Faker or Bully?

The faker-bully overlap

Vishal: How are fakers related to bullies? Fakers often have a posse of flunkies. I’ve noticed that often bullies do too.

Bill: Being a bully is different from being a faker, but the same person can be both. 

What defines a bully is the desire to harm or intimidate people who are vulnerable. Fakers don’t necessarily want to harm or intimidate people. Fakers just want to enhance their social status, and what defines them is that they misrepresent themselves to accomplish that. Bullies, on the other hand, aren’t necessarily trying to enhance their social status. They can be motivated by all sorts of things. 

Vishal: What are some examples? 

Bill: A bully might be motivated by, say, some deep-seated anger. The bully keeps that anger on a leash, but lets it loose when there’s no risk of retaliation—in an anonymous online forum, for instance, or in whispered gossip and back-stabbing in which there’s no opportunity to question or challenge the truth of what the bully says. A bully might also be motivated by sadism: the bully might enjoy watching other people suffer and enjoy the feeling of causing that suffering. These motivations are different from the one that defines fakers.

Vishal: But a faker can also be a bully?

Bill: Yes, a faker can also be a bully: harming or intimidating other people might be one way a faker tries to gain social status. The prototypical bullies depicted in popular movies tend to be fakers. Think of high school bullies like Biff in the movie Back to the Future. He tries to enhance his social status by convincing other people he’s tough. One way he tries to convince them is by picking on people who are too weak to retaliate. It’s his way of saying, “No one can stand up to me. There’s no one standing above me with the power to hold me accountable.” 

But picking on weaker people isn’t a real indicator of toughness. That’s why people challenge bullies with the line, “Pick on someone your own size!” Picking on someone smaller or weaker isn’t an accurate measure of how tough someone is. An accurate measure would be fighting someone who doesn’t have a size or strength advantage—that would be an apples-to-apples comparison. If you win in that kind of contest, then you can lay a legitimate claim to being tough. But that’s not what the bully does.

Vishal: In these movies, the bully is defeated when someone stands up to him. Is that  the way it actually works? 

Bill: Kind of. Recall that the faker-bully is essentially saying, “No one can stand up to me.” That message is proven false when two things happen: 

Individual Resistance: someone stands up to the bully, and 

Social Support: the group that the bully is trying to convince of his toughness supports the person who’s standing up to the bully. 

The combination of Individual Resistance and Social Support exposes the bully as a faker. It says to the bully, “You act as if no one can stand up to you, but this person is standing up to you. You’re not as tough as you make yourself out to be. You’re a fake!” When people realize the faker-bully is a fake, they’re no longer as fearful as they were. They realize that the faker-bully’s terrifying image was just that: an image that doesn’t accurately reflect how the faker-bully really is. Their increased confidence breaks the faker-bully’s hold over their minds. They see more clearly who the faker-bully really is, and that newfound clarity and confidence makes the faker-bully doubt whether he can succeed in fooling them anymore.

Vishal: Can you have Individual Resistance by itself? Can that be enough to stop the faker-bully?

Bill: Individual Resistance by itself doesn’t break the hold the faker-bully has on the social group. It just makes the faker-bully more cautious around the individual who’s resisted him. The faker-bully knows that one person isn’t fooled by the faker-bully’s false image, so the faker-bully doesn’t try misrepresenting himself to that person anymore. But the faker-bully will still try to fool the rest of the group, and seize opportunities to bully others. 

If you really want to defeat the faker-bully, the social group has to make it clear that they see the faker-bully’s false image for what it is. One way of doing that is to rally around the person who’s making a stand against the faker-bully. It’s a way of saying to the faker-bully, “This person says you’re a fake, and we agree!” That tells the faker-bully that the group won’t be fooled by his misrepresentations.

Vishal: What you’ve said about faker-bullies reminds me of something I’ve noticed with fakers in general.

Bill: What’s that?

Vishal: Suppose there’s some guy—call him ‘Alfred’—who calls out a faker. Like suppose he calls Tim Ferriss a faker, and he has good reasons for calling Ferriss a fake. But Tim Ferriss keeps on doing what he’s doing. He just ignores what people like Alfred say. It’s only when a group of people takes Alfred’s criticisms seriously that something changes. So it seems like the points about Individual Resistance and Social Support apply to fakers in general, not just faker-bullies.

Bill: Correct. The faker thrives on misrepresentation—just like the con man. To stop the faker, the social group has to make it clear that they can’t be fooled by the misrepresentation. That’s true whether the misrepresentation takes the form of bullying or something else.

To be continued...