Bullying, Humiliation, and their Effects

Humiliation is the result from bullying. Bullying is the “repeated oppression, psychological or physical, of a less powerful person by a more powerful person” that causes people to act (“What is Bullying…”). These acts can be either positive or negative. This topic is notable because in a large scale, if the acts are negative it can lead to war, genocide and overall destruction of the parties involved.

This is evident in the results of World War I when World War II and the Holocaust occurred. The bullying countries that created the Treaty of Versailles humiliated the Germans. Germany felt reduced to almost nothing and they detested the feeling. They began to need, to hunger for counter-humiliation and Hitler was the man that provided the means and the will to do so (Lindner “Human…” 2). And as thoughts of being degraded grew, so did the thoughts of irrational acts. Those men and women became addicted to the feeling of humiliation and channeled that grave anger into revenge for their beloved Germany. In this case humiliation took a massive toll on Germany and created war and genocide. The bullied became the bullies.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological theory that explains these events. It describes peoples’ tendency to seek consistency among their cognitive ideas and the need to change those thoughts when there is an inconsistency, or dissonance, in their behavior or visa versa (Festinger). In perspective, the Germans that did know about the killings of Jews forced their cognitions of killing as a bad act into killing as a survival act in order to compensate for the mass genocide (dissonance) (Johnson-Reuband xxii-xxxiii). Hitler was in such control over many Germans’ beliefs that he was able to persuade them to go along with killing about 23,015,000 people ranging from Jews, Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and other non-Jews (Mattil). Cognitive dissonance was used to justify the Holocaust.

We can change this by limiting the amount of negative actions that result from bullying. This can be achieved by converting the need for counter-humiliation into the need for moderation. Moderates are those that chose to promote peace instead of aggression and war. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela are two people that chose to be moderates in response to humility. Moderation is how humiliation can be resolved with conflict management and thus save lives from incidents like war and genocide.

We need moderate action! We need to be able to look past humiliation and try to deflect the anger and instead bring about peace. The anger caused by humiliation is like dripping food coloring into a bowl of water, before you know it the whole bowl is covered and you can’t see the difference between the color and the once clear water. And so we should be moderates; those who put the lid back on the pipette of food coloring.

Work Cited

Festinger, L. Cognitive Dissonance. Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

<http://tip.psychology.org/festinge.html>

Johnson, Eric A; Karl-Heinz Reuband. What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder & Life in

Nazi Germany: An Oral History. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, A Member of Perseus Books Group, 2005. Web.

Lindner, E.G. “Human and the Human Condition: Mapping a Minefield.” In Human

Rights Review, 2.2, 46-63. Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

<http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/evelin/MappingMinefield.pdf >

Mattil, James. Flashpoints: Guide to World Conflicts. Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

<http://www.flashpoints.info/issue_briefings/Genocide/Genocide_main.htm>

“What is Bullying? Defining bullying: a new look at an old concept.”

Web. 30, Sept. 2009. <www.education.unisa.edu.au/bullying/define.html>