The following excerpt of Bully Nation is from Chapter Six, “Marching to Bully: How the Military Trains Bullies, Both Inside and Outside the Services”:
American militaristic capitalism is a bullying system that draws upon bullying traditions found in, for instance, the Roman and British Empires. Our approach to the study of bullying is different from that of other investigators because we do not emphasize its psychological causes. But that does not mean we negate psychological and even biological influences. Clearly, a bullying society needs bullying personalities. There is no contradiction between focusing upon individual or psychological bullying and the study of institutional or structural bullying. Rather, both aspects depend on and reinforce each other. Elites depend upon institutions that build attitudes, values, and behaviors that make the rest of the population docile, willing to accept their subordinate position and to act and think in ways that maintain the […]
Another reason that meditation should be a required subject during school years. It may be the alternative that makes people return to civility when confronted by bullying. I know from personal experience that knowing how to kill is a terrible burden to carry and meditation is the key to subduing the tendency to turn to bullying methods to settle disputes. A little meditation goes a long way toward settling disputes which could end in more drastic, harmful solutions and it ends up producing more wellness in society as a whole as well as in personal disputes.