Bullying, hazing, shaming, or peer pressure

An interesting post and resulting conversation going on over at InfantryDort about the beneficial attributes of bullying.

Any man who thinks bullying is ubiquitously inappropriate has the survival instincts of a deer gazing longingly at headlights.

For most of human history, communities had weak formal institutions. Public ridicule, shaming, and ostracism were used to enforce norms.

Examples:… https://t.co/njbFS7fCLV

— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) May 29, 2026

There is of course, commentary trying to distinguish and delimit the behavior as whether we are talking about bullying, hazing, shaming, or peer pressure.  

There does seem general acknowledgement that bullying can function as a mechanism for enforcing social norms.  

The thought which occurred to me is that since at least the 1960s, we have slowly been trying to reduce bullying in high school and college, perhaps reaching peak aversion in the Woke Micro-aggressions back in the 2010s early 2020s.   

In the same period we have seen the cult of multiculturalism post-1980s, the failed belief that multiple, and any, cultures can coexist within one governance system.  

Finally, this is the same era, especially post-1990s when we became averse to any measurement or testing on people which might highlight differences in capabilities.  

So in the same period, we were insisting that bullying was wrong, that there were no real differences between people anyway, and pretending there were no social norms that needed to be enforced anyway.

The wreck of those philosophical indulgences is spread on the shore and people, everywhere across the OECD, seem to want to return to their cultures, their social norms, and reasonable means for achieving those social norms.

Is bullying an appropriate societal tool for setting and enforcing social norms?  I think that is what is being discussed here.  

Obviously sadism and injury are out, but there remain many implacable issues.  Social norm policing has to be unpleasant to be effective; non-physically injurious forms of bullying such as ostracism can cause real psychological injuries; how do you ensure that the social norms being enforced are the social norms you want enforced, etc..  

An interesting and wide ranging discussion with many points made in a largely civil fashion.