to do stuff for us. Those bullies are also better at getting elected but given that we’ve handed over societal power to those who get elected we’ve given them more power over us than neoliberalism and the market allow.
But at every stage of our lives we are forced into destructive competition.
Jesu C on a bouncin’ pogo stick. George’s technical training was in zoology. Where he must have read Darwin at some point. The entirely of existence is a competition. And it’s against the fellow members of the same sex of our own species too.
Just idiocy.
Here, “at times” is standing in for “consistently”
“But at every stage of our lives we are forced into destructive competition.”
I used to be a senior manager in my thirties. I didn’t like doing it, I found that I didn’t really take pleasure in ordering people around and more importantly doing their thinking for them, so I stopped. I became self employed instead and enjoyed watching all the ineffectual middle managers stabbing each other.
’George’s technical training was in zoology.’
And he gets that wrong as often as everything else!
@Ottokring: ’ I used to be a senior manager in my thirties. I didn’t like doing it, I found that I didn’t really take pleasure in ordering people around and more importantly doing their thinking for them…’
Yes, management training at my firm is geared to the ideal situation where you are expected to manage free-thinkers yet in my experience of management, it immediately makes you your staff’s surrogate mum!
bullying and aggressive behaviour
was mostly just banter and horseplay when I was a lad. Sure, there were real bullies, proper evil sociopaths in the bodies of 12 year olds.
But children in general also weren’t wilting little pansies who couldn’t dish out, and receive, the odd black eye or lump, and didn’t run to teacher every time someone called your Mum a slag.
.
You’d be surprised how many biologists haven’t. Because Darwin’s theory was, at the time Monidiot attended Oxford ( of all places…), only a hypothesis. Plenty of circumstantial evidence, but no actual proof.
It wasn’t until the late 1980’s that enough pieces were puzzled together that the actual mechanism through which evolution works was described and proven enough to elevate evolution to Theory.
As-is, Darwin’s work is a brilliant piece of deduction correctly linking breeding practices and natural selection, but it doesn’t offer any actual proof. Just suggestions and a proposed mechanism.
Judging from his Wiki, Monidiot was already infected with the Socialist Bug before he was at Oxford, and the lesson Darwin and successors teaches would not have sat well with him.
The fact that he went on to present natural history ( known by real biologists as “romantic fables” ) at Auntie Beeb is clear indication of the crowd he hung with then.
He is a Naturalist through and through.
The modern equivalents are “Climate Scientists” and “Environmentalists”.
So he would have heard of Darwin, may have even read the book, but his bible was Das Kapital, not On the Origin of Species.
Yes, management training at my firm is geared to the ideal situation where you are expected to manage free-thinkers yet in my experience of management, it immediately makes you your staff’s surrogate mum!
A good fried left our consultancy because he decided he needed to get some people management experience on his CV. I warned him that it wouldn’t be what he expected and that there’s nothing worse than managing people.
Six months later when we were having a beer he admitted it might have been a mistake, but he stuck it out for a couple of years and to be fair it did his career some good.
That was 25 years ago, I’ll bet its worse now given all the recent evidence of self entitlement and modern laws appearing to tip the scales a long way in favour of employees.
I notice the usual mistake that the economy is a zero-sum win-lose game. Also note that they found “bullying and aggressive behavior” – people who are more aggressive accomplish more?
How do the cry bullies in HR, DEI and ESG fit into this scheme?
philip @ 1.09, apparently ‘DEI’ now stands for ‘Didn’t Earn It’…..