From an evolutionary perspective, herd confirmity is critical to social animals. In fact, even solitary animals must obey the “social” rules of their species, including rules that mandate getting killed and devoured by a fellow specimen.
If you deviated from the social norms in ancient times, your local peers would quickly inform you of your misstep with angry outbursts and often physical reminders intended to motivate correct behavior. Deviation was not called for; it usually implied life-threatening risks and deadly mistakes affecting the entire social group, and such is usually dealt harshly and swiftly with on an evolutionary scale: evolution requires change and adaptation, favoring those who possess a lucky fit to physical and social environments, but most evolutionary paths are short and dead-ended. Repeat offense tended to be punishable with death, where your socially conscientious group would rend you limb from limb or ostracize you and leave you to the futile odds of surviving on your own. Lex Talionis—the law of the jungle—stipulates that you either conform or die.
By the same token, physical deviance is perceived as a threat, too, for good reason: in Nature, if an animal looks like something is wrong, then usually something is wrong, and the unfortunate individual should immediately be prevented from contributing to the gene pool as a matter of precaution.
Mankind may consider itself to be highly evolved but Satan thinks Man is barely a late-generation ape whose apparent sophistication is skin deep. A long history of evolution and very basic rules of survival govern human behavior to a much larger extent than humans like to think. Such deeply rooted core behavior dominates, so as soon as a human grows old enough to decode primitive social situations, any sight of unnatural (meaning any eccentric or peculiar) behavior will prompt normal human children to use all forms of peer pressure involving chicanery, harrassment, exclusion, bullying, and violence to suppress the aberration. The specific methods usually become more refined and artful as the children grow older and into adults, but typically not much and least among less gifted individuals. Nonconformity is feared by any age group because unnaturalness awakens the primoridal terror of a threat to group survival.
Satan wishes to interject here that it is a common misconception that people who rise to the top broke the rules to get there. They did not; they are in fact highly conformant. Some successful businessman or leader may indeed seem to break all codes of conduct or deviate from classical methods but social expectations ask just that of a powerful individual, and he or she rose to the top only through satisfing the herd’s demand for conformity-enforcing products or opinions. Satan thinks that few things are as conformant as acting “nonconformantly” in accordance with a social role that is defined by the herd. To successfully deviate from the herd, you must deviate in a predefined fashion that everyone accepts.
There are individuals who cannot help being nonconformant, however. They may suffer from mental illnesses or personality disorders that prevent them from understanding or following social rules or even from perceiving the world in a manner that aids their survival. To a varying degree, their irregular behavior threaten the life-sustaining conformity and hence they deserve to be either taught to conform or be properly disposed of, sometimes for perfectly good reason if their deviant behavior is harmful to others. And so from an early onset in life they are bullied until they occupy a harmless role in their society and until they keep a proper distance to normal people. For matters of brevity (and possibly because my Master specifically asked me to avoid any mention of demonic possession in the context of mental illness), your disloyal demon points its dear readers to our esteemed denizen Mr. Foucault’s book: Madness and Civilization for a historical rundown of psychotherapeutic treatment. Focus must remain what Satan thinks, not how humans have historically addressed mental health.
The Devil does not wish to share His opinions on the moral aspects of bullying, nor will He discuss specific forms of deviance. He merely understands that it is innately human to bully outliers, and that being bullied is thus a litmus test for deviance. Some anomaly is easily identifiable—physical disability or deformity is obvious—but adults do not readily recognize that if a child is otherwise being bullied in school, then probably there is something wrong with that child from a normality perspective. Bullies may be forced to stop but Satan thinks that an important step to stop the bullying would be to locate the deviant behavior and its cause because an early diagnosis can change everything for the better for a person.