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🗣 hecklers

Visakan Veerasamy
October 3, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about hecklers lately. There are a bunch of related-ish words, with varying connotations:

  • haters – simple, succinct, memorable, but can have the unfortunate side-effect of implying that the criticism is unfounded or unwarranted. (Kanye once said “haters are fans too”, which I reference often in conversations.)
  • critics – doesn’t adequately capture the disruptive nature of heckling. You can have constructive critics. Being oversensitive to criticism is a bad look. But it’s also true that a lot of criticism is written from a rather tedious
  • objectors – this typically brings to mind “conscientious objector”, which people do in defiance of conscription. I don’t know if you can really “object” to an individual; you typically object to state action, or maybe to a group. See also: dissident.
  • status regulators – this is a useful description of a very broad group of people – really, status regulators exist in every single group, and I’d maybe go so far as to say, with the rare exception of a minority of weirdos and mystic-types, all people tend to do at least some amount of status regulation in their groups and communities.
  • trolls – the “true” meaning of troll has been diluted somewhat. In my opinion, trolling was originally a kind of cheeky, mischievous, trickster activity – goading people into disagreements, getting them flustered. You could make the case that Socrates was a troll. But trolling has since come to be conflated with malicious targeted harrassment. Being oversensitive to silly trolls is a bad look.

(I realize while writing this that trolls are actually very difficult to talk about – it’s like talking about sarcasm, or irony. There are layers to it. Is the person self-aware about their trollish behavior? What about concern trolls? It’s complicated! But that’s not what I want to get into in this post.)

As my public profile grows (23,000 Twitter followers at the time of writing), I’ve increasingly found myself running into people who don’t like me, and/or what I’m doing. There are a few different kinds classes of responses I get. I would say that almost all of them can be interpreted through the lens of status regulation, which is helpful.

I was vaguely thinking about writing “how to deal with haters”, but I didn’t like the idea of that, because of the… fundamental attribution error? “Hater” is a strong term, it implies that the person has strong sentiments, is holding strongly on to their position.

Then I was reminded that Obama and Seinfeld once had a bit of a conversation about hecklers:

Obama: Do you still get hecklers? What’s your theory of handling hecklers?

Seinfeld: I say, you know what, you seem upset. I’m so sorry, I know that’s not why you came in here. Let’s talk.

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, S07E01

And it occurred to me that that’s probably the right frame. And if it’s not, well, if it’s good enough for Obama and Seinfeld, it’s good enough for me.

✱

i wish I could really get inside the minds of some haters to really know what they really think. I think part of the tragedy is that they don’t believe anybody is capable of any real feeling, and that everyone is faking/bullshitting all the time, because that’s how they feel about themselves.

and so in a way they do more damage than they are capable of intending, in a sense. because they do more damage than they can perceive, since their perception doesn’t extend that far
but at the same time I think an inverted thing is true, which is something like “you can’t hurt me in a way that matters”

whatever pain i experience reading nonsense hater stuff, it’s stuff that my brain is getting me to consider, it’s really all within me. and i’ve noticed this pain has reduced significantly in scale and scope over the years as I develop more clarity about how I help people

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