The Truth About Trolls

Art from gucomics.com

PwnUrMom is a troll, and even though we tend to despise trolls, this post is not a rant on him.  It is about speaking the truth — the truth about trolls.

Let’s be frank.  Through all his misogynistic, racist, demeaning and generally negative comments, we want him.  We crave him.  He wants attention and we clamor to him — just like the woman who keeps dating jerks and complaining to the nice guys, or the man who keeps going back to the women who use him.  We say that we hate PwnUrMom, but we keep going back to him.  We could ignore him, but do we choose that route?  We hide our attraction by deriding him, but that veil is thin.

When we flag his comment or publicly denounce him, it is to satisfy that craving of beating down on something immoral, something indecent.  We are mistaken, however, to think that everything immoral and indecent lies in PwnUrMom.  Though we may pretend, it is not PwnUrMom that we despise, but the sick puppy inside of us that we project onto him.  Have we not all done or thought much worse things than call somebody a fag? Do we not each have deep dark secrets that we dare not share with anyone?  Should we not first remove the log from our own eye?  It is that same sick puppy inside us that revels at every celebrity scandal and political slugfest.  Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that “he is evil” and “we are good”.  Aren’t all the insults going his way just as bad as the stuff coming out of his mouth?  Yeah, “he started it first”…um, how old are we?  And aren’t we the ones accusing him of being childish?

But it is not just about hypocrisy, for even hypocrites speak truth sometimes — it is true that many of his comments are deplorable.  No, it’s worse because we are active participants in perpetuating those comments.  If he never got any response, would he continue to exist as PwnUrMom the troll?  If we did not subscribe to the trash news depicting and spreading the worst that humanity has to offer, would it still be around?

Gratuitous sexy picture with trolls, thanks to cracked.com

In the movie Untraceable, a serial killer sets up a website where people can log in to watch his victim be tortured to death.  The twist is that the intensity of the torture is directly proportional to the number of viewers.  Of course, every single time, the website gathers enough viewers to torture his victim to death.  The movie may be allegorical, but I find it hard to doubt that were a serial killer to do this in real life, the result would be the same.  It is easy to point an accusing finger at a public sicko from the safety of anonymity hiding our private inner sicko.

In fact, it may be PwnUrMom who is the righteous one by sacrificing himself to be our moral pinata.  I reckon we should thank him for holding out a mirror so brightly reflecting our darkness, our misgivings, our many faults.  Perhaps PwnUrMom just needed a thanks, an open embrace, a sympathetic ear.  How would each of us have turned out without a supportive environment?  Would we have ended up the same way?  Why does he crave attention?  (Don’t we all?)  Who are we to say.  Or maybe he simply is just a complete asshole.  The point is, it is much easier to throw stones than it is to try and understand each other.  In the end, whatever the truth is about PwnUrMom, that same truth applies to us as well.