I see a surprising amount of people declaring that when they antagonize people, or when someone else antagonizes people, the antagonist is getting their victims to wake up to themselves, to more clearly identify their own shitty behavior. The argument is that if you see someone acting histrionic when you’re acting histrionic, you will look at their behavior and compare it to your own, realize how similar the two behaviors are, cease the behavior, and thank them profusely for winning the internet today while saying “enjoy your gold, sir!”
This does not work. It’s so incredibly not how this causality works that I’m shocked anyone believes this bullshit enough to say it out loud. First of all, when was the last time you thought someone else’s bad behavior contained useful information about your own behavior? In my experience, those most likely to do this rhetorical move are least likely to introspect when anyone pisses them off. This is not a coincidence, but that is entirely lost on such people. Intriguingly, trolling doesn’t work on such people but they will look you dead in the eye and claim that it works on people they consider both less intelligent and less emotionally mature than themselves.
No one has ever been yelled at or made fun of by someone and said to themselves “wow, this person is educating me on my failings so effectively. I see now that this person, as my superior, is condescending to act like me to show me how ineffectual this behavior is. I will not take this exchange as evidence that my histrionic behavior is the optimal way to get people to react to me, engage with me, and even act more like me, despite the fact that that is exactly what just happened. No, instead, I shall stop doing this.”
It’s a lot easier to get people to act worse by yelling at them or mocking them than it is to get them to see reason. This is so trivially obvious that I am embarrassed for every person who has tried - especially, god forbid, in public - to claim otherwise.
To make fun of people to get them to embarrass themselves by yelling at you serves the you and only you. To indulge in yelling, mockery, and sneering while telling yourself that you’re just doing it to make a point is simply to use a flimsy excuse to indulge in low emotional regulation and pretend it’s driven by something other than poor self control.
I know this because I used to fight with my mother. My mother is an incredibly intelligent, perhaps even brilliant, woman, with multiple patents to her name, a long career in engineering, and multiple solo businesses for her hobbies. None of this intelligence served her all that well, however, in verbal altercations with me. This is because right alongside her brilliance, my mother has quite a short fuse, and when it goes off, she’s functionally very stupid.
When we’d fight and the argument would pass a certain emotional pitch, my mother would abandon all semblance of real argumentation, dispensing not only with coherent claims, not just sentences, but even parseable words altogether. When my mom got angry enough, she’d adopt a high-pitched baby voice and just babble at and over me while I talked to her. When I told her I didn’t respect this behavior and told her she was immature for doing it, she told me that she was merely showing me how I looked and sounded.
Imagine what happened the next time we fought, after an exchange like this. Do you imagine that I went easier on her? That I moderated my speech? That I was gentler, more persuasive, more rational myself? Or do you suppose that my mother’s utter and obvious lack of restraint, coupled as it was with embarrassingly transparent self-justification, only encouraged my own, resulting in efforts to rhetorically hit her as hard as I could where I knew it would hurt the most? If she wasn’t going to listen to me, she was going to suffer for it. And I had all the evidence I needed that this strategy was going to work - all I had to do to embarrass and demean my mother was to make her angry. Her lack of self control gave me immense power, and her insistence on seeing her loss of control as a strategic play against me only tipped the scales further in my direction.
On top of all of that, it was not remotely obvious to me that I sounded anything like her, given that I was, you know, forming full sentences using an at worst angry but otherwise normal speaking voice. Notice how my mother’s ability to accurately evaluate my behavior disappeared when she was angry, and notice how she debased herself in front of me in an embarrassing attempt to indulge her anger.
“But that was your mom!” You offer sulkily, immediately irritated and bitchy as always. “I’m just yelling at internet NPCs! They’re basically not even people! Of course your mom shouldn’t have acted like that but the rules are different online!”
Listen to me. This is worse. At least my mom was sacrificing her dignity as a side effect of being sincerely engaged in a noble effort to properly raise an extremely willful daughter. The antagonism of a child is a hard thing to ignore, it cuts close to the bone, and many are incapable of the level of self-regulation my mother would have needed to respond better to my behavior.
