I don’t know if there is a word for it, the infuriating effect of where a person challenges you not to challenge them. Specifically by using the first conveyance of information between you both to set a barrier up to what can be said. Often now, the first thing you know about a person is the thing they wish not to occur in the coming discourse, as if this primary interaction has only the purpose of setting rules inviolable. I don’t know if this is a devious tactic in an effort to gain an advantage, putting you on the back foot, a fear driven anxious attempt at not being potentially injured by words, as it is an often realised malady of modernity that people are tremendously thin skinned, or is it for the purpose of controlling the narrative of the person so as not to have the ego creation of the self they wish to offer challenged by the truth of what and how they are in reality stood before you?

What I do suspect is that this is a learned behaviour, societally founded and enabled, almost encouraged I would venture. One where folks have noticed and adopted the tactic because of the demonstrable usefulness of it, just like anyone with even slight wisdom will ape repetitive success. I don’t at all blame folks for assimilating this annoyance, this habit of language and manner, because I don’t believe it is a fully conscious occurrence. More likely it comes to be a part of who people are psychologically, in the same way that social truth invades the psyche and leaves markers in the form of neural fragments and pathways. We all know the effect of a rumour is that even when you find out it is completely unfounded, that knowledge does not remove a lingering feeling that resembles the falsehood as you first accepted it in an emotional sense.

We are cruel creatures it is true. I come from a place where the most frequent form of group interaction is to belittle another, lesser able to defend, member of that group so as to deflect from potentially having the same done to yourself. It is a form of bullying I suppose, to point out those things that we know that person might not feel good about, like their weight or their penury, and it happens in groups as part of banter as well as harmful accusation. Yet in my country in particular, among my contemporaries, it worsens somewhat in that it is more the regurgitation and reminder of times when a person, the victim, you maybe, had acted foolishly, than a direct attack being levelled. The effect of this being worse than just merely illuminating the truth of their bearing. Nobody likes their shame broadcast to a group, we are prideful animals that seek comfort in reasoning, and possibly misremembering, that we had acted as nobly as information allowed us to at the time. Where pride and cruelty meet we see conflict, this is the bullying aspect. Where I may be incapable of defence, you may feel compelled by the potential for advantage, to become the aggressor.

None of this is necessary in a workplace because we have a hierarchy that is more powerful than the raw power of the physical specimen or the intellectual power of the word-bully. But that power is itself oppressive, setting rules that may overprotect those that should face legitimate criticism as often as it acts in an effort primarily to protect against cruelty and unfairness. I would go as far as to say that it rarely prevents imbalance, and we find the protection offered being not against bullying, but for bad ideas and foolishly undeserved intellectualism. In normal circumstances a group will enact corrective influence so as to prevent silliness that is, and should be, avoided, for the simple reason that to let people away with silliness is to encourage and empower them to make what is silly equal to what is true or useful. Economic power, if expressed, is of course a form of oppression itself, it allows wealth to act in place of knowledge, it enables those that hold wealth to express an opinion that is greater than their number, to talk on behalf of all they have power over, as if agreement is bought with wages or the price of goods. Acquiescence may be purchased with a wage, but agreement is thought not action, and in the workplace we are often doing what we would disagree with if we had voice to say so.

The smarter person can be an intellectual bully or a teacher, whichever they choose to be, the only difference being the desire to take advantage or to form relations. Pointing out where there is error is not a bullying tactic if it is not motivated by a will to bully, oppress, or shame. Is it so frequently encountered, this form of misidentified “bullying”, that most people are now willing to engage in the habit of setting conversational rules? I think not, but firms will take the opportunity to exploit this so as to control conversation for purpose. I take the opinion that it is a habit to use the tactic of pre-emptive protection by prior restraint that is born of a fear which is mostly unfounded. That people have become so hyper-vigilant and so weak of will that they fear potential more than is reasonable. Prior restraint is a protection that very few persons actually need, and by enacting it we create only false dialectics. For the thinking person, who wants honesty in interactions, even if they are not pleasant, this must be unacceptable.

Paul S Wilson