Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in primary schools

> deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists...

which is answered by O'Brien (in part III):

> ...How does a man assert his power over another, Winston?" Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.

* Such, Such Were the Joys (1952)

Nietzsche had written extensively about this way before.

Nowadays we know that humans (and other animals) bully because they derive immense health benefits from being the aggressor.

Those benefits are trivial to detect many decades after the fact.

Until those benefits are offset by a hefty price to pay, nothing will change.

Which health benefits are those?

"Assert" implies O'Brien has already chosen the punitive route. In other words, O'Brien is not revealing some deep secret of human power dynamics. Instead, O'Brien is giving a self congratulatory self justifying explanation for his wrong doing.

Are you sure? Your assessment is probably specific to regional experience; I'd probably have agreed with you at another point in my life. It's not something I was familiar with before living here, and it's not the same kind of (hierarchical/organizational/bureaucratic) power alluded to in the quoted passage, but in Austin I'm acutely aware that a not-insignificant subset of "normal" people here seem to be driven to seek enough power in whatever position they occupy that will allow them to make others miserable. I see it in people here who are nasty to me for no reason, and I see it in people here who are nice to me but nasty to others for no reason.

It's a shame that "the cruelty is the point" is so tightly bound to politics, because it captures in a few words a perfect description of the phenomenon.

It is at the minimum of very different kind of self-justification than what you'd usually expect from a villain.

When Winston answers with the the expected "for your own good" narrative, O'Brien rejects it and punishes him for it:

> The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing.

It's not merely

> You're now comparatively better because others are now worse.

You are really better in absolute terms at their expense.

These effects last decades!

Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying to you.

> Here, we show that victims suffer from greater increases in low-grade systemic inflammation from childhood to young adulthood than are seen in others. In contrast, bullies showed lower increases in inflammation into adulthood compared with those uninvolved in bullying

> Conclusion

>Being bullied is known to have adverse effects on psychological and social development, but it is increasingly being recast as similar to family maltreatment in its potential to disrupt both mental and physical functioning across the lifespan (1, 2). In contrast, bullies experience few downsides and reap biological advantages of increased social status. Social status and disruptions to one’s status may play a central role in physical health functioning through effects on chronic low-grade inflammation, and these effects may persist for decades. Our findings suggest that this mechanism may be a key target for efforts to reduce risk for a bevy of age-related diseases and to promote optimal psychological and physical health functioning.

The literature about this is immense. There are even a couple of studies with monozygotic twins which are notoriously difficult to do.