Trolls as sociopaths

Like Megan, I was somewhat horrified by this passage from The New York Times’s fascinating piece on trolls:

Fortuny spent most of the weekend in his bedroom juggling several windows on his monitor. One displayed a chat room run by Encyclopedia Dramatica, an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore. It was buzzing with news of an attack against the Epilepsy Foundation’s Web site. Trolls had flooded the site’s forums with flashing images and links to animated color fields, leading at least one photosensitive user to claim that she had a seizure.

. . .

As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and not be required to help.”

I couldn’t believe that the articles’s author just kind of let that statement go. We’re talking about people who exhibit a number of the classic symptoms of sociopathy in this piece; that quote is simply the most glaring one. No, of course you can’t be REQUIRED to help someