So I sat down late one recent night to write some tweets intended to bring people together. There is an important unity beneath all the conflicts and hatred. Peace, and all that stuff—it’s what I believe in. We are all human… We need to respect each other… We all have good within us… Etc. etc. etc. There is “Something” rather than nothing.
But in the vacuum that is Twitter, my words hardly seemed to create meaning. Hours passed with fruitless effort. The message felt boring boring boring.
Being somewhat new to the tweet game, I was trying to move beyond pontifical points and come up with ideas to engage people online. I yearn for people of different religions, philosophies, and ethnicities to see their commonalities.
I long to interest people in the search for important universalities, a central unity. One problem, however – this idea is corny, passé.
Nowadays, who wants to understand the other side? No truth but my truth.
Who needs to seek ideas beyond our own when it is so easy to bask in oceans of online thought similar to our own?
We seem to be living in a time of diversity fractals.
At, like, 4 AM, I just went rogue. Despite years working with conflict resolution of intractable problems, I embraced a new method, ATTACK! INSULT! SLANDER! DEGRADE! FTA!
Was it the hour? Chemicals divinely finding their way into my bloodstream? Just me being me? I’m not sure, but it turned out to be fun to come up with the perfect jibe, the flawless slander, a totally unfair but funny denigration of the positions that ran counter to what I wanted to promote.
Just barely keeping myself from topics of bodily functions and sexual slurs, I called people “egobots,” “tiny minds,” and “stupidoquarks.” Not terrifically clever, but I gloried in pointing out narrow thinking as brainless, mean, pointless, and weird. I maligned intolerance. I insulted bigotry. I disrespected hatred. I went crazy. I found something to attack in every religion, every ethnicity, every political party. Everywhere! Everybody!
I came to understand why insults are widespread on the Internet. It is such resplendent fun.
Exhausted and exultant after the experience, I soundboarded my new tweets to a friend before I posted them.
Thank goodness.
He politely pointed out that this approach was a mismatch to my purpose, my purpose being “harmony”. Achieving harmony is a discipline. It is the art of synching vibrations with that which is good. It is the art of finding the notes that create chords of beauty.
As with any discipline, there is a strength required to maintain a moral perspective. In the void that is twitter, a single one’s morals may seem to echo into nothing, but it is in conjunction with others’ that they form context and volume.
He also reminded me that these tweets would exist forever, waiting to bite me in the future. A bucket of cold water. Granted that I would have any followers left to read them.
I have to say though, that I learned something unexpected from this adventure into trolling. I had not really understood the elation, the sense of power in the (semi) anonymous creation of malicious insults.
It was truly an ego building exercise, one that appeals to the discordant, disharmonious crevices of my nature. Probably so for many others. I venture to say too, that it would have been even more fun with sexual slurs and bodily functions – in a self gratifying, low frequency, mean kind of fun way.
Those tweets that never actually made it to Twitter helped me to better understand the intractable radicals of all sides. When the truth is discarded, virtue goes out the window and the full breadth of infinity ranges before you.
There is something humanly satisfying in mining vulnerabilities of the other side, but the delight of creating the perfect putdown is ultimately discordant with humanity’s greater good.
Harmony is the willingness to recognize and to avoid where you are not supposed to go.
So now that ecstasy has past. Back to the grind of trying to engage people in big ideas, in beauty, knowledge, truth, justice, love, self-examination, unity, and enlightenment.