Why People Troll

Imagine someone whose life never took off the way they wanted. For whatever reason, they are now stuck in a miserable situation; a dream career never came to be and they still live in mom’s basement. Their life is parasitic and they know it. The only thing that brings them any relief is tearing down others. Those who don’t create can only try to destroy. It’s a sad fact that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel.

Abusive childhoods are breeding grounds for adult addictions. Traumatic events that occur while the brain is still developing mess up the circuitry, magnifying the consequences across the spectrum of life. The transmitters between each neuron operate below optimum levels. This is where addiction comes in. If a normal person’s dopamine levels are at a healthy 100%, someone who’s suffered childhood abuse will only work at 40%. However, the drug of choice boosts that up to 80%, which is the closest they’ve ever felt to being whole. But when the drug wears off, the dopamine level crashes below what it was previously, at 20%. So the addict has to go back to the drug inflate it again (only it may never go as high; next time will be 75%, then 70%, etc.).

But drugs of choice can take many forms: cigarettes, pills, pornography, video games, or even television. Anything that causes a temporary dopamine rush becomes dopamine fuel. Specifically, I want to talk about internet trolling, when someone leaves nasty, hateful, or derogatory comments over the internet. Things they would never say to a person’s face. It seems to not have any consequences because of the safety of the computer screen; but like any addiction, this temporary boost is unfulfilling and cries out quickly for more. As suicides from cyber bullying have been on the rise, the consequences are clearly not so harmless at all.

The amygdala (which means “almond” due to its shape) is a part of the brain that controls fear and aggression. Vision has a direct path to the amygdala due to its location (behind the eyes the middle of the lower brain). This is why we react emotionally to imagery (and why propaganda can be so effective). Logic and reason take place in the cerebral cortex, which is further up, taking information longer to be processed there.

In the wild, this is a useful survival mechanism. If our tribal ancestors saw a lion at a distance, their fear response kicked in and the amygdala sent messages to the renal glands above the kidneys to release adrenaline and help them run fast. Our brains are so effective at this studies have shown that we can react fearfully to danger before we even recognize what the danger is.

Our surroundings growing up have a tremendous impact on our mental stability as adults. Ideally, a child should develop in a two-parent home that provides a balance of love and discipline. But if the parents divorce, are verbally or physically abusive, or neglectful, the child is put in a constant fight-or-flight mode too early in life. As a result, the brain overcompensates by reinforcing the amygdala as a survival strategy while under-developing the frontal cortex.

Because their fight-or-flight reflex is messed up, people with overdeveloped amygdalas struggle with insecurity, anxiety attacks, and aggression towards others. They misinterpret everything as attacks and are prone to rages even at the slightest hint of friction. They can have difficulty maintaining close relationships. Think of an animal backed into a corner afraid for its life; when it goes into fight-or-flight mode, it scratches, bites, screams, urinates, anything to get out of the situation alive. In humans, short tempers betray deep insecurities.

What’s especially noteworthy is that other opinions can also be viewed as a threat. Argumentative people crave a “thrill of victory” (again, the dopamine rush) because their minds interpret other viewpoints as literal threats. It’s like an immune system going berserk and sending white blood cells to wipe out an infection. This is why I personally try to avoid internet debates; just like the person with anger management issues, someone who constantly needs to win arguments online is usually trying to mask childhood insecurities.

I personally think that the specific abuse that leads to internet trolling is neglect. Divorce and its traumatic effect on children is one example, but neglect can take many forms. It could be that the parents punished the child by locking them in closets or kept them isolated from others. Or the mom or dad always worked too late and never spent time with their children.

Our relationship with our parental figures shapes who we are perhaps more than anything else (birth order plays a factor, too). There’s an old saying that the way you talk to your children is the voice they’ll hear in their heads for the rest of their lives. Children need to feel safe and protected by their families. Absent parents create fear in their children. The child lives with an underlying sense of being abandoned in the wild surrounded by predators. In adulthood, this fear manifests itself as a desperate need for attention. People who are loud, boisterous, or flamboyant were often neglected by their parents. The coping mechanism is the attempt to be the center of attention, always, in every situation, and is the sad story behind famous comedians like Robin Williams.

