Troll Thyself
In the fourth week of The Interactive Voice—or in the fourth chapter, if you’re following along at home—the main assignment is to identify an argument that falls under the focus you chose for the semester and that you feel passionate about.
Then I ask you to argue the opposite side of that argument and play the devil’s advocate.
It’s my favorite assignment. When I gave it to a class for the first time, I knew its significance in teaching writing, but I couldn’t have imagined its importance in the present landscape. Thought it’s a standard writing prompt, it quickly became one of the semester’s most important learning moments.
First came the disclaimers. Though every student in my class writes under a pen name, they were quick to issue elaborate, italicized warnings on the assignment:
To whom it may concern, please do not associate the following words or ideas with me. This is only an assignment for a college class and an odd professor who wants us to write in the voices of those who oppose all that is good, rational, and/or holy.
Clearly, I’d hit a gas line. The lesson worked, and in more ways than one.
Other students discovered their empathy. They honestly struggled to put themselves into the wingtips of the opposing bench. I always have a debate team captain or two as well. They slip so easily into the mind of “the enemy,” it looks to the rest of the class like they didn’t understand the assignment.
If I’m lucky, one student will write like I hope all of my students will learn to write, and become the example.
Good writing discovers. Good authors advance their thinking through both their research and their writing processes. Even in a final draft of many drafts, a good article preserves that sense of discovery for the audience. Every few semesters, one student facing a polarized issue discovers a third way to navigate through it.
You can’t write like this if you have all the answers.
I’ll never forget the student who was so energized by the assignment she took all of these steps at once. She made the passionate argument she felt defined her, then researched the opposition and imagined that perspective, and finally found the issue far more complicated. She was strikingly open about learning and changing her mind, admitting she’d never challenged herself like that before.
How often are we asked to challenge our own wisdom? It’s the rare student who follows through, and the rare individual who admits to changing a prsonal perspective rather than wanting to create change in others.
Not long after these first semesters, the country lost its mind, and the people who needed the devil’s advocate lesson most of all distorted and exploited the very social media platforms I use to teach good communication.
Internet trolls take their name not after the monster under the bridge, but from the fishing process where a net is dragged along the bottom of the sea. The moniker “troll,” like the label “hacker,” was a positive word in early Internet culture that became a negative word in the mouths of the Internet skeptical. A good Internet troll, according to the original definition, does exactly what my assignment does.
A troll is jester to the king. In medieval times, the court clown could often say or suggest ideas in front of royalty—through the art of comedy—which would get anyone else executed. The wise Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear is created in opposition to the King’s figurative blindness.
Online trolls use the Web to net the general public, looking to catch and awaken people who can only see one solution.
It’s American to troll. The checks and balances system built by the founders is designed to counter polarized mindsets and give voice to marginal ideas. A good member of a political party fights like a good lawyer in a courtroom and a good scientist in the lab—they fight passionately about an idea to further the truth.
They don’t mind losing if their hypothesis, client, or law proves wrong, guilty, or lacking.
Americans in particular should be more conscious of the human tendency to become wrapped up in “us” versus “them” by now. The need to wake the self when you feel the need to awaken everyone else is as old as Plato’s “Know thyself.” The only way to question authority is to question yours first.
When I gave this assignment a few weeks ago, a painter in my class said, “You’re talking about the internal editor, and the artistic process.”
On the nose. I didn’t start teaching counterarguments, comedy, or trolling because they are current obsessions of the Web, but because they have always been the most important aspect of artist or writer. The authors who are relentless in their judgment of themselves, their ideas, and their work author the great works.
Causes make terrible literature. The writers who live within the paradoxes of life create the fiction, nonfiction, and art that grasp and occasionally change the world.
In other words, if you know thine enemy, then you clearly have homework to do.