[dilaudibble]

I see this is by David Graeber who recently died. My respects to him, his family and his work.

However I disagree with the article. I am also someone who has been on the receiving end of bullying and (rarely) on the dispensing end, but I feel that the premise of this article is wrong. The reason why people did not care about the highway of death is because 1) it happened a long way away 2) people like us, from our side, did it 3) very few popular faces said it was wrong and 4) it happened to people we don't care about very much. These views can be summed up as parochialism, and they are usually the reason that we allow evil to be perpetrated against the innocent.

It's also the reason we allow the poor of the world to starve (c.f. Living High and Letting Die, Peter Unger) which I don't feel can be construed as bullying. A similar example is the behavior of the allies immediately after the second world war, who apparently did little to acknowledge the Holocaust.

My view differs from David's in that I don't think we seek to justify bullies because we think they are better than their victims - I think we seek to justify bullies because we don't care very much about other people, due to lack of time and energy. I find it difficult to parse his whole argument but David appears to be suggesting that it is much more complicated and to do with our participation in bullying and our institutions. Fair dos, but I feel my explanation is simpler and better.

[DFHippie]

I don't think your explanations are really in conflict. His point is that cowardice keeps third parties from intervening and then ego defense in the face of their own cowardice gets them to denigrate the victim. Yours is that it's just sociopathic indifference. But people do feel guilt at their inaction and they do blame the victims. And most likely David Graeber would have agreed that people are more likely to step in to defend people closer to them -- kin, friends, members of their religion or ethnic group. So apathy does have a role to play in his model as well. If you have a lot of apathy you need little cowardice + projection to preserve bullying. If you don't, you need more.

Another neglected factor is how convincingly one can tell oneself preventing the bullying is somebody else's responsibility. If the crowd of witnesses is large or there is someone else nominally in charge, you can have empathy and inaction without any recourse to victim blaming or other self-deceptions.

[xbar]

Briefly, this. Condolences to Mr. Graeber's family.