The virtue of trolls

Trolls can be useful for taking the temperature of society, because they often cling to conventional prejudices and try to gain mileage from them.  You can learn a lot about who your friends and enemies are by who speaks up against a troll and who shows real understanding of what is going on.  You don’t want people close to you that are ambivalent or have foggy thinking.  So, sometimes you just have to let them do their work.

One of their other notable traits is to portray a model of the human psyche to you that is completely static and unnuanced.  They are at the extreme end of how some people live their lives — the opposite to the shamanic end, that is liquid and every changing.  It can be good to be reminded of how life is fairly static for some people.

Also — another important fact — I learned something very interesting from  a recent troll, because I interpreted his saying about himself being “childishly idealistic” and “harsh” correctly.

Indirectly, this gave me very good insight into what I have been running up against as one of the core qualities of modernity that seems to take umbrage with me (and vice versa).  It’s another way of talking about narcissism really, because people often approach difficult things (like martial arts, or talking with me) in a mode of expecting to be indluged or getting what they want immediately with little work.  When they do not get that thing there were looking for (which is never actually defined and why it is called CHILDISH idealism), they immediately become Harsh.  In fact they haven’t communicated their real minds to me (because they don’t have real minds, only childish idealism).

But they feel like the purity of their original desire is thwarted when they don’t immediately receive gratification for unstated needs.  Then they assert themselves harshly and quite vengefully.

And this troll did exactly how I interpreted his original statement, as a modeling his mind.  He asserted that he had originally decided to “give me a chance” but now he was going to call me all sorts of names because I’d failed him in some unspecified way.  

APES IN CAPES!