To troll or be trolled?

Laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

Donald Trump gestures with his hands while someone holds a mic in front of him,

Politics and satire belong together, they deserve each other. Humour has been part of politics ever since the first jester dared jingle a bell in the face of a king. Those who get their kicks from bursting the bubbles of the pompous are drawn to the corridors of power like moths to a flame. But in recent weeks laughter has hit the headlines again. A couple of weeks ago, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamela Harris chose her running mate Tim Walz, the only thing most of us knew about him was that he was the one who had called Trump ‘weird’. A few minutes of furious googling later we knew much more, but the suspicion lingered that he had been picked for having finally answered the question that had plagued the Democrats for nearly a decade: how do you deal with Donald Trump?

As a psychologist who works with leaders I have been asked this question numerous times. How do you go up against someone with the magnificent trolling skills of Trump? Is it possible to win against a person so adept at humiliating those who oppose him? And I think Walz is on to something. He hasn’t called Trump a threat to democracy or labelled his supporters a basket of deplorables. No. He has called Trump weird, and his supporters good dinner guests. Why is Trump weird? Because, says Walz, he has never seen him laugh.

Trump is not the only one accused of being humourless. Our own former Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was equally unamused at becoming the butt of the joke, when a banner reading ‘I Crashed the Economy’ next to a googly eyed lettuce quietly descended behind her during an onstage interview. She left the stage abruptly and was quick to respond on X that what had happened was not funny. Most people thought it was funny and that she – like Trump – was slightly weird not to laugh it off, at least a little bit. As the political prankster Noël Godin once said: there is no better way to judge a person’s character than by how they behave when hit by a custard pie.

We spend our lives subtly and unconsciously evading the slightest whiff of humiliation.

There is however a deep psychology behind all this hilarity, or lack of it. For decades now psychologists have conducted numerous studies on the phenomenon of Gelotophobia. Not the fear of ice-cream, as one might initially think. Gelotophobes you’ll be pleased to know are perfectly capable of holding it together in the presence of a knickerbocker glory. What they fear is being laughed at, and as always this sounds infinitely more sophisticated translated into Greek (gelos/laughter, phobos/fear). Much of the gelotophobia literature is a heartbreaking tale of young people crippled by the fear that others will laugh at their weight, or their acne, or target them for bullying. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but mocking words it seems can leave us socially terrified for the remainder of our adult life. In its most debilitating forms gelotophobia is a cause for clinical intervention.

But the study of gelotophobia goes further than treating the clinically distressed. Lurking among the samples and statistics is a wisdom that helps us understand why Trump and Truss are the people they are, and more importantly teaches us something about ourselves. Because most of us in some mild sub-clinical way are gelotophobes. We spend our lives subtly and unconsciously evading the slightest whiff of humiliation. Margaret Atwood was no doubt right to say that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. But many people would rather die than be laughed at.

Could it be that our love of laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves?

One of the primary findings about gelotophobia, is that those who are most scared of being laughed at are also scared to laugh. To say of Trump or Truss that they lack humour is equally to say that the last thing on earth they want is to be the object of laughter. Most gelotophobes were once victimised, ostracised or bullied, and humour was the chief instrument of their humiliation. They were forged by the cruel conditioning of mockery. As a result, they view laughter-eliciting situations negatively. In facial coding studies they show less joy and more contempt when presented with smiling joyful people. The inner freedom to join others in laughter has been quashed by the suspicion that the laughter of others is a threat. Some compensate for this by making sure they always have the upper-hand, always the troll never the trolled. Which speaks to another finding, more applicable to Trump than to Truss, that derisive humour is the way narcissists conceal their vulnerability. Behind every grandiose expression of superiority, lies a shame and inferiority that can be defended by attacking others.

Gelotophobia ultimately is a subtype of our fear of being disliked, and if the bestseller lists are anything to go by, this is clearly a pressing concern for many people. Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishmi brought the wisdom of Japan to the question in The Courage to be Disliked, and Ryan Holiday did the same from a Stoic perspective in Courage is Calling. How to live in a world that shapes us through the threat of ridicule has been pondered for thousands of years. It even turns up in the New Testament of the Bible. When the disciples of Jesus stepped out to deliver their first public discourses, they were accused of being drunk, stupid and presumptuous. The word used to describe them in the historical sources is parrēsia, usually translated bold, but perhaps more accurately rendered the freedom to say anything (pas- all; rheō- to utter). For them freedom of speech was not a societal given but a virtue they enacted in spite of their society.

In the ancient world the term parrēsia was more often used to describe the counter-cultural courage of the Stoic philosophers. But the disciples were not Stoics. They weren’t schooled in the rigours of Greek philosophy, but rather apprenticed to the Hebrew prophetic tradition. A tradition which equally appreciated the inevitable opprobrium befalling those who presume to critique and rejuvenate a stale culture. They were simply following the teaching of the master who pointed to ridicule, scorn and gossip not as PR disasters to be managed, but as prophetic honours to be celebrated. Or, as Marty Babcock once claimed, ‘Jesus promised his disciples only three things: they would be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble.’

We should be cautious then laughing too much at the embarrassments that befall our political class, and perhaps more attentive to what our schadenfreude might point to within us. Could it be that our love of laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves? Even worse, what if vindictively celebrating their misfortunes is itself a symptom of the inner helplessness, inertia and unfreedom we claim to oppose? Or, to give the same question a more positive inflection: what would we be doing or saying differently if we were genuinely and entirely free of the fear of being ridiculed?

Blessed are those who do not fear the laughter of others for they may change the world.

Article

Culture

Generosity

Virtues

4 June 2025

6 min read

We need to rescue volunteering

Our use of the word now reflects unwanted obligations, rather than a deep desire to serve.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

Two small lifeboats raft together on a river rescue.

