My husband would’ve made an excellent troll. Also? An excellent cult leader.
J, my husband, is an exceptionally smart and knowledgeable man. He’s the person everyone — myself included — goes to with the random questions that rise up in one’s brain by way of daily experience, questions about history or science or the arts that no one else seems to know the answer to off-hand, often un-Googleable in their phrasing: "Who was that dude who made sculptures comprised entirely from tinfoil, the guy who died a penniless janitor?" J would know, we should ask him.
He’s kind of like my personalized, live-in human Google, always on hand to fill in the Mad Libs blanks that life naturally inserts in my trains of thought. He’s a repository of both useful and useless trivia, of quirky knowledge and scholarly historical fact, with a steel-trap mind I greatly admire.
But there’s also something about the way his brain works — his high-level perceptiveness about the world and the inner-workings of the people around him, his ability to retain information about people and things and recycle it usefully in his daily life, coupled with some indefinable and mysterious something else — that borders on spooky sometimes. There are moments when I can see the cogs in his brain turning, and I don’t even begin to understand the specifics of what’s going on in there but I know that he’s harnessing his powers of intellect to perform what can only be described as Jedi-mind-trick-like feats of persuasion and mental coercion. Positioned in an argument or debate, he has what often seems to me like a supernatural ability to convince the other person that, at the very least, their position is desperately, painfully flawed, and that his is, of course, rock solid. It’s sort of magical, watching it happen, watching him exert that sophisticated psychological control.
Needless to say, these "skills" have come under fire frequently in our marriage, and it’s reached a point where I’m able to almost physically feel the force of his mental manipulation when he begins working it. It isn’t something I can ever put my finger on, what it is he’s doing exactly. That’s the magic of it. It’s so lightly and expertly worked that if asked to separate out what is actually being said from the gentle massaging mindfuck, you’d be hard pressed to do it. So in our day-to-day life, I don’t even bother. Instead, I simply lower my gaze to his and say "J, stop being an asshole."
I don’t know what the appropriate word for this is. Persuasion? Mind control? Expert debate? Manipulation? All seem to fall short, and each of those words feel sort of negative and accusatory, not the admiring praise I intend. Because the truth is that J uses his superpowers of the mind for good ends, not evil ones. He uses it — whatever IT is — to convince people of things that he believes are essentially good or positive for them, or to steer them away from bad things. He doesn’t use them to intentionally hurt people, or try to bend them to his demonic will, or enlist him as his zombie followers, or try to crush their spirits. He has a very strong sense of the value of other human beings, and deep ethics regarding how people should treat one another. However, all of that said, I can see how his skill set, put in the wrong hands, could have a profound dark side.
I started thinking about all of this because of this New York Times Magazine article about internet trolls, which is equal parts fascinating and frightening, and I encourage you to read it. Mulling it over, what struck me about the trolls in the article is their unrelenting calculation and mental cunning — a sort of predatory foil to my husband’s relatively benign persuasion. Both take a kind of perceptiveness about other people and how to approach them in such a way to achieve the hoped-for ends, both skillfully recognize weakness and exploit it. Mister White, meet Mister Black. Or is posing that sort of easy dichotomy even useful?
My point I guess is that everyone is a complicated mixture of complex and often competing psychologies, neither simply good nor simply bad. J could be a troll or a cult leader — he and I have joked about the latter, complete with off-color white Nike and Kool-Aid jokes — but he’s not, because he chooses not to be. Why does he make that choice? Because he respects other people and has a great deal of empathy. Because he believes winning an argument isn’t worthwhile if you have to remove someone’s dignity to do it. Because he has a strong sense of justice. But J isn’t "good," and the trolls aren’t "bad," any more than the aforementioned tools they share are good or bad. An ax isn’t a bad tool when it’s used to chop down a neighbor’s dead tree for them. But when it’s used to chop off a neighbor’s head… well, you see where I’m going with this.
Something that struck me about that article and that has been haunting me all morning was the paragraph in which the article’s author divulges the following about the "troll" Jason:
When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three
other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was
molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter
telling her to kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of
emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh.
He’s still my son.”
It isn’t a justification. It is, however, something of at least a partial explanation.
For the record, this isn’t let’s all hold hands and sing kumbaya with the trolls. This isn’t about excusing inexcusable behavior either. And some of it IS inexcusable. It’s about understanding another person’s humanity, or at least trying to come to an understanding, as much as that’s possible. And not for the benefit of them but for ourselves, for our own sanity as people who live great portions of our lives on the internet.
These are some of the questions we ask again and again: why the malice, why the hatred, why the vile and incomprehensible raging? Why would someone do this, behave this way, say these things? Why me? Why my friend? Why kick me when I’m down? Why make fun of someone in pain? WHY?
In my mind, an incomplete but relatively concrete answer is finally beginning to form.
. . . . .
ETA: Because there seems to be some confusion about this, let me clarify (quote pulled from my comments here):
"OK let’s agree: getting molested DOES NOT JUSTIFY BEING A TROLL.
GRANTED. AGREED. NEVER EVER IN QUESTION.
Now let’s move on from that obvious level to a higher level:
Might deep, horrifying childhood trauma help explain or aid in understanding (BUT NOT JUSTIFY!) why someone became a jerk?
Yes, it might.
Does trying to understand someone mean you’re condoning or justifying their behavior? NO.
Thank you, proceed."
. . . . .
This post was picked for Five Star Friday, "The best of what’s being thought and said on the web." (I’m genuinely honored, thank you!)
