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.

Review

Art

Culture

11 November 2025

5 min read

The dot and the dash: modern art’s quiet search for deeper meaning

Neo-Impressionism meets mysticism in a quietly radical exhibition

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Van Gogh's painting of a sower, walking across a field as the sun sets.

Vincent van Gogh, The Sower.

Kröller-Müller Museum. Photographer: Rik Klein Gotink.

When Helene Kröller-Müller was introduced to charismatic art teacher H.P Bremmer in 1905, she came to view art as the conveyance of a spiritual experience. With Bremmer as her art adviser, she built an art collection and museum intended as a centre for spiritual life, set in the tranquillity of nature. A significant part of that collection is currently on show at the National Gallery providing an opportunity to see connections between modern art and spirituality which were always there but generally had not been highlighted by art curators or critics of the past.

The focus of Radical Harmony at the National Gallery is the Neo-Impressionist art of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. However, Kröller-Müller and Bremmer were also early collectors of the work of Vincent Van Gogh, an example of whose work is included in the show. As the Neo-Impressionists were artists who used small dots of paint to create their images while Van Gogh used broad dashes of pigment, this exhibition is an exploration of the spirituality of the dot versus the spirituality of the dash.

Neo-Impressionists painted in small dots of pure colour. Viewed from a distance, the colours blend to create nuanced tones and an illusion of light. Now known as pointillism (although this name was not liked by the artists themselves), this technique simplified form and played with colour in an entirely new way, verging on the edge of abstraction.

The Neo-Impressionist's dots of colour were carefully and deliberately placed to sit still on their canvases creating an overall sense of harmony and calm. It was this quality of peacefulness in their work that attracted Kröller-Müller. She spoke of these works being 'light and delicate, spiritual in content and style' and of Seurat's work as expressing 'emotion of religious-poetic disposition'.

That was not how Seurat himself viewed his work. He viewed his approach as being more like a scientific method, but Kröller-Müller’s perceptions do have synergies with the work and religious inspirations of other Neo-Impressionist artists whose work is included here, particularly that of Jan Toorop and Johan Thorn Prikker. Both Toorop and Thorn Prikker also made works in a mystical Symbolist style, while Toorop, around the 1930s, became one of the most reproduced artists of his time, through his prints of Roman Catholic iconography.

By contrast with the stillness of the Neo-Impressionist’s dots, the dashes used by Van Gogh possess a much greater sense of energy and movement. Each dash shows the direction of the brushstroke with which it was created and the cumulative effect of the dashes, set alongside each other, leads the eye across the image. Many of Van Gogh’s images, as which ‘The Sower’ included here, have a central sun forming a halo effect, with its rays, depicted as dashes, emanating from the flaming yellow orb and infusing the remainder of the image with its divine light and energy. Van Gogh viewed Christ as a ‘glowing light or blazing sun’ and used the dashes in his work to imply the divine presence in the world and its landscapes.

In the exhibition, the contrast with dots that is provided by dashes is also apparent in a series of three heavily abstracted landscapes by Thorn Prikker, which draw on the approach of Van Gogh to create movement and energy throughout the entire image in contrast to the calm and stillness of landscapes created using dots of colour. Within their mystical Symbolistic images, Thorn Prikker and Toorop created a similar effect using continuous flowing sinuous lines.

The contrast between the two styles was clearly apparent in the museum that Kröller-Müller opened in The Hague in 1913. There, in the spacious front room, Van Gogh’s paintings hung ‘powerful, dramatic & heavy’, ‘like life itself, like our reality’. In an adjoining room, ‘she created a lighter and more mystical atmosphere’ by hanging the works of Seurat, Signac and Théo van Rysselberghe. She wrote that as you came from one into the other, you would ‘suddenly stand in a completely different world’; being among the Neo-Impressionist works was to be where everything was light and tingling as ‘a French sun rises’.

Bremmer and Kröller-Müller were early collectors of work by Van Gogh (as, too, was Anna Boch, an artist who also features in this show) regarding him ‘as the ultimate example of an artist who was filled with a sacred respect for everyday reality’. They also viewed Pointillism as ‘a spiritualisation of art’, as ‘applying the colour to the canvas dot by dot’ was done ‘in order to contemplate things more calmly and profoundly’.

This focus on contemplation informed not only their collecting but also the design of the purpose-built museum that was opened in 1938, for which the artist Henry van de Velde was the architect. Van de Velde’s own Neo-Impressionist art also features in this exhibition, and he summed up the focus that he, Bremmer and Kröller-Müller had on contemplation of images in sympathetic architectural spaces, when he wrote of wanting:

‘To establish the Dream of realities, the Ineffable soaring above them, to dissect them without pity to see their Soul, to strive for the pursuit of the Intangible and meditate – in silence – to inscribe the mysterious Meaning.’

Enabling such contemplation was the aim of these three and this exhibition reveals how and why they followed that aim. In doing so, the exhibition reveals more to us about the connections found and made between art and spirituality early on in the development of modern art. These are connections which have been overlooked in earlier discussions and presentations of Neo-Impressionism but which are being helpful and rightly rediscovered and represented in the present.

Visit this exhibition to gain that understanding but also to take the opportunity, as Bremmer, Kröller-Müller and Van de Velde desired, to meditate in silence ‘to inscribe the mysterious Meaning’ of the works you will see.

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists, 13 September 2025 - 8 February 2026, National Gallery

Visit the exhibition site

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