The difference between teasing and malicious intent.

And I think in part that’s because there was a positive teasing culture in my own family. There was a lot of teasing from my dad and grandpa and with my cousins, even from my mom occasionally. But it was always clear, first, that they were playing and it was a kind of game, second, that they loved me and cared about me, third, that there were limits, and fourth, that everyone was willing to be teased themselves and take it in good humor. There was a sense that none of us took ourselves too seriously.

Experiencing non-malicious teasing actually gave me the fortitude and confidence not to be bothered by malicious teasing. It was a kind of play that actually developed my ability to face my own faults and the faults of others without letting it upset me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning from being teased. Learning to recognize subtle social cues and learning how to adapt and survive as an individual within the group.

Within any social group, especially the bigger and the more diverse it gets, the greater the tension generated by the differences between the members. Another person is always a kind of threat to your own individuality and identity and desires. At the same time, having different people around you makes your own particularness more clear. And all of that can be hard to face.

Belonging to a group can be hard. Finding a place in it is a tricky process. But for all that it demands from you, a group can also give back a lot. Granted that others often restrict and threaten your identity, they can also help you see and realize it, by helping you see yourself in contrast to others and discover a unique role in the context of something larger than yourself. In a healthy social relationship those personal differences can arise and be recognized and integrated within the group identity. But it’s wrong to assume that there isn’t an inherent problem and threat to the whole concept of sharing space with people who aren’t you.

In such a circumstances you need some mechanism to bring those differences to the surface, as well as all the tension that they generate. And you need a way to recognize and address and relieve that tension. One of the ways that humans often relieve tension is through humor. Humor often involves a certain amount of teasing, picking out the particularities and little things that we do and just poking at them a bit. Bringing them to the surface. And having a laugh about them.

Those differences may or may not be a real problem; to some degree any significant difference between people is always a kind of problem. Teasing and humor allow you to recognize and relieve some of that tension in a way that does not (ideally) descend into actual maliciousness. It allows us to struggle with one another, openly recognize our differences and threats, wrestle with them a bit, have it out a bit, and then laugh and be friends instead of enemies.

Good teasing doesn’t arise from the desire to exclude or expel someone from the group, but rather is a kind of negotiation among the group, where awareness and acknowledgement of our own and one another’s faults and virtues, combined with not taking each other too seriously and not taking ourselves too seriously, allows us to take our place in the group. It’s a cathartic negotiation and mock struggle that ends in mutual respect, or at least tolerance.

The positive version of teasing and hazing is a kind of ritual exposure of our own vulnerabilities and our concerns about one another, and an affirmation that we can take it and live with it and with one another. It’s a signal of willingness among the members to display and have recognized their differences and acknowledge and accept and survive the inherent tension that they create.

In this way, by going through this process, you earn the respect and acceptance of the group. The one kind of person who really can’t belong is the person who takes themself so seriously that they won’t play the game and won’t allow themselves to be taken any less than completely seriously. That’s a dangerous bid for untouchability, inequality, and hegemony. Even a hegemony of reactivity and sensitivity (rather than one of dominance and insensitivity) is still a hegemony; any kind of exceptionalism is a challenge to the group dynamic. That kind of attitude simply isn’t compatible with a group-negotiated society.

A good group will have an idea (that they have worked out in relationships with one another) what is and is not malicious, they and will push back on any truly malicious content and punish it. And malicious teasing does happen, both within and between groups. But to characterize all the activity of teasing as malicious, the sorting out if differences, recognizing and even criticizing them, thus relieving group tensions, that is a serious mistake. Completely banning it and avoiding it removes fundamental way in which humans become able to live with each other. Much like many forms of play and freedom, people can and will get hurt. But it is also how we develop the capacity to live with and in the world as it is. You can’t lose it without losing something more than merely its liabilities.

If you and I couldn’t make a joke about each other safely, because the stakes between us are always so high and so serious, then we can’t be in relationship; we must be at war. If our differences can’t be taken unseriously or casually or with humor, then they present a real threat to one another. And it won’t be long before things go beyond the possibility of relationship and necessitate estrangement and avoidance, or else must progress to negotiation by force (legal, social, martial, or physical).

So the question we have to ask ourselves, as inviduals and as a society, is, is that the choice we want to make? Do I want to be in relationship with these people, do I need to be in relationship to them? What are the likely results of shifting our interactions to the domain of force? Will it get me what I want? What do I want? What do I stand to gain or lose?

I’m not saying we should all start teasing one another. But I am saying that maybe the crusade against it isn’t so obviously and simplistically positive as we have been led to believe. And we might want to think about what kind of world we want to live in, with what kind of people and in what kinds of relationships. Because people really are different. And taking away their mechanisms for adapting to the threat of group membership won’t make them less sensitive and threatened by the imposition the group represents.

The only way to overcome and negate those differences by force would be through the application of absolutely tyrannical power and suppression. Would that be better than allowing people to sort such things out, within reasonable (largely socially defined, not legally defined) limits? The moment you start using hard power to regulate your interactions with other people, you’re not really in a relationship any more. You’ve passed beyond that; you’ve precluded negotiation. Is that how we want to learn to live with one another? Is that better than facing the risks of being teased?