To troll or be trolled?

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

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical 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.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.