The researchers claim to be surprised by their findings, but is it really so remarkable? A large and impressive study of children’s progress into adulthood found that those who display bullying and aggressive behaviour at school are more likely to prosper at work. They land better jobs and earn more. The association of senior positions with bullying and dominance behaviour will doubtless come as a shock to many.

This is not to suggest that all people with good jobs or who run organisations are bullies. Far from it. It’s not hard to think of good people in powerful positions. What this tells us is that we don’t need aggressive people to organise our lives for us. Neither good leadership, nor organisational success, nor innovation, insight or foresight, require a dominance mindset. In fact, all can be inhibited by someone throwing their weight around.

Whether in game theory or the study of other species, you quickly discover how the dominance behaviour of a few can harm society as a whole. For example, a study of cichlid fish found that dominant males have “lower signal-to-noise ratios” (sound and fury, signifying nothing) and counter-productive impacts on group performance. Anything sound familiar?

At every stage of education and career progression, and in politics, economics, and international relations, we should seek to replace a competitive ethos with a cooperative one.

A win for bullies is a loss for everyone else: their success is a zero-sum game. Or negative-sum: The first study I mentioned also found that school bullies are more likely to abuse alcohol, smoke, break the law, and suffer mental health problems in later life. But the bullies’ triumph is also an outcome of the dominant narrative of our times: For the past 45 years, neoliberalism has characterised human life as a struggle that some must win and others must lose. Only through competition, in this quasi-Calvinist religion, can we discern who the worthy and unworthy might be. The competition, of course, is always rigged. The point of neoliberalism is to provide justifications for an unequal and coercive society, a society where bullies rule.

It’s a perfect circle: Neoliberalism generates inequality; and inequality, as another paper shows, is strongly associated with bullying at school. With greater disparities in income and status, stress rises, competition sharpens, and the urge to dominate intensifies. The pathology feeds itself.

The researchers who conducted the first study suggest, having discovered that bullies prosper, that we should “help to channel this characteristic in children in a more positive way.” To my mind, this is the wrong conclusion. Instead, we should seek to build societies in which aggression and dominance are not rewarded. It would be better for schools to focus on dissuasion and counselling.

But at every stage of our lives we are forced into destructive competition. Not only are children pressed repeatedly into winnowing contests, but so are schools. In England for instance, with its Sats tests and brutal Ofsted regime, these contests damage the well-being of children and teachers. As always, the competition is organised to enable the wealthy and powerful to win. But, as Charles Spencer explains in his memoir of life at boarding school, winning is also losing: Parents who send their children to private schools pay to create a dominant outer persona, but the child in the shell might be twisted into knots of fear and flight and anger.

This........

© Common Dreams