The Bullies Took Over
How Cruelty Became the Language of Leadership
Somewhere between high school and now, I forgot how rebellion worked.
I went from refusing to play along with authority to believing it was there to speak up and protect us.
I. What Happened?
I don’t like bullies. I don’t know anyone who does.
Bullies don’t even like themselves.
💰 So why is it that everywhere I look, the people in charge all seem to fit the type? I’m not saying “bully” is an actual career path, but it might as well be. Somewhere along the way, success started looking like domination: the ability to climb faster, talk louder, and step harder than the next person. If you don’t push, you get pushed.
💰 The bullies from high school burned out long ago. Being an ass is exhausting. But the world they left behind runs on the same logic, their absence created a vacuum, and it filled itself with new versions. The names changed, the tactics evolved, but the principle stayed the same: power rewards cruelty that calls itself confidence.
💰 Bosses, coworkers, managers, politicians, salespeople, the President… all of them seem to have replaced the ability to lead with the ability to take credit when things go right and find a scapegoat when they don’t.
💰 In my experience, they don’t look for leaders. They look for believers, the kind of person who will soak up the flattery, stay late without asking, and trust that hard work will eventually speak for itself. It never does. The system doesn’t reward effort; it feeds on it.
💰 I’ve seen it up close. One of my bosses once held up a fucking calendar, pointed at a Monday two weeks away, and said, “That’s the day I’ll promote you.”
I came in that morning ready to start. Instead, I was told I’d have to wait a little longer because I was still “needed” in my current role.
💰 Later that day, I found out my boss called in my supervisor and said that if anyone mentioned the promotion, they’d “find someone else.” The message was clear: loyalty only runs one way.
That’s the playbook.
💰 Love-bomb the loyal. Praise the overworked. Promise advancement like a treat. Then, when someone asks for what they’ve earned, remind them who holds the leash.
💰 Our institutions run the same goddamn way. We call it “leadership culture,” but it’s just refined bullying; power sustained through manipulation, humiliation, and the illusion of merit. The schoolyard tactics grew up, got better suits, and learned HR language.
💰 Now it’s “managing expectations.” “Maintaining order.” “Protecting the brand.”
All phrases that mean the same thing: keep people afraid enough to obey and hopeful enough to keep trying.
💰 The cruelty is systemic now, not a personality flaw but a structure.
We’ve built entire hierarchies around rewarding people who can exploit empathy without feeling it. The calm tone, the confident posture, the speech about “hard choices,” all masks for the same thing: control through pressure.
We tell ourselves it’s professionalism.
It is fucking not.
It’s bullying, scaled up and standardized.
The question isn’t why bullies end up in charge. It’s why the rest of us keep building ladders for them to climb.
II. The Professionalization of the Bully (A Metaphor)
At some point, the bully put on a suit. They stopped shoving kids into lockers and started learning the language of management. They traded fists for metrics, taunts for “feedback.” Corporate America didn’t eliminate bullying; it gave it benefits. The modern workplace rewards the exact traits that used to get people sent to detention: aggression, dominance, performative confidence.
💰 When women and Black workers began entering the professional world in greater numbers, the rules changed, but the reflexes didn’t. The old bullies couldn’t shove or shout anymore, so they learned to weaponize tone, language, and policy instead. Bias was rebranded as “fit.” Exclusion became “culture.” Control dressed itself up as “management.”
💰 The bullies learned that intimidation scales better in conference rooms than playgrounds, and once they figured out how to dress it in buzzwords, the culture applauded. They started calling it leadership presence. They started calling compliance teamwork. And every time someone spoke up about inequity, it was labeled a “personality issue.”
💰 The new order didn’t need open hostility, it had etiquette. Discrimination went from shouting to silence, from slurs to subtle exclusions. The same violence, but now wrapped in HR language. “Tone” became the new weapon. A Black employee was told they sounded “angry.” A woman was told she seemed “emotional.” The feedback wasn’t about performance, it was about control. Every critique was a quiet reminder of who set the rules and who was allowed to break them.
💰 These weren’t accidents of culture; they were adaptations of power. The same energy that once enforced segregation and silence now enforced civility. It smiled more. It apologized in emails. But it punished just as effectively. And over time, that performance of politeness became the standard for leadership itself. The best bullies learned to sound reasonable. The most dangerous ones learned to sound kind.
💰 Eventually, the pattern leaves the office and seeps into everything else. Politics borrows its tone from management, the same corporate arrogance, the same “we know best” voice. Public service becomes public relations. The leader becomes the brand.
💰 Now bullying wears patriotism like a suit jacket. It sells cruelty as efficiency, ego as strength, and obedience as unity. The authoritarian doesn’t need to shout anymore. They just issue a memo. Either play along or find another job. Our entire system has been optimized for it: the way elections are funded, the way workplaces measure success, even the way social media trains us to admire dominance. The tools that were supposed to democratize power instead taught everyone how to perform it.
The bully doesn’t have to take your lunch money anymore.