Lifeboats on the River Thames.

x.com/rnli_teddington

It’s a hot summer evening and there are 30 of us sweating in our dry suits. Tuesdays usually mean lifeboat training, but this night is a little different. An intermission from the usual intensity of a team-building exercise: racing two lifeboats across the river Thames. Allocated into teams of two rowing in a knockout tournament, we are going to be here for a while. Our cheers provide the soundtrack for the BBC radio crew recording a programme on volunteering. The mood is convivial; the competition is fierce. None of us have to be here; all of us choose to be. We are a lifeboat crew, and we are all volunteers.

Around 25 million people in the UK do some form of volunteering. And they are celebrated during Volunteers’ Week, which has been running for 41 years. The benefits are well documented these days. The mental and physical health boost. A sense of purpose. The chance to learn new skills. A route to forging connections with other people.

Despite this, though, the number of people volunteering has been on a twenty-year decline. One in three organisations are struggling to retain volunteers, in part due to the cost-of-living crisis making people’s time and capacity more precious than ever.

Beyond that, our use of the word seems to have shifted to reflect unwanted obligations, rather than a deeply held desire to serve. ‘I suppose I better volunteer to put out the chairs’ we might pronounce with the deathly weight of Katniss Everdeen’s ‘I volunteer as tribute,’ glancing to the left and the right in case anyone saves us from the undesirable task. It seems the very idea of volunteering needs rescue.

It wasn’t on my radar to be lifeboat crew, but an unexpected new job in an unfamiliar London suburb unlocked this possibility. When I considered ‘Why wouldn’t I?’, I couldn’t find a strong reason. So, one autumn evening I trekked down for my first Tuesday night at Teddington lifeboat station. It was time to fill in the paperwork: I was officially a volunteer.

Over the months that followed, I found myself wondering why other people gave their time, energy and skills to complete the nearly 50 training modules and to be available 24/7 when someone on the water was in need. I hungered for people’s stories, to know why they kept answering the call when their beds were warm and the night was unknown. So, over the four years that I was on the crew, I asked them. I spoke with teachers and students, company directors and full-time parents. I heard stories of multiple generations on a crew, their family’s blood running orange and blue. One woman spoke of overcoming her fear of heights to scale the side of a boat; another had an unexpected tale of a dolphin attack. Each time, I had the same question: why do you do it?

And I was struck by the fact that none of them gave an answer that fully added up. They could name parts of it: care for people, teamwork, a love of the sea. Sometimes of the reasons they started (‘Dad did it’) were not why they stayed on (‘I could make a palpable difference’). I didn’t meet anyone who didn’t enjoy being on the water. Play and peril can co-exist – and we need to have moments of joy along the way if we’re going to be in it for the long haul. But in each case, the answers always seemed to come up a little short. If I was looking for something neat and complete, I wasn’t finding it.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby. At some point, volunteering will cost you something.

Back on the river, the knockout races are suddenly interrupted. A call from the coastguard: there’s a person in difficulty in the river. The mood switch is instantaneous; the action swings from contesting to collaborating to get a boat headed upstream as fast as possible. Somewhere, someone is having a very bad day. This is what we exist for.

The RNLI was born out of a need. In the early nineteenth century, nearly 2,000 ships – and their crews – were being wrecked on British and Irish coasts every year. Sir William Hillary saw this loss firsthand from his home on the Isle of Man, joining with others to rescue as many as possible – but it wasn’t enough. People continued to perish. So, he rallied other activists and philanthropists, and in a London pub, the charity now called the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was formed. Hillary’s motto, 'with courage, nothing is impossible’, can still be found adorning lifeboat stations around the country.

None of the lifeboat crew members that I met seemed to think of themselves as anything but ordinary. They were full of admiration in the stories of fellow crew mates, but saw themselves as entirely human, naming everyday needs and familiar comforts. Writing about courage, Andrew Davison recognised that,

‘The willingness of a courageous person to forgo ease, safety, the comforts of home, and even to risk life and limb, does not spring from hatred of any of those things’.

This is, perhaps, the difference between volunteering and having a hobby (also commendable for its health benefits, sense of purpose, opportunities for connection). At some point, volunteering will cost you something. That sacrifice is needed demonstrates the level of care; otherwise, it’s simply another act of self-actualisation in the service of the volunteer themselves.

It’s dark on the river and the boat crew is still out. The BBC’s team has packed up for the evening. We have tidied the station, no evidence of the antics of hours earlier. We depart. Close to midnight, those of us who can, return. We bring the boat in from the water, and make it ready for the next call, which will inevitably come. One less job for those who’ve been on duty all evening. It’s the least we can do.

In the origins of the term is a spirit of offering. The Latin voluntaries carries a sense of ‘to give of one’s free will’. This, perhaps, is where we’ve lost our way with the whole idea. For there to be a sense of duress in volunteering is to strip the generous act of its power. Where there is obligation on one side and self-interest on the other, we can find the middle ground marked by devotion, by having chosen to serve and therefore having the commitment to see it through. This is the invitation that volunteering can offer us, and that I glimpsed from people who had been volunteering on the lifeboats for decades.

Writing to the sea-faring city of Ephesus in ancient Greece, the church leader Paul encouraged people to ‘submit to one another’, which is another way of saying sacrificially help each other. In smaller coastal communities, a lifeboat crew might be called out to save a family member. In London, a city of millions, it will always be a stranger. But either way the decision was the same: to show up. The reasons why we do it don’t always add up. There are flavours of compassion, of wanting to be useful, to be part of something bigger. But there seems to be something else as well. A dedication to meeting a need. Put another way, we might call it love.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Support now