We ask ourselves the questions…
When did it become our habit to start every conversation that’s even remotely controversial by expressing our opinion…. and then ducking?
Why does anything having to do with politics feel so ugly, frustrating, and dysfunctional?
Have we become a nation of trolls?
Like anyone else who’s spent any time on the internet at all, I’ve asked myself these questions. Can democracy survive a culture in which hurling insults is the normal way matters of importance get “discussed”?
A more perfect union…
Democracy requires healthy communication – the ability to express differences of opinion, passionately and loudly even – with an end result of creating a consensus. This is the foundation of self-governance. There’s a reason that freedom of speech and the right of peaceable assembly are in our First Amendment. Without safe forums in which differences of opinion get openly discussed, freedom is not possible.
Yet we seem to have lost the ability to disagree with one another without being disagreeable, replaced by a preponderance of pointless flame-throwing – verbal flame-throwing which threatens to drive out the reasonable voices our nation needs to move forward.
Are the trolls winning?
I’ve chosen to undertake the task of creating a forum in which counter-insurgency tactics against trolls can be discussed and implemented. As a starting point, I’ll be sharing some tools that have helped me walk in this world in a way that feels healthy and allowed me to have healthy, even uproarious conversations with people who hold very different opinions than my own… people who I consider among my dearest friends perhaps specifically because they disagree with me.
I’ll be inviting people to create a community committed to being part of the solution – of making war not on any individual trolls but on the concept of “trollness” itself – of defeating trollness by modeling appropriate communication at all levels and at all times.
I firmly believe that the strongest position to come from is the highest moral posture, and so I call this community the “High Roaders.”
The High Roaders
I’ve spent much of my adult life studying communication. I’ve come to understand that effective communication requires more than audience analysis, rhetoric, encoding, channels, cultural context, feedback, and the like. At its core, being an effective communicator requires one thing – to be the sort of person people want to listen to.
I begin this quest, therefore, by sharing two tools as foundations – not foundations guiding how we communicate with others but foundations guiding how we communicate with ourselves. I offer two tools:
- Commit, right now, to never getting angry over any comment posted on the internet, ever.
- Never lose sight of the fact that we could be the ones who are wrong
Before we get into these tools, however, let’s make clear – there are trolls and there are TROLLS. That is, there are some who are angry, name-calling, offensive jerks (trolls) and there are those who threaten actual violence – who seek out identities, post addresses, children’s names and schools, and act in ways that aren’t obnoxious, but criminal. I hope to disarm trolls through the behaviors of our numbers, with an eye toward helping as many as possible to act more responsibly, to potentially reconsider their positions and behaviors. TROLLS need to be dealt with through law enforcement and forum administration, as limited as those resources and recourses sometimes feel.
Tool #1 – Never get angry, ever
We cannot disarm trolls by becoming trolls ourselves. We lose sight of the high road when we respond in anger ourselves. This is actually easier than it sounds. We tend to respond to obnoxious internet posts in the same way we might respond to someone insulting us, face-to-face, for example, as in a bar. Naturally, if someone insults us face-to-face, in a public space, we are likely to become angry – to feel as though we have face to save and that it would be seen as cowardly not to respond in kind.
The reality on the internet, however, is much different. Insult-throwing trolls aren’t the equivalent of someone insulting us to our face. They are the equivalent of someone hurling insults as they drive past us in a car and then racing off… wearing a mask. To consider them anything more than that is silly really.
Of course, each of us has a right to become angry over injustice, bigotry, and intentional malice. But we fight these not by getting angry at their carriers – we fight injustice not by seeking to destroy trolls but by seeking to disarm them whenever we can. Never allow yourself to get angry over anything posted at you on the internet. Ever. Take the high road.
Tool #2 – It could be us who are wrong!
Out of all the challenges faced with taking the High Road, admitting to ourselves that it could be us, ourselves, who are wrong is perhaps the hardest. Nonetheless, if we are to present ourselves as fair-minded critical thinkers, we need to never lose sight of the fact that we are human too, and imperfect in our understandings and judgments. We cannot call for open-mindedness in others if we are not committed to open-mindedness ourselves. By seeking first to understand (one of Steven Covey’s 7 Principles), we provide ourselves an opportunity to disarm trolls not by overcoming them, but by being relentlessly reasonable… by taking the High Road.
Realizing we could be wrong – by accepting this premise as an absolute fact – also helps with implementing tool #1 – it’s harder to be angry if we realize we could be seen as a troll by someone else.
“Opening” Thoughts….
I realize some of this may feel kind of “zen”, but if we’re to take back the public internet forums and create safe places to conduct healthy discussions, we need to start with ourselves. As Ghandi said, we need to “become the change we want to see in the world.” I think of the internet now as being like a public park in an iffy neighborhood – a park where people hang out who are dubious, sketchy, and threatening. The solution is not to abandon the park to the lowest among us. The solution is for everyone in the community to come to the park, to create a safe public space in our number, to crowd out and make uncomfortable those whose behaviors are problematic.
I offer this posting as a beginning, a beginning of what I hope is an on-going conversation. I have many more tools I’ll be sharing in future posts that can, hopefully, become part of a conversation describing potential solutions.
I begin today by committing myself to the High Road, and inviting you to make a similar commitment yourself, and together coming to understand what that means and how we can achieve it.
AuthorBerniePosted onSeptember 19, 2016TagsBernie Nofel, democracy, freedom, trolls
2 thoughts on “How to Take the High Road, Disarm Trolls, and Save Democracy (Part 1)”
- Jim Brandonsays:September 20, 2016 at 12:16 amBernie – this is good stuff and I look forward to reading further posts. The writing is clear and clean, as are the ideas.I think it’s important, and you may want to address in later posts, the format of how people write on line. Good ideas get lost in long, long, unbroken sentences and paragraphs that are un-readably long. Like the writer is worried someone is going to interrupt them if they take a breath…