You, on the other hand, are dispensing with all semblance of rationality because someone who could fully literally be a bot said something to you that annoyed you. You are taking your dignity to the town square, stripping it bare, and beating it publicly all to “show” someone you fully believe is 3 SDs worth of IQ beneath you how stupid and pathetic they’re being. How confident are you that your “imitations” of their behavior are any closer to reality than my mother’s whining baby voice was of my directly stated opinions?
Furthermore, when my mother adopted a shrill, wordless, sneering parody of a Charlie Brown adult, she was only humiliating herself in front of her teenaged daughter and (sometimes) her husband. When you do it, you’re doing it in front of hundreds, even thousands of people, who rather than seeing it as a brilliant chess move see only your poor self control and obvious reflexive need to eat shit if someone flings it at you.
Let’s get even more specific. My mom was more experienced than I was, at minimum not experiencing a heady cocktail of teenaged hormones, and was explicitly charged with ensuring my well-adjusted upbringing. Despite all of those signifiers that her behavior should guide mine, not the other way around, my mother indulged in behavior that she explicitly believed was more like mine. I thought she was wrong that I was acting at all similarly to her baby voiced ululations, but even if she was right, what kind of message does it really send to a subordinate to imitate behavior you want them to quit? Similarly in the case of the internet troll, is engaging in behavior not a tacit support of it as effective? As fun? As better than trying to be the grown up? Why are we pretending that indulging in this kind of behavior is doing anything other than acting as a force multiplier on nasty childish bullshit?
If you’re going to indulge in this behavior, please have the decency not to try to run interference against claims that it’s anything other than deeply embarrassing for you. It’s doing negative good, certainly for the person you’re dealing with but most of all, it’s doing little good for you.
Every time you do it, you reinforce the neural pathway that gets a kick out of bitchily throwing plates at your dignity in public. Every time you do it, you get favorable reinforcement from your dumbest (via genetics or ideology), least inhibited, and most emotionally immature followers, reinforcement that it’s good, ideal, even, to embarrass yourself publicly to own people you think are too stupid to grok what you’re saying.
There’s a way out. You don’t have to live like this. At minimum, you can stop with the cope that says it’s benefitting anyone, least of all you. And maybe, if you develop the emotional regulation of someone of say 18 years old, you might even learn to stop indulging in childish behavior because someone else started it.
If you’re not a big enough person to ignore rather than imitate the behavior of people that you consider your inferiors, you’d be better off removing yourself from their company entirely. Imagine if my mother had spent more than two decades prior to my 18th birthday practicing her reflexive desire to punish other people with their own behavior on the scale of a ninety thousand follower twitter account? How effectively do you think she would have been armed to manage a disagreeable hyperverbal daughter then?
Take some time to really think on it. Good luck out there.
I loved the journey this took me on, "throwing plates at your own dignity" is such a good image. I wonder, was the sarcastic wah-wah thing encouraged in 90s parenting books or something? Relatable.
There's this dynamic discussed in psychotherapy (usually about parenting) where two people slip from relating or conversing into a "doer and done-to" dynamic, and nothing good can happen when you feel like someone is doing something unpleasant to you and you need to win. No information can go in. No relating is possible. You have to withdraw until you can see them as a person not a combatant. Trolling is the epitome of doer-done-to.
Are you spying on my current Twitter activity? I had just banned myself from the app for the rest of today after engaging with anons in a substandard fashion when this piece hit my inbox 😆 I'm a huge hypocrite too because I am generally opposed to internet snark. Some rationalize it by saying that they're putting someone down for the sake of educating *others* -- so that third parties reading the interaction can see how superior your position is. But even third party readers who agree with your opponent will see themselves as the target of the snark. It's best not to get in the habit of interacting ungraciously or uncharitably with anyone, lest that habit kicks in during a conversation where it definitely shouldn't.