The Real World of Abuse

Why are some people bullies and abusers? What is the psychology at work?

We all know the story about the man who has a bad day at work, and then comes home and kicks the dog. This seems to be the basic abusive turn: trying to make yourself feel good by making someone else feel bad. Like the demons in hell. In sum, some of us, because we are essentially weak people, cannot handle our own feelings by ourselves, if they are unpleasant feelings. To avoid them, some take to alcohol. Some, really the same sort of people, take to kicking the dog; or anyone else who is nearby and helpless. Kids, especially.

This is contemptible and completely immoral, of course. But it is also, on the face of it, completely illogical. How does making someone else feel bad make me feel better?

For most types of bad feeling, it won’t, will it? But there is one exception: guilt. People commonly seem to believe that guilt is transferable; this is the Pharisaic impulse. The phenomenon of the scapegoat seems to be ingrained in human nature and human culture, found all over the world: you blame someone or something else for your own sins, punish them severely for them, and so convince yourself that your vehement reaction to supposed sin makes you a moral paragon.

You see this urge in politics all the time. This is the essence of the witch hunt, and this is the essence of the nanny state. People who make large incomes in rather dishonest ways and never give to charity can often claim themselves to be highly moral people because they vote to enforce higher rates of aid to the poor—i.e., making others behave as they should. Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula, claimed to simply be punishing evildoers.

It really looks as though most people are abusive, given the opportunity. Most people will join a lynch mob; that’s what makes it a mob. Milgram’s shock experiment famously demonstrated this fairly scientifically. So too, a democratic plurality of Germans voted for Hitler, and so far as we can tell, he retained his popularity with the German public just as long as he seemed to be winning the war. Daniel Goldhagen argues that most Germans knew perfectly well what was going on in the death camps--and were all for it. Jews always make good scapegoats.

The greatest horror of bullying and of abuse, in the end, is indeed the self-righteousness of the perpetrator. He or she will always add insult to injury: it is not enough to punish the victim, but the victim must also accept that it is deserved. For the abuser, that is the whole point.

It also follows that, if confronted with incontrovertible proof of their own bullying or abusive behavior, anyone who is truly abusive, truly a bully, will not admit guilt for it, but seek to deflect. They will deny it if they can. If faced with incontrovertible evidence, their obvious fallback position is to insist that they themselves are or were being abused, and so are the real victims. Indeed, they are the first who are going to whine about their own lot. That is their established modus operandi; the whole point of the exercise from the beginning has been to deflect guilt.

Unfortunately, the “experts” in psychology and in authority generally are either too stupid or too complicit to see this. Probably too complicit: psychology and authority are natural magnets for abusers. As a result, most of their interventions, which grow more and more insistent, tend to be on the side of the abuser, and will actively seek to obscure the issue.