Of Claudio Risé

Source: The Truth
It is a sign of pain expressed by the words and gestures of bullies. They are signs of anger or desperation, not words with meaning. They don't have those yet, they never had them. However, it's not really for the grade in the register that they beat the professor, or because they really hate their weakest companion to death that they wipe the slate clean with his t-shirt. Technically these are “acting out”, actions that come from deep unhappiness, in an existence devoid of motivating structures and orientations. Awareness and speech are not there. If anyone could really listen to their anger, their unhappiness, in that sinking backwards into personal and collective regression (which affects us all in different ways), perhaps he would hear a cry for help, of meeting.
Feeling it is difficult for us today because we are horrified and afraid of naked aggression. Even if that dripping gel of talk shows then captures us, or of politicians, when it is served to us as a show to attract our attention. Thus flattering and nourishing our worst parts: vulgar and violent like theirs, but also an expression of the club of established aggressive players. However, they do not recognize any kinship between themselves and those bullies who have no words and no worldly habits.
The fact is that in this piece of history after the last world war (very short after all, therefore not very significant), we first forgot and then even prohibited us from remembering and transmitting our own words to those who do not yet have their own, what is aggression and what is it for?. After two world wars, the extermination camps, with gulags still active in the USSR, it was also natural to convey aversion to violence, aggression, hatred, thus hoping to strengthen the pole of opposing impulses: those of love.
However, the result of this removal was one of the most powerful forces of life, conflict and aggression, it was removed from the field of life and consciousness and pushed back into the unconscious. Relegated to films on the animal world and considered a pathology among men. The reality is that we cannot do without everything that has a function in the living world. And even if no one tells me, when I bite into an apple I express, as well as hunger, aggression: for example in biting me, eat it, and reduce it to a core, which I will throw away. All this part of destructive pleasure, of eating the apple is inseparable from the constructive part: precisely eating it, and enjoy this elementary experience. If then my aggression, deplored, disappears completely, it's a deal for anyone who will immediately provide me with the apple crushed into a bar (and thus transfers the aggression to the machines that prepare it for me), but it's a disaster for my overall well-being. Starting with my ability to intervene personally, creatively and physically, about the world, modifying it. In short, the ban on all aggression is a deal for the productive and financial world, and a severe loss of ability to generate energy, strength and health for the human person. The fall in the reproductive drive and birth rate is linked to the same phenomenon: the biological aspects and dynamics in the sexual act, behavioral and affective of an aggressive nature are multiple.
After the trauma of totalitarianism and war, the Western world in particular, it has transferred the monopoly of violence to machines, producers of consumer goods, but if necessary also deadly weapons of destruction. Man is thus expelled from physical play, psychic and symbolic of the struggle. Aggression, removed from consciousness and driven into the unconscious, is reserved for technology, like other fundamental aspects of human life. It is in that dark and uncontrolled place that she becomes monstrous, and irrepressible. The energy previously invested in the conflict is thus turned against man himself, producing autoimmune diseases, many mental disorders and all non-communicable diseases (N.C.D. non communicable disease, today the leading cause of death due to disease). Bullying is just the smallest part (even if humanly devastating) of this anthropological process.
The rejection of any aggressive form, with his renunciation of educating it as intrinsically “bad”, it deprives human life of an indispensable strength. And forget a teaching on which the entire Western civilization is built. That of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who in the founding period of the West was remembered as Polemos, the conflict, it is the generator of everything, of everything that lives. Human history does not develop by proclaiming sensational and abstract truths, but by bringing opposing forces and experiences into contact. Peace, in the world and within us, arises from the energy released by accepting and overcoming this problematic encounter, otherwise it's war: personal split and social chaos.
Not too paradoxically, even the gestures that have been so disorientating in the latest bullying news are desperate attempts to meet the other: the prof in his power and distance, the weak companion in his weakness. Meetings in which, like between very young children, everyone brings what they have: one a cherry and the other throws a stone. But that's all they have: themselves and anger, aggression. Not much, however energies that as long as they manage to direct themselves towards another in the ambivalence of hate/love and not turn against themselves in the form of depression or self-destruction, they still have the possibility to transform and build. In order to educate and transform aggression, however, it would be necessary to recognize its meaning, which is always what Heraclitus insisted on “the shady one”, it cannot be dismissed with” eh, but you shouldn't” of tranquilist respectability. They too know that it shouldn't be done; they do this because they have nothing else, at the moment, than that anger, that loneliness, and that violence.
You could at least try to listen to that pain, that punch, that desperate language. Then it would be felt, Perhaps, and: “open, look at me, do something. For me. Don't go ahead lost in your plans, your circulars, your records, as if they were alive and I didn't exist”. You think these are psychoanalyst's ruminations, theory, literature? It's not like that. It's everything else that is abstract: the yield, the program, the profit, the vote.
If there is no meeting there is nothing: no one can learn, nor teach. As Martin Buber explained, if there is no You, if the other cannot become one, the ego is just a rhetorical figure, a fiction, a bureaucratic position, and nothing happens. The meeting though, essential for every transformation, it's a battle, in which each recognizes the value and meaning of the other, as in the Mahabarata. It is in battle that young Arjuna learns, by the voice of the god Krishna, that he has to fight. Fifteen, twenty years of school for a young person or they become at least a fight (even with himself) or they are nothing. You can't pass 15 or twenty years, most of your youth, per “learn to produce”, “become a resource” or other such nonsense. First of all, because learning how and what to produce is constantly changing, and it doesn't take all that time. But above all because at school you have to learn much deeper and more decisive things: to live, to do it, to love, to meet, to tell the truth. To meet the other.
In short, to fight. You would have it too, the desire to fight. But nobody wants it. Even many professors, to whom it is indispensable. As it was for my Greek, Pietro Scazzoso, an illustrious Greek expert and boxer, who threatened to punch his students, adoring, if they did not respect Greek metrics when reciting the Iliad, to memory. Today fighting is not a subject of study. Indeed it must be repressed. It's there, and of course outside, in the world, where everyone or almost everyone behaves like teachers who don't see you, let's act out, the desperate gesture. And you're immediately a bully. Maybe forever.