The term “projection” is used to describe imagining one’s own desires onto others. However, I use the term somewhat differently. Let’s call it “the parental hallucination.” People with bad relationships with their parents grow up imagining everyone they meet is their parents, most of the time without even realizing it. There’s a projector in their heads broadcasting an image of their mom and dad on everyone they know, even their own spouses and children.

This is why so many girls abused by their fathers marry abusive men. They’re trying to rewrite their childhood in adulthood, only this time they hope to get love and nurturing from the monster. But the deadly trap is that like any addiction, it never works. Robin Williams spent decades being adored, applauded and loved by millions, but that could never fix the neglect he suffered from his parents.

So we have two ingredients that make up the groundwork for an internet troll. The first is an overdeveloped amygdala that views everything, even something as harmless as another person’s opinions, as a threat. The second is the parental projection, the hallucination that everyone they meet online is their mom and dad. If they were neglected as children, they now have the ability to make themselves the center of attention. The third is perhaps the most crucial: anonymity. Imagine being able to punish your parents from the shadows without ever suffering any perceived consequences. Trolls often tend to have garish, cartoony avatars and rarely show their true faces. Like the KKK, Isis, or Antifa, real cowards act brave while wearing masks.

This futile attempt to make up for a lost childhood motivates people to take up strange causes. Most angry feminists have an absent father somewhere in their past. Behind most atheist social media trolls are oppressively strict religious parents. Crazed environmentalists or animal rights activists tend to have parental figures who beat or verbally abused them (they project their parents onto the meat companies and themselves onto the animals). The epidemic of single motherhood has left us with a generation with considerable daddy issues.

The desire for attention from parents while wanting to lash out at them at the same time is a toxic combination. This is the average internet troll in a nutshell. But lest I be accused of adopting the “blame your parents” cliché, there does come a point where self-responsibility comes in. In other words, no matter how bad their childhoods were, people can eventually grow up and come to terms with it, then quit the never-ending attempt to rewrite everything in adulthood. Escaping these behavioral patterns is one of the most freeing things that can happen in life.

I don’t even think it’s a new behavior.

Asshats have always been around. It’s just that it used to be that you had to be physically in their presence to notice them. Now they have better reach.

But Trolls have always been a part of the human experience.

Oh, and they seem more prevalent because whiners also have a whole lot more reach on the internet. They’re as hard to avoid as the trolls. When not dealing with actual trolls, we’re dealing with whiners constantly whining about trolls, which is just another form of trolling imo.

“...on the causes of destructive tendencies...”

Sometimes, there ARE no causes, friend. Some people are just ... twisted ... and get their jollies being d*ckheads. It’s a power trip, I guess.

You are correct, though, about some causes. But... Human nature is a bizarre thing, and there are simply times when there IS no explanation for why people do what they do.

It’s a power trip, I guess.

You mean, a cause?

Dig a little into psychology and neuroscience, apply those principles through observations, and you'll be surprised at how it re-colors the lenses through which you view the world.

Now, every time I get attacked by a troll on-line, all I see is a neglected child crying out for attention from mommy and daddy. It's freeing, because the best way to win is not to get sucked into their vortex, but to deny them that attention.

I understand you, friend.

But it doesn’t change the fact that some folks just get off on being morons, and nothing will change that.

“...Dig a little into psychology and neuroscience, ...”

My studies were learned a long time ago, on the streets of North Philly... :^) “School of Urban Warfare.”

Good point. I suspect distance increases the likelihood of trollish behavior, and whining, since in person most people don’t like to interact with trolls and whiners.

If you’re trying to persuade me, you need to speak a different language. As in, convince me why I’m wrong about my research on the amygdala’s role in fear and anger responses. Or the effects of childhood abuse and neglect across the spectrum of life. Or my theory on the parental hallucination (which I can see clear evidence through observations of human interaction).

“...If you’re trying to persuade me,...”

I’m not. It’s just that your experiences are probably different than mine. I’ve known people throughout my life that had great upbringing, and they STILL turned out to be complete worthless douchebags (usually after getting involved drugs, to be fair).

“...convince me why I’m wrong about my research...”

You’re not. Never said you were. I just said that in SOME cases, SOME people are just .. rotten through and through, for no apparent, discernible reason.

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