Article
Culture
Politics
Psychology
5 min read

To troll or be trolled?

Laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves.
Donald Trump gestures with his hands while someone holds a mic in front of him,

Politics and satire belong together, they deserve each other. Humour has been part of politics ever since the first jester dared jingle a bell in the face of a king. Those who get their kicks from bursting the bubbles of the pompous are drawn to the corridors of power like moths to a flame. But in recent weeks laughter has hit the headlines again. A couple of weeks ago, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamela Harris chose her running mate Tim Walz, the only thing most of us knew about him was that he was the one who had called Trump ‘weird’. A few minutes of furious googling later we knew much more, but the suspicion lingered that he had been picked for having finally answered the question that had plagued the Democrats for nearly a decade: how do you deal with Donald Trump? 

As a psychologist who works with leaders I have been asked this question numerous times. How do you go up against someone with the magnificent trolling skills of Trump? Is it possible to win against a person so adept at humiliating those who oppose him? And I think Walz is on to something. He hasn’t called Trump a threat to democracy or labelled his supporters a basket of deplorables. No. He has called Trump weird, and his supporters good dinner guests. Why is Trump weird? Because, says Walz, he has never seen him laugh. 

Trump is not the only one accused of being humourless. Our own former Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was equally unamused at becoming the butt of the joke, when a banner reading ‘I Crashed the Economy’ next to a googly eyed lettuce quietly descended behind her during an onstage interview. She left the stage abruptly and was quick to respond on X that what had happened was not funny. Most people thought it was funny and that she – like Trump – was slightly weird not to laugh it off, at least a little bit. As the political prankster Noël Godin once said: there is no better way to judge a person’s character than by how they behave when hit by a custard pie. 

We spend our lives subtly and unconsciously evading the slightest whiff of humiliation. 

There is however a deep psychology behind all this hilarity, or lack of it. For decades now psychologists have conducted numerous studies on the phenomenon of Gelotophobia. Not the fear of ice-cream, as one might initially think. Gelotophobes you’ll be pleased to know are perfectly capable of holding it together in the presence of a knickerbocker glory. What they fear is being laughed at, and as always this sounds infinitely more sophisticated translated into Greek (gelos/laughter, phobos/fear). Much of the gelotophobia literature is a heartbreaking tale of young people crippled by the fear that others will laugh at their weight, or their acne, or target them for bullying. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but mocking words it seems can leave us socially terrified for the remainder of our adult life. In its most debilitating forms gelotophobia is a cause for clinical intervention.  

But the study of gelotophobia goes further than treating the clinically distressed. Lurking among the samples and statistics is a wisdom that helps us understand why Trump and Truss are the people they are, and more importantly teaches us something about ourselves. Because most of us in some mild sub-clinical way are gelotophobes. We spend our lives subtly and unconsciously evading the slightest whiff of humiliation.  Margaret Atwood was no doubt right to say that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. But many people would rather die than be laughed at. 

Could it be that our love of laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves? 

One of the primary findings about gelotophobia, is that those who are most scared of being laughed at are also scared to laugh. To say of Trump or Truss that they lack humour is equally to say that the last thing on earth they want is to be the object of laughter. Most gelotophobes were once victimised, ostracised or bullied, and humour was the chief instrument of their humiliation. They were forged by the cruel conditioning of mockery. As a result, they view laughter-eliciting situations negatively. In facial coding studies they show less joy and more contempt when presented with smiling joyful people. The inner freedom to join others in laughter has been quashed by the suspicion that the laughter of others is a threat. Some compensate for this by making sure they always have the upper-hand, always the troll never the trolled. Which speaks to another finding, more applicable to Trump than to Truss, that derisive humour is the way narcissists conceal their vulnerability. Behind every grandiose expression of superiority, lies a shame and inferiority that can be defended by attacking others. 

Gelotophobia ultimately is a subtype of our fear of being disliked, and if the bestseller lists are anything to go by, this is clearly a pressing concern for many people. Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishmi brought the wisdom of Japan to the question in The Courage to be Disliked, and Ryan Holiday did the same from a Stoic perspective in Courage is Calling. How to live in a world that shapes us through the threat of ridicule has been pondered for thousands of years. It even turns up in the New Testament of the Bible. When the disciples of Jesus stepped out to deliver their first public discourses, they were accused of being drunk, stupid and presumptuous. The word used to describe them in the historical sources is parrēsia, usually translated bold, but perhaps more accurately rendered the freedom to say anything (pas- all; rheō- to utter). For them freedom of speech was not a societal given but a virtue they enacted in spite of their society. 

In the ancient world the term parrēsia was more often used to describe the counter-cultural courage of the Stoic philosophers. But the disciples were not Stoics. They weren’t schooled in the rigours of Greek philosophy, but rather apprenticed to the Hebrew prophetic tradition. A tradition which equally appreciated the inevitable opprobrium befalling those who presume to critique and rejuvenate a stale culture. They were simply following the teaching of the master who pointed to ridicule, scorn and gossip not as PR disasters to be managed, but as prophetic honours to be celebrated. Or, as Marty Babcock once claimed, ‘Jesus promised his disciples only three things: they would be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble.’  

