I once completely lost my voice, on a flight from New York to London, and spent the next week having to communicate through gestures and mime. Without a voice, it became difficult for me to express what I thought or felt or needed. For humans, the voice acts as a fundamental tool for communicating a spectrum of meaning, emotion, and intention to others.
In Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential (Penguin, 2025), psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman delivers a timely and incisive critique of what he calls "victim mindset culture"-the growing tendency for individuals to view themselves primarily through the lens of past hurts and limitations, rather than as active agents in their own growth and transformation.
It is only in this existential reality of the present where decisions, choices, behaviors, and actions can be initiated. What that then means, in terms of bullying, which only takes place as a choice in the present, is that one can choose to be a bully, or one can choose not to be a bully. Either choice will have consequences, for which the individual will be and is responsible (Falla et al., 2023; Menesini et al., 2013; Purje, 2014).