I read a comment once lauding bullying as an evolutionary filter that prevented the environmentally unfit from too strongly impacting the species. This has, like many other ideas that took me aback, floated around in the back of my mind while I sorted what I thought about it.
"This also happens with animals so it is not a completely human thing."
While I don't want to, because of the off hand comment you provide above, I am forced to acknowledge that there is some truth to the idea that bullying is an evolutionary force, something that enables species - not just us small boys on playgrounds suffering from mean people - to ensure their fitness. The world is a dangerous place. All of us are actually no more than tasty meals that deliver themselves to our predators when we stumble into their hunting grounds.
The fact that other species also exhibit bullying behaviour lends support to this theory that bullying contributes to evolutionary fitness. While purely considering humanity as animals enables some justification of such social cruelty, that is not all there is to humanity. We vaunt ourselves as something more than mere animals, make reference to our spiritual beliefs, sublime arts, and scientific understanding to support a belief we are higher creatures than our fellow species on Earth.
I hope that is true of us, and that more substantial forces than physical needs are operant that justify my inherent value of kindness and mercy more highly than lust, greed, or power. The considerations I have given consciousness informed by the No Hiding theorem of physics, which suggest that our conscious minds are immortal because they are information that cannot be lost to the universe, support that hope. Our actions while we live, viewed in the light of immortal spiritual consciousnesses, become more permanent than anything carved in stone, and, unless we can ameliorate and rectify such acts in the hereafter through communicating with others, such as those we have done wrong, I can see that regretting unchangable acts forever could indeed be a hellish fate.
I appreciate your contribution to my reflections on these matters. Your insights are beneficial and substantive because you strive to be rational, honest, and beneficial to your fellows.
Thanks!
Well really I kind of derailed my initial reason for writing the post. It happens. I was more thinking about the "Don't give the bad guy press, don't say their name" thing in order to stop copy cats. I think we should report information and instead be focusing on other factors for why that person thinks they should be a copy cat. PARENTING, Education, Mental Health, etc.
Yet I kind of side tracked myself with the bullying because that is one of the things that a lot of mass shooters claim to be reacting to.
I knew there was a reason I insist that trolls are necessary. I appreciate the insight.
Thanks!
HaHa! Indeed, the more annoying the troll, the more it puts me in the position of testing my tolerance or experiencing its threshold. Everyone has such a threshold. If by tolerance I mean "static agreement", then I have given the term a different meaning and "fixed" it.
"Tolerance" I understand in a context as a dynamic between me and the world. I therefore cannot simply "be tolerant", there is no such thing (as for missing a point of reference), but in context I experience my personal threshold/boundary of what seems acceptable or unacceptable to me. It is therefore highly subjective.
Whereas I think a troll neither challenges nor really engages in such challenging competition. A troll by my definition is an immature will-o'-the-wisp, something that flutters around without making sense, like a speech output device that does just that because of its technical ability to throw out verbs.
A troll by this definition has no address, does not seek dialogue or argument and counter-argument. It just appears somewhere and trolls away after a while. The troll is random and aimless in my mind.
In German, the term exists in the animal kingdom; one says, for example, that the young boar trolls away. Or one says to a child "troll yourself", which means something like "sniff around" or "run around".
A mother who lets her young trolling around, lets them explore the world, has in mind that it may get a bleeding nose, an accident, an uncomfortable encounter as well as a friendly and easy one. She is reasonable in that she does not want to avoid the one and only support the other. For she knows that the world in which the kid trolls around offers everything she cannot do alone.
If the young gets hurt she will have empathy and care for it. If the young gets pleased she will cheer with it. Of course, sometimes she will fail and tell her little troll that it was its own fault to have gotten a bloody knee.