The Lost Art of the Troll – Part I

reply to post by LesMisanthrope


Excellent insight as always LesMis. I've been contemplating how I could possibly troll this thread but I decided there is no use in trolling a thread that champions the art of trolling.

I proudly characterize myself as a troll, and I truly do believe in the concept of trolling in a positive light. Why do I embrace being a troll? Trolls push the boundaries of acceptable social and intellectual norms, and by doing so are able to present unique and original perspectives. Trolls are interesting. When you are truly trolling, you are presenting ideas so profound and insightful that most people will not be able to wrap their heads around your ideas and immediately reject them. If you want to truly present profound and insightful ideas, you cannot go about doing this in an agreeable fashion. The only way to let your ideas shine is to draw attention to them by alienating it from all other ideas, and the way you do this is the process of trolling.

I believe the concept of trolling is a noble one, but the execution is often less than noble. There certainly are noble trolls, and then there are trolls that taint the concept of trolling. Trolling is only an effective and acceptable method if you have a reasonable cause for doing so. You use trolling to champion your cause, but if your cause isn't worth championing you must relook the reasons why you are trolling. When you are trolling you often end up bashing other people's ideas and making fools out of them, and if you do this purely for the fun of it then you should be ashamed.

My favorite trolls in history are fools from Shakespeare's plays. Fools have the freedom to bash on kings and perform rash actions without any reprecussions because people rationalize: "he said or did that just because he is a fool." As a result of this freedom, there was always a profound, underlying meaning to everything the fool said that usually went unrecognized by other characters in the play, but not by the audience.

This is the goal of a troll, to present the illusion of a fool to people they are arguing with in order to make a fool out of others by eliciting illogical and overly emotional responses, and by doing so the troll shows he is intellectually and emotionally superior to his opponents.

But as I said before, this intellectual superiority is meaningless without a reasonable cause being it. Bashing others' ideas just for the fun of it is truly a foolish thing to do.

Friends. I have devised a follow up.

I'm hoping you will grace it with your trolling.

Part II