They own the cafeteria.
🔥 FURO 🔥
By the late 1970s, women made up nearly half the U.S. workforce, but less than 5% of corporate executives. Reports from that era show rising “incivility” complaints correlated directly with increased gender and racial diversity. (EEOC, 1980–1990)
III. The Bully Economy
Where Cruelty Became Currency
The same logic that runs a toxic office now runs the country: reward those who exploit, punish those who question, and dress both in the language of “efficiency.” It doesn’t shout anymore; it nudges, withholds, and deletes. It calls exploitation “optimization” and treats exhaustion as proof of loyalty. The cruelty is clean now: automated, sanitized, profitable.
💰 It isn’t management when a company lays off thousands and calls it “strategic restructuring.” When workers are forced into gig jobs with no safety net, that’s not innovation. The boardroom version of the bully learned to hide behind spreadsheets, where suffering becomes a statistic and ethics are a rounding error.
💰 Every policy that rewards extraction over care is built on that same logic. Raise productivity. Cut compassion. Profit off fatigue. The market doesn’t have feelings, they say… but it does. It feels hunger, and it feeds on ours.
Then one of them made it to the top.
💰 A television celebrity whose catchphrase was “You’re fired,” a man who bankrupted casinos, airlines, and universities, now claims to run the country like a business. He governs the same way he managed his empire: through spectacle, intimidation, and debt. He fires staff like ratings stunts. He inflates numbers, spins losses as legacy, and treats accountability as optional. The business model is chaos: keep everyone on edge, keep them guessing who’s next, and sell the fear as leadership.
💰 He isn’t an outlier. He’s the blueprint. His whole cabinet is constipated with the same shit.
The modern strongman and the corporate CEO now speak the same dialect: dominance as efficiency, cruelty as control. The billionaire and the bully became the same archetype, worshiped for their ability to “get things done,” no matter who gets crushed in the process.
💰 The line between corporate greed and political cruelty has dissolved, because the same donors fund both. The same consultants write the memo that ends up as a bill. What starts as a talking point becomes law. The economy and the state now share a single vocabulary: the dialect of discipline. Every law framed as “fiscal responsibility” is really a redistribution of pain. Every budget cut is a reprimand. Every deregulation is permission for another bully to move up the ladder.
💰 And the public? We’re told to be resilient, to adapt, to compete harder. Buy one doll instead of two, or three. Eat the fucking tariff… That’s the final trick: to make us bully ourselves in the name of survival. This is what capitalism has perfected: the outsourcing of cruelty. The government enforces it, the market monetizes it, and we internalize it.
It’s no longer a contest of winners and losers.
It’s a system that convinces you cruelty is the cost of staying in the game.
🔥 FURO 🔥
Between 2000 and 2020, U.S. CEOs’ pay grew by 1,322%, while median worker pay rose only 18%. Six of the ten largest employers in the country now rely primarily on part-time or gig labor. (Economic Policy Institute, 2023)
IV. The Politics of Humiliation
Shame as Strategy, Cruelty as Creed
The bully economy needed a stage, and politics gave it one. Public service turned into public theater, and humiliation became the applause line. The cameras roll, the insults fly, and the spectacle feeds the machine. Policy no longer needs to work; it only needs to wound.
💰 Humiliation has become the modern state’s most efficient tool of control. It’s cheap, emotional, and it is goddamn contagious. It turns democracy into a game show where cruelty scores points. The strongman doesn’t need consensus. He just needs enemies, and a crowd willing to watch them burn. The crowd laughs, the polls move, and the cycle repeats. Outrage becomes entertainment. Suffering becomes branding.
💰 The leader berates the press, mocks the disabled, and attacks judges from the podium… and instead of recoil, the base cheers louder. The logic is simple: if he can humiliate them, he can protect us. His cruelty becomes proof of allegiance. This is the governing style of the modern age, the merger of entertainment and enforcement. The old propaganda machine needed censors; the new one only needs content. The spectacle does the rest.
💰 Every insult is an order. Every tweet a decree. Every firing a ritual sacrifice to the god of ratings. What used to be debate has become domination theater, where argument is weakness, empathy is treason, and fear is policy. It’s not a coincidence that “owning” your opponent became political currency. The bully class realized long ago that ridicule erodes resistance faster than repression. You don’t need to silence dissent if you can make it look ridiculous. You don’t need to jail critics if you can convince the crowd they’re jokes.
💰 The result is a country that mistakes cruelty for strength and shame for justice. The government no longer governs; it grades, mocks, and punishes. The press plays along, dutifully replaying every insult, tantrum, and lie; amplifying the spectacle because attention is the only economy left. And when the audience grows numb, the system simply raises the fucking volume.
Humiliation has replaced persuasion. Fear has replaced faith. And politics has become the perfect mirror of the marketplace that built it: loud, cruel, and completely indifferent to who survives it.
