But it’s not a simple matter of “the guy who’s a jerk doesn’t count because he was born a nerd” because in a lot of cases you can say the reverse is true – the nerd is a jerk.
Are you able to elaborate on this wisdom Frank?
My first encounter with what I now think of as “macho posturing” was when I was an eighth grader and played the PS1 version of Final Fantasy 7. As the game went on I was becoming more and more angry with my character and the choices in the plot – not in a “wants to kill all the enemies” way, but in a sense that I was more and more frustrated with how they were acting and talking. (I remember having a huge fight with Aerith where she insulted me for not being able to take the insults she was throwing my way, and I started to lose it, because even though she didn’t mean any of it she still used these insults on me constantly even though I was getting really tired of them. I got a game over and saved my game, and eventually got my temper back under control.)
I also remember, at one point, wanting to get involved in some sort of fight between the “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys,” and after I finished my battle with Aerith I started to talk to a group of people who were waiting for me on the other side of the door, only to decide I didn’t care enough about them and the fight. That moment of self-consciousness is what gave me pause about whether I was acting too much like the asshole I felt I was.
Around the same time I started to notice that there were a lot of other nerdy kids on the playground, who weren’t nearly as angry as I was. And I got the feeling that they weren’t angry for the same reasons I was – they just didn’t care enough to go to the trouble of being angry and being so publicly angry. It seemed very, very possible to me that some of the people in this group were actually jerks – but that these people didn’t count, because nerds are “people of good will.” Of course I can’t be sure this wasn’t an over-generalization based on my own experience and I can’t be sure how many cases I was missing, but I got the feeling that there were a lot more nerdy people who were nice (in the sense that they would act in socially acceptable ways when they got angry) than there were who were nice (in the sense that they weren’t as angry), and I thought this was a shame.
The point of my post wasn’t to tell anyone that they’re a bad person for not being an angry-looking angry person. I’m not telling anyone that, because that isn’t true. I know several people who look much more like jerks than most of the people I was talking about. I know lots of people who act more like jerks.
But I can’t think of a single good reason I feel justified in thinking “the guy who looks like a jerk doesn’t count, because he’s a nerd.” In fact, the fact that the person who’s “nice” looks more like a nerd seems like exactly the reason they don’t count. Nerds may not look as angry as most people on the playground, but they’re more angry than most of the jerks.
Of course, that’s only a vague intuition. And as someone whose behavior is often at least as anger-related as it is socially acceptable, I guess I also have an intuitive sense that this is bad behavior. But I couldn’t point to any reason why it would be more justifiable than the reasons it would be bad – and even if I could, it wouldn’t follow that this is a behavior that anyone should or should not engage in. And since the behavior is, or at least seems to be, more acceptable than a lot of other forms of bullying, I have to conclude that this is an argument against bullying.


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