Article

Culture

Politics

Psychology

29 August 2024

5 min read

To troll or be trolled?

Laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

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

Character

Culture

Idolatry

Psychology

31 October 2025

6 min read

We need a sense of shame - but need mercy even more

Shame may be necessary, but only if it can be defeated

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Frankstein stares our from his covered face.

Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein's monster

Netflix.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of shame a lot recently. Both professionally and personally, it’s a topic that is demanding my attention. It’s following me around, insisting that I look it in the eye, shoving and nudging me – taunting and tempting me to finally snap and wrestle it to the ground. I guess that is the very nature of shame, isn’t it? It’s always so stubbornly there.

I’ve also noticed that it seems to have elbowed its way into cultural conversations; it’s been putting a real PR shift in, seeking rehabilitation in public discourse.

The actor, Jacob Elordi, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Kind of interesting, kind of not. The sliver of it that really caught my attention was when the interviewer asked Jacob,

‘What’s one lost art that you wish would come back in style?’

To which Elordi replied,

‘The art of shame. I wish people could experience shame a little heavier’.

Gosh.

It makes sense that this was Jacob’s answer; the interview was conducted to promote Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro’s new movie in which Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein’s monster. So, I get it. He’s been consumed with what components make up a monster, endeavouring to literally turn himself into one. He’s been ruminating on the recipe of evil, and perhaps he’s found one key ingredient – shamelessness. Maybe Jacob, having dwelt on such, has subsequently looked out at the not-so-fictional ‘monsters’ wreaking havoc and has diagnosed the same thing, a distinct lack of shame.

It's a solid thesis.

It reminded me of another recent interview, this one with the acclaimed author, Zadie Smith. She said,

‘Shame gets a bad rap these days. I think it’s quite a useful emotion, corrective on certain kinds of behaviour… I assume people – including myself – are just deeply, deeply flawed. And so, shame is usually quite appropriate on a day-to-day level… shame is a kind of productive thing to create change. I guess I do believe that. I know it’s definitely a Christian emotion, that’s why it’s so out of fashion. But I always thought it quite productive in the gospels, that idea that you assume that you are entirely in sin. I always assume that.’

I half agree with both Jacob and Zadie. In a way, I’d be a fool not to. Not to mention, proof of their thesis.

I cannot deny that I am, as Zadie points out, deeply, deeply flawed. There is a crack in everything I do, a fracture in all my best intentions. And yours, too, I’m afraid (but I have a feeling you know that). There is a brokenness to us, a breaking-things-ness. To each and every one of us, ‘hurt’ is both an adjective and a verb – something we feel and something we do. The things I want to do, I never manage. The things I don’t want to do, I seem to manage every day. I am falling short, missing the mark – I am so fallibly human.

To acknowledge such is not only obvious, nor is it simply ‘useful’, as Zadie suggests. It’s inherently spiritual, it’s paradigmatic.

Last summer, I hosted an event at which Francis Spufford, one of my most cherished wordsmiths, playfully quipped, ‘I’ve heard original sin (the notion that we are, as Zadie notes ‘entirely in sin’) described as one of the few theological propositions which you can actually confirm with the naked eye’. ‘Sin’, Tyler Staton similarly writes, ‘is simultaneously the most controversial idea in Christianity and the one most universally agreed upon’.

There’s something deeply wrong with the world. We all know that.

Which, presumably, is what Jacob Elordi is getting at – he’s observing bad people not feeling bad enough about the bad that they do, or worse still, the bad that they are. A healthy dose of shame is the medicine that this world needs, he suggests.

Oh Jacob, I sympathise with that. The thing is, I have a hunch that the presence of shame makes as many monsters as the absence of it.

And Zadie, I wonder if shame births as much destruction as it does ‘correction’.

While I agree with you both that, in a world as broken as ours, shame needs to exist in some form or another, it also needs an antidote. It’s a dangerous substance; toxic and destructive. Don’t let it fool you, don’t be over-generous to it – shame may (in its most moderate and appropriate forms) be an acknowledgment of the disease, but it is not the medicine. It could only ever be ‘useful’ if it is, ultimately, defeatable.

At least, that’s my – admittedly very Christian – conviction. That’s my take. I can’t pretend that it’s not as theological as it is sociological in its underpinnings.

I’m relatively new to the liturgical aspects of my own faith tradition (that is, the formalised scripts, actions and rituals that have long fuelled religious experience) , so I have the pleasure of not being numb to them. When I read the ancient words of ancient prayers, they shoot right through me, particularly these ones:

‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you and against our neighbour in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault...’

Ouch.

As I read those words, week in and week out, my brain creates a helpful montage for me – whirring through the countless ways in which I have failed – in what I think, what I say, what I do. I’m confronted with the ways that my breaking-things-ness has leaked out of me through my negligence, it’s spilled out of my weakness, the force of it directed at others through my own deliberate fault.

Oh yes, I’m well acquainted with the emotion of shame.

But the only thing productive/appropriate/corrective about falling on my face in shame, is that there is a mercy that can scoop me up. It’s not hopeless, you see? There’s a mend-ability. There’s an antidote to shame; there’s a balm for its burn. There’s a bewildering love that banishes shame from within me – there’s a rescue route from its toxic spiral.

The moment that shame is acknowledged, its presence verbalised, its power felt – is the very moment it needs to be neutralised. It cannot fester, it cannot be afforded the loudest, nor the last, say.

And so, to Jacob Elordi’s interesting wish – that ‘people could experience shame a little heavier’, and to Zadie Smith’s fascinating thesis that ‘shame is a kind of productive thing to create change’- I hear you. I see what you’re getting at. But I can only ever wish people to experience the heaviness of shame if it means that they are more sensitive to the feeling of it being undeservedly lifted off them. That’s where change happens. That’s the medicine.

So, Jacob and Zadie, let’s agree to half-agree on this one, shall we?

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