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Ethics and Morality
How to Keep Brats From Growing Up to Be Brats
Three top priorities for troll-proofing everyone.
Posted April 21, 2020
You might be sheltering in place with a troll. Trolls are not just online. It’s a lifestyle, a state of mindlessness that people can fortress themselves in no matter their medium or message.
Never listen, think, wonder, apologize, or introspect. Always scold, boss, dictate, and pretend you're the supreme judge and invincible hero either just because, or because you name-drop some fake savior whose coattails you ride. Say or do anything to pretend you have an absolutely uninterrupted and uninterruptable winning streak. As one popular televised troll puts it, “Even when I’m wrong, I’m right.”
You might be sheltering in place with a petulant toddler or teen. It happens. They’re trying out the troll lifestyle. It comes naturally to most of us at some point in our young lives before a conscience kicks in.
Or you might be stuck in place with an adult troll, for example, a chronically insulting, nagging, emotionally abusive partner. That happens too.
The troll lifestyle will be the death of us.
It’s important that we stop adults from regressing to the petulant troll lifestyle. And really important that we prevent our toddlers and teens from sticking with it.
Education will be changed as a result of all of this sheltering, or at least it should. Maybe it will finally adapt to being upstaged by 24/7 free online education in anything. In the 1960s, futurist Buckminister Fuller predicted that one day we’d have the best teachers in the world recording classes that are accessible to everyone everywhere. With the internet, we’ve got that now.
We get so little educational facetime with kids not just because classes are short, underfunded, and overpopulated, but because they’re too long and distracting for kids. Sure, some kids do fine in the desk-and-chalkboard classroom invented over 2,500 years ago. Most kids don’t. It’s the 21st century ADHD. We have the tiniest window of opportunity to influence them.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste but so is that tiny window of their attention we get to prevent them from wasting their minds.
As with any scarcity, it’s important to prioritize, not wasting their attention on things they can learn on their own or things they won’t retain. Learning on one’s own has gotten much easier. On tap on our cellphones, we’ve got every fact, skill, and idea.
And still, we’ve been wasting precious class time teaching what they can learn as-needed online the way we adults learn. And still, we’re teaching things they will not retain, still wishful thinking that minds are computers you can just program. Say it and they’ll know it forever.
If there’s one education priority, it’s troll-proofing our young ones. Here are three ideas about what that requires:
1. Conscience isn’t just talking about yourself.
Conscience is having your walk match your talk, which requires that you monitor your walk and talk, shepherding them into alignment. A guilty conscience is the monitor alarm going off, us feeling bad about not walking our talk.
When someone says, "Just look at yourself!” they’re not just asking us to look at our behavior, but at how our behavior is misaligned with our talk. We call it self-reflection or introspection but that’s not quite right. Trolls self-reflect when they say, “I’m perfect.”
Basically, there’s first-guessing and second-guessing. First-guessing is your un-monitored talk about your behavior. Trolls have first-guessing down cold. They say “I’m patriotic. I have integrity. I’m a stable genius,” as if declaring it makes it so and if you don’t believe them, you’re an evil idiot just out to sabotage them. First-guessing is your conscience-free, unmonitored talk about yourself. It’s boasting, self-flattery, declaring your fine qualities and tutoring others on how they must interpret you.
Self-consciousness and second-guessing ourselves have a sour reputation. Sure, they can be done wrong or in excess. Sure, they can make us feel uncomfortable. But eliminating them entirely is freedom from conscience and the gateway to the troll lifestyle.
If you simply declare that you’ve got integrity, you’re first-guessing. If you say, “I like to say that I’ve got integrity, though watching how I act, that may not be entirely true," that’s second-guessing. Training children to second-guess even though it’s awkward and they don’t want to learn it is an educational priority for troll prevention.
2. Wisdom isn’t just knowledge.
There are plenty of unknowledgeable trolls but also plenty of knowledgeable ones, trolls who memorize a bunch talking points from their one and only sacred text, whether it be religious, political, or philosophical and parrot from that parochial arsenal to prove that they’re know-it-alls.
Recently an online troll demanded that I read the Book of Revelation because it has all the answers. I told him that I had read it and several books about it. He replied “No! Just Revelations! Don’t read anything about it.”
Education should confuse the smug self-certainty in all of us. It should force-feed us enough conflicting perspectives that we eventually realize that we’re going to have to learn to shop carefully among perspectives. It’s not about being kind and tolerant, it’s about cultivating one’s life-saving BS detector as something other than imperiously sneering “fake” at anything we dislike or cynically declaring fake about everything, the way teens sometimes will.
The wisdom to know the difference is really the wisdom to want to know the differences that make a difference. It’s the wisdom to face the reality that there are differences that matter to your own survival, to not ruining our lives by living out your days in the troll’s barbed-wire foxhole, dishing it out and not taking it in.
Confirmation bias is the Achilles heel of humankind. It’s our natural inclination to dish it out and not take it in, to only attend to what proves us right, and deflect and ignore anything that hints we might be wrong.
Wisdom starts with the recognition that confirmation bias is a problem. The troll lifestyle starts with the discovery that confirmation bias can be exploited as the solution to all of one’s problems.
3. Critical thinking is not just BS-detecting those who doubt you.
There’s lots of talk about teaching critical thinking without nearly enough critical thinking about what that requires. As a result, there are a lot of trolls out there who think they’re critical thinkers because they know how to attack any idea that challenges their authority. That’s like being obsessed with fairness to you and claiming that it proves you’re fair-minded.
Critical thinking and rhetoric are two sides of the same coin. Critical thinking is BS-detecting. Rhetoric is BSing. Rhetoric is spin-doctoring; critical thinking is unspinning the spin-doctoring.
Naturally, given confirmation bias, when people pocket that two-sided coin, they use it “spin I win; unspin you lose.”
Trolls can be very nuanced critical thinkers but only to prove that everyone who disagrees with them is an idiot. They will not BS-detect their own beliefs. They umpire to win.
Troll-prevention requires learning to spin and unspin evenhandedly, in other words, learning how to unspin your own beliefs and to spin a good argument for opposing beliefs. Self-doubt and other-affirming, not just self-affirming and other-doubting.
I heard from several online trolls last week, all with the same exact parrotted message: “Who made you judge? You need to find Jesus.”
“Who made you judge?” is critical thinking directed at the troll’s challenger. “You better find Jesus” is rhetoric bolstering the troll. That’s what people will do with an education in rhetoric and critical thinking unless they are required to apply both spin and unspin evenhandedly.
Many parents have been forced by the virus to become homeschoolers for the first time. Not a bad opportunity to do a little troll-prevention, which I would argue is the paramount educational priority for every child no matter what they end up doing with their lives. Indeed, the less time they waste indulging in the mindless troll lifestyle, the better they’ll be able to adapt to our accelerating cultural change and still find something they want to do with their minds so they end up being decent people with fulfilling lives.
