another quick point on trolls/grey vampires

In my comment below on the reader’s remarks, I made the following point in parentheses:

“Trolls are easy to recognize: they don’t need to be sniffed out, you just need to avoid interacting with them, which can also be hard because they tend to be such sneaks about choosing situations where it’s hard not to respond.”

Later, after posting this, I asked myself: what exactly are those situations that trolls tend to choose?

The answer is really quite simple, I think: trolls tend to choose situations with witnesses. This explains a great number of things that I’ve noticed.

Trolls are not unknown outside the blogosphere, but they proliferate in vast numbers here. Previously I had thought this a function of the easy anonymity of this medium. But now I see that this is merely a subsidiary point– some of the worst trolls I’ve known are quite well known as to their personal and socio-professional identity.

However, these people almost never try to troll you one-on-one. If they send you an email, it’s likely to be strangely conciliatory– “let’s make up,” that sort of thing. But then if you agree, they immediately revert to troll persona on the web.

In a couple of instances I actually know the people to some extent. In one-on-one interactions they are often quite meek, but add the right witness and –bam!– they’re suddenly trolling in person the same way they do electronically. But there have to be witnesses. They’re lost without the implied support of other onlookers. This is what makes trolling a less harmful subspecies of bullying in general… It is common wisdom that bullies are cowards at heart. Trolls are also cowards at heart, unable to carry on legitimate intellectual dispute without sneers conducted in front of others.

Contrast this with the grey vampire type… Grey vampires actually function even better one-on-one than in groups. They suck energy by twisting every step in a conversation into some new obstacle, some new faked uncertainty about something or other.

But the key point is to remember that philosophical discussion occurs between people, not between disembodied arguments. If you feel your energy level decreasing regularly when spending time in discussion with someone, I would recommend writing them off. Perhaps you can read an article of theirs now and then and learn from it, but if you feel your energy level dropping, there’s a good bet it’s deliberate on their part, even if not quite conscious. The condition of human interchange has to be warmth, or bad things are most likely bubbling beneath the surface. Warmth is simply too easy and too inherently rewarding to be avoided unless there are less-than-clean motivations for doing so.