Commentary
Why Do We Like Bullies?
- by Matt Straz , April 8, 2013
Last week Rutgers University fired its men’s basketball coach for his abusive behavior toward his players. His acts, caught on video, included a range of behavior typical of a schoolyard bully: name-calling, pushing and kicking his players. The coach, who was supposed to be the leader of his team, was allowed to inflict his abuse for too long. As a result, the Rutgers athletic director and another official were also fired.
Like sports, the media and technology industry also has its share of bullies. Donald Trump has made a career of picking on people. Michael Arrington, the volatile tech blogger, is now being accused of abuse by former business partners and friends. Tech executive Keith Rabois, who resigned from mobile payments company Square amid accusations of an improper relationship with a colleague, recently took to Twitter to criticize the founder of Foursquare.
While school administrators and educators work to root out bullying at the grade-school level, for some reason our industry accepts it. Donald Trump gets paid by NBC and other companies to build his brand, which he then uses to bully more people. AOL paid Michael Arrington millions of dollars to buy his blog, TechCrunch, after which he heckled the company until he was fired. And then AOL invested in Arrington’s venture fund. After Rabois left Square, he was rewarded with a position at a venture capital firm.
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Nobody is perfect, and everyone deserves a second chance. But the media and technology industry not only seems to tolerate mean-spiritedness, it sometimes goes out of its way to reward it. Making fun of someone with a speech impediment, breaking a press embargo or lambasting a founder is acceptable behavior if the person is wealthy or powerful enough.
There are more good people than bad, so it should be easy to spot the professional bullies and do something about it. But it can be difficult to act. Like Rutgers, we sometimes give the bad actors a slap on the wrist and let them carry on -- if we do anything at all.
“For years I was partners with someone who I was told not to associate with by many people I respect. I ignored those warnings, defended the person and thought they were just ‘misunderstood’,” Jason Calcanis, a former business partner of Arrington, said last week.
We should be able to create a culture where abusive behavior and personal attacks are called out. We should be able to have a healthy debate about ideas without getting personal and abusive. And when people cross that line, we should do something about it.
“Life is short. Don't enable the bad actors,” Calcanis recommended.
That seems like good advice
Calcanis is one to talk!
I feel exactly this way about Joan Rivers. She is constantly rewarded for her bullying tactics, its not a comedy act - its mean. There was a time where she did a real comedy routine and she was witty and funnt. She has morphed into pure mean with Fashio Police, Twitter comments, et al. Call them all on it!
I don't condone bullying, and when my own kids come home with a bad story about someone, I usually ask them "tell me something good that happened today". I'd prefer they focus on the positive. Along those lines, and as somebody who was bullied as a youth, I don't consider bullying to be all bad. It's a question of what is being done, and how the recipient is capable of dealing with it. In my case, the bullying ended up being a positive thing. I was able to focus my attentions on subjects I knew would get me ahead in life. So while I was not the most popular kid in school, I never worried much about what would happen when I went to college or the workplace. The bullying sucked when it was happening, but today I can find the silver linings - linings which may not have ever happened if not for these events. Life can't be all wine and roses, and I'm not saying we should go out of our way to bully people. We shouldn't. But it's intriguing to listen to the Rutgers players who have defended their coach. I wasn't on the team, and all I've seen are short snippets of bad behavior on the part of the coach in team practices. Yet, based on some of the player commentary, they didn't see anything bad in what some of us find repugnant. Based on my own experiences, I am sympathetic to their view. We take what we want from life, and if all we do is seek out the bad, then all we will ever have is the bad. We often look at Bill Parcells as a great coach. Yet some of his tactics to motivate players such as Lawrence Taylor could be labeled 'bullying'. But Bill was wise enough to know that would never work with Jeff Hostetler, and utilized different tactics with him. You can't just simply write off behaviors you disagree with if they yield positive results. The question isn't "Why do we like bullies?" We don't. However, there are times - not always, but some moments - when we can respect the results produced by behaviors we normally have no interest in employing. Utilizing the stick rather than the carrot is sometimes useful. Real bullies are not people we like. Real bullies are those people who are just mean and nasty because it's who they are. They exist because they confuse cause and effect. They have seen a level of success with bad behavior and assume they can always get results with bad behavior. When they don't, they don't question their methods, they question the qualities of those bullied and lay the blame on them. We don't like them, we either don't care about them (in my case), or in the case of most others we fear them and refuse to confront them.