We should be cautious then laughing too much at the embarrassments that befall our political class, and perhaps more attentive to what our schadenfreude might point to within us. Could it be that our love of laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves? Even worse, what if vindictively celebrating their misfortunes is itself a symptom of the inner helplessness, inertia and unfreedom we claim to oppose? Or, to give the same question a more positive inflection: what would we be doing or saying differently if we were genuinely and entirely free of the fear of being ridiculed?  

Blessed are those who do not fear the laughter of others for they may change the world. 

Article
Christmas culture
Culture
Film & TV
4 min read

This is love, actually

Love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort.
A sister visits a brother
Michael and Sarah.

I’m not a great lover of Love Actually, actually. I find it overlong, boring, and unrealistic. The plot holes are yawning. Aurelia’s lack of French despite her living and working in France with a father apparently fluent in French always irks me. Why would anybody in Keira Knightley’s shoes give her husband’s best man that kiss? On this year’s rewatch with my family, Joanna’s run all the way back through the airport, despite her plane to New York being on last call for some time, joined the list. The chauvinism and some of the jokes get more uncomfortable with each passing year. 

I guess the suspension of disbelief is the point with a film that is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Amid the mawkish tat there is a little in the way of saving grace- Emma Thompson’s performance, both in support for her friend Daniel as he grieves, and in dignified devastation at her husband’s unfaithfulness, will always be masterful and deeply affecting. But it is in Sarah’s storyline, caring for her mentally ill brother Michael, that best demonstrates love, actually. 

Unless you’ve been under a rock for twenty years, you will know the story. Sarah silently yearns for her colleague Karl, something everyone in the office has become aware of. They get together at the Christmas party, and are about to get to it, when Michael rings, distressed, asking for the Pope, and needing Sarah’s reassurance. She answers the phone, twice, knowingly ending her chance with Karl for that evening, and possibly forever. 

Love Actually is mostly full of glossy and unrealistic love. Attraction is easy, love comes quickly, meet cutes are abundant, demonstrations of love are impulsive and Christmas romances happen all over town. Pretty much everyone ends up twinkly-eyed despite the origins of their own story arcs. But Sarah turns down this kind of romantic love for an older, deeper, more burdensome love and a less happy ending. 

In leaving behind her chances with Karl to care for Michael, Sarah self-sacrifices her own dreams to embrace the circumstances she has been given. In our current era of boundaries, self-prioritisation, and idealising of (particularly Christmas-orientated) romantic love, Sarah’s example is never more important. Hers and Michael’s story would not feature in a Hallmark Christmas film, and it feels the most real of all for that reason.  

Sarah demonstrates that love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort, but very often a scarred, painful, and deliberate choice to put oneself second even when some or all of our being is resentful and resistant. The hand she has been dealt, being the only family for Michael, carrying his care on her shoulders alone, is not particularly fair. The demands sacrificial love makes of us are often not fair; romantic, familial, or otherwise, but to love truly is to love anyway, bearing the cost of loving those who are a burden to us, and the humiliation of being loved by those to whom we are a burden. 

The siblings’ story strikes at the truest meaning of love at Christmas. Jesus’ birth is the eternal demonstration that God is not content to remain in the comfort of heaven in perfection, but instead comes to suffering and hurting humanity. In the same way that Sarah gently and firmly deals with Michael’s violence, so God deals with all the violence we throw at each other and at God, and loves us anyway. Just as Sarah sacrifices her own dreams of life with ‘lots of sex and babies’ with Karl to spend Christmas Day in a more costly, more true relationship with Michael, so God’s own Son gave up heaven and humbled himself to spend the first Christmas Day in a feeding trough, present to humanity and all its burdens. 

If you attend a carol service this year you will probably hear the title given to Jesus by the prophet Isaiah of Immanuel, meaning God with us. This name demonstrates that although we all carry our own instability, weakness, and selfishness, God’s love does not leave us, but is all the more present with us in our need to be loved although we offer little or nothing in return to God. On a cosmic level, we are the burden, with our individual and communal tendency towards self-destruction. And yet, the Christmas story reminds us that God remains present to us. 

This is love actually at Christmas. It’s not happy endings and spontaneous proposals. It’s painful, suffering, difficult, unfair, sacrificial love. Sarah and Michael’s story expresses the truest expression of love we will ever see. The kind that gives up dreams to be present to those who are suffering. The kind that gives up heaven to be present to those on Earth. The kind that accepts the love given by those who can give it, even if we feel humiliated by the depths of our need. If we choose to embrace the unglamorous, the burdensome, the inconvenient, we will never be closer to the first and truest of all Christmas stories. 

Thank God for Sarah and Michael, who point us to the cowshed containing the God who does not abandon us for better and easier things, despite our fragility.  

(And makes Love Actually a little less insufferable). 

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