🔥 FURO 🔥
A 2023 Pew survey found that 74% of Americans believe political leaders “enjoy insulting their opponents,” and 62% say they feel “exhausted” or “angry” watching national news. (Pew Research Center, 2023)
V. The Culture of Collapse
We Built This Machine to Eat Us
Here’s the thing about collapse: it doesn’t feel like disaster when you’re inside it. It feels like routine. You still go to work. You still pay rent. You still scroll past headlines about billionaires and body counts and think, someone should do something about that. Then you remember you’ve got meetings.
💰 That’s how it works. The system doesn’t need to convince you it’s fair; it just needs to keep you busy. It feeds on your exhaustion. It loves your apathy. The bully economy trained us for this, decades of competing against each other for the privilege of being exploited. It doesn’t matter if you’re the overworked employee or the underpaid voter; the rules are the same. Take the hit, smile for the review, say thank you for the opportunity.
💰 Somewhere along the line, cruelty stopped shocking us. We started calling it realism. It’s the air now. You hear it in customer service scripts, political debates, even dating apps; everyone negotiating from fear, everyone posturing to survive. We’ve built a culture that confuses numbness with resilience.
💰 And we keep pretending it’s normal because the alternative, facing what we’ve become, feels worse. We tell ourselves this is just the cost of being adults in a broken system. We call it the hustle. We call it pragmatism. But really, it’s surrender. It’s letting the bullies win by becoming one of them.
💰 That’s the secret at the core of the bully economy: it doesn’t just dominate you, it recruits you. It convinces you that empathy is weakness and cynicism is wisdom. It sells you survival as self-interest and then blames you for losing faith. It teaches you to laugh at what you hate because that’s easier than changing it.
💰 We’ve internalized the logic so deeply that rebellion feels impolite now. We look at cruelty and say, well, that’s just how things are. The old bullies don’t even have to enforce it anymore. We enforce it for them. We’re monkeys in a room attacking the one who climbs that ladder, forgetting why we even do it.
Collapse isn’t coming. It’s already here. It just has better lighting.
🔥 FURO 🔥
Average U.S. work hours have risen 13% since 1980, while reported happiness and civic engagement have declined by over a third. Gallup calls it “the burnout century.” (Gallup, 2024)
VI. Closing
We Built the Bullies. We Can Break Them.
Every era gets the villains it trains for. We built ours in boardrooms and broadcast studios, raised them on applause and grievance, fed them our time, our data, our silence. We taught them that cruelty sells, that fear keeps ratings high, that outrage is the cheapest fuel on earth. And now we flinch at what we’ve made, pretending we don’t recognize the reflection.
💰 But the truth is, this was never about one man or one administration or one ideology. The bully is just the costume. The system underneath, the fucking hierarchy that rewards domination and calls it drive, was here long before he was. We built it every time we looked away, every time we mistook obedience for order.
💰 The culture of collapse only holds as long as we keep performing it. The moment we stop playing along, it cracks. It’s fragile by design. It needs our exhaustion more than our belief. The second we refuse to measure worth by cruelty, the economy of fear goes bankrupt.
💰 That’s the quiet secret the powerful won’t say out loud: the machine isn’t indestructible. It’s just loud. It survives because we keep it humming with our labor, our screens, our attention. Pull the plug, and it stutters. Look it in the eye, and it blinks.
💰 We built the bullies, yes, but we can break them. Not by shouting louder, not by begging for better rulers, but by refusing the game. Build smaller systems that actually work. Protect each other instead of competing. Practice solidarity like it’s survival, because it fucking is.
💰 When we stop mistaking cruelty for strength, the empire loses its voice. When we stop laughing at our own exploitation, the spectacle dies.
The Stooge State can keep spinning, but we don’t have to stay on the ride.
🔥 FURO 🔥
Worker-led cooperatives now employ more than 40 million people worldwide, with higher satisfaction and lower turnover than corporate firms. (ILO, 2024)
ETHER
You want the dance? Fine, step into the ring of noise. The floor is marble, the ceiling fluorescent, The music is the hum of a thousand machines counting our hours. They call it progress. I call it choreography. A waltz of wolves in tailored skin, circling the same carcass they call civilization. Look closely. See how the leaders twirl? How the pundits spin? How the people sway between laughter and despair, trying to stay in rhythm with a song written by their own exploiters? This is performance art in a burning theater. Every press conference is a pirouette. Every policy a practiced bow before the altar of capital. And we, the good audience that we are Clap on cue, mistaking motion for meaning. They teach us that power moves gracefully, but it’s just well-rehearsed cruelty. You can dress a tyrant in procedure and call it democracy. You can choreograph oppression until it feels like order. But every dance ends the same way. The music slows. The spotlight flickers. And suddenly, you notice the smell of sweat and smoke. The Stooge State wobbles, still pretending it’s leading. The crowd starts to turn, unsure if this was the show or the collapse. Listen, do you hear it? That ragged breath between applause and realization? That’s the sound of an empire missing a step. The question isn’t whether the music stops. It’s whether we keep dancing when it does.
🪢