Mean girls bully everyone else to keep themselves on top.  So do mean guys.  I’m reading right now about the Barbarossa brothers in the Western Mediterranean.  They were more or less pirate kings.  Being pirate kings, they had no security.  Continued cruel atrocities kept themselves on top.

We can see that in the scriptures.  The great and spacious building runs on mean girl power.

And I also cast my eyes round about, and beheld, on the other side of the river of water, a great and spacious building; and it stood as it were in the air, high above the eart

And it was filled with people, both old and young, both male and female; and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine; and they were in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come at and were partaking of the fruit.

-thus Lehi’s Dream

One aspect of the dream is that the building lacks a base.   We’ve talked about that before.  Briefly, it means that the building people suffer from a lack of real-world feedback.  The people on the ground suffer consequences for good or for ill.  They either reach the tree or they drown or get lost.  The building people are insulated from all that.  Their sense of status and well-being is entirely self-referential.  By eliminating short-term risk, they have only made a long-term catastrophic risk a certainty.  “Great will be the fall thereof,” the scriptures say, and when the building falls all the inhabitants will be crushed.

Another aspect of the dream is that the building’s lack of a base explains why the people in it have to be so nasty.  Stable, recognized status is status that people don’t have to continually fight to uphold.  People who are insecure about their status fight to maintain it, usually by clearly and repeatedly and cruelly asserting their superiority to others.  Bullying is one form of that.

  The status of the people in the great and spacious building is as insecure as can be.  Their building literally has no base.  So, yes, they spend all their time mocking and pointing.