Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

Is there a central cause, a cause in common, in all bullying? And is there a solution to bullying? Yes! That cause, that solution, and much more are described in “Literature, Children, & Bullying”—the exciting, kind, urgently needed new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known! 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of the lecture we are publishing in 3 parts: When Does Evil Begin?, by Eli Siegel. In 1953 he gave a series of talks, landmarks in literary criticism and the understanding of self, talks explaining and placing Henry James’s short novel The Turn of the Screw. One of these is the present lecture, in which he looks at several children of literature and history as a means of showing what impelled Miles and Flora, the child protagonists of that puzzling James novella.

In the series on The Turn of the Screw, he was explaining something humanity needs burningly to know—about good and evil, kindness and cruelty, justice and injustice: What is the source of evil, in a child or adult? Where does evil begin?

Speaking to me in an Aesthetic Realism lesson many years ago, Mr. Siegel said:

There are two mes in everyone. There is one me that is the most beautiful thing in the world. There is one that is the ugliest thing in the world. Every person has that me, and they should hate it more than anything, because it’s theirs.

“The most beautiful thing” is the desire in a person to respect the world, see value in what’s not oneself, know and be richly fair to things, facts, people. “The ugliest thing in the world” is contempt—the going after an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Evil anywhere, Mr. Siegel showed—every injustice, meanness, coldness, brutality, whether in a schoolyard, on the internet, in government, across a dinner table, anywhere—arises from the desire for contempt, present in everyone. I think there is no greater contribution to human well-being than his seeing this and making it clear.

Bullying—the Fundamental Cause

Without Aesthetic Realism, contempt has not been understood—nor has “the most beautiful thing,” like of the world. And therefore contempt has had tremendous power, in the everyday lives of people and also nationally and internationally. Let us take a matter involving children, about which there is much concern now: bullying.

In the present section of the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel speaks about two children in important novels: Master Blifil in Fielding’s Tom Jones and Wackford Squeers Jr. in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. (In the previous section he spoke about another character in that Dickens novel, Ralph Nickleby.) Wackford Junior is, among other things, a bully. And Dickens describes him at once humorously and terrifyingly.

What is the central thing in bullying, the fundamental cause?…Read more.