Gang culture and Victimhood; what's the difference?

Many youth of El Salvador are victim to and perpetrators of a long-burning gang rivalry. It is a rivalry fuelled as much by drug trafficking and bribery as by psychology. Matthew Charles and Juan Passarelli bring a camera into this terrible microcosm with their documentary The Engineer.

Around the same time as I was navigating the app, this document caught my attention. Notice how often it discusses 'anti-bullying' measures, and more importantly that it never even considers how teachers and other influential people could instead be pro-victim. This is not about blaming the victim. It means creating an environment where people can be resilient to, or even benefit from, acts that would otherwise make them victims.

The problem with being anti-bully is that it can only work from the top-down. It works to the extent that it becomes the bully's bully: assuming dominance, and then expressing it in a struggle to be recognised. If it worked from the bottom-up there would be no need for it; we would see a balance of power. It is constrained to be a half-measure because it endorses the kind of relationship that it campaigns against. It denies the worth inherent in everyone by endowing with prestige qualities people had little-to-no part in creating. For teachers this means seniority, just as bullies (and gang members) may have their strength and charisma.

That such half-measures can be valuable is attested by the longevity of law. It is such relationships that underlie the notion of statehood. In the face of historical successes, the question for the future therefore becomes when these relationships seem justified. As much as law must adapt to accommodate the changes around it, this question is always ongoing.

Legitimacy is an unavoidable membrane mediating between ideas in our heads and our physical actions in the world. At different times of our lives we will encounter it in many different forms. It takes "high-fidelity" shape in the nature of the scientific method, the development of wisdom; or lower-fidelity forms in the pressures for social conformity, the use of juries, the practice of elections. It is in constant metamorphosis; a neural network learning from the traces of past electrical impulses exchanged between one side and the other.

Fidelity is the degree to which signal is divorced from noise. I distinguish it from 'legitimacy' only in the sense that legitimacy depends on context - fidelity is context-free. Context itself is hugely susceptible to noise. For example people are able to distrust 'science' when they conflate the products of research and the method that merely assisted in producing them. Such notions of 'science' can - quite reasonably - lack legitimacy, no matter how high-fidelity the method in the background.

Here, another name for signal could be objectivity and for noise, subjectivity. That is, behind fidelity - high or low - is the matter of independence. Independence from singular, flawed interests. Wisdom is personal, yet its development is high-fidelity given a natural trend toward the universal. One gets a whiff of this in the Analects of Confucius, the Eightfold Path, gnothi seauton, Kant's Categorical Imperative, Jung's collective unconscious. What matters here is not so much the dialectical bridge between the subjective and the objective, and even less what is traveling across it.

Instead, what matters here is ambition towards the universal. Such ambition bolsters legitimacy by seeking common ground and - another, much harder task - accommodating differences. An ambition that builds community. An ambition that is conspicuous in its absence from 'anti-bullying' proposals.

Anti-bullying looks to be conceived mostly in the form of legislation, and therefore inherits the problem with any legal fiction (such as 'statehood'): you only get the sense that it exists when its boundaries are challenged. After damage is already done. Crime statistics make the principle that retribution discourages crime at least a little hollow. Legislation swims against the current in another way: that it treats children, to use an old phrase, as little adults; the schoolyard and classroom as miniature neighbourhood and economy. Instead, the tremendously simplified environment makes grass-roots campaigns much more feasible.

Being 'pro-victim' is not limited to, despite the singular nature of the term, helping individuals cope with abuse. Say, with self-defense training, or Stephen Fry's clever retort "no, no, don't touch me; you'll give me an erection." It is also about rewarding people who form supportive social groups (especially around those most in need of support), at once bringing everyone in the group greater security, instilling community values, and helping to preclude bullying, rather than just responding to it. These measures should preclude both in the nature of a deterrent, and also by combating insecurities that can lead to the abusive behaviour in the first place.

I was a little disturbed when it dawned on me that the impulse to unite in such groups, transplanted to the context of El Salvador, is exactly what allows gang culture to persist. The worst sense of security is a false sense of security; this is precisely the result when the bullied become the bullies, and two rival gangs - MS-13 and Eighteen Street - become each-others ideal out-group. This vicious circle can likely be escaped only with major economic reform in El Salvador. It is instructive for authority figures in less dangerous countries that this fire was only kindled due to Salvadorans carrying a particularly violent strain of gang culture from the United States. These behaviours are learned: it just needs to happen when looking at a friendly face, not down the barrel of a gun. To cohere a community of ambition, not to isolate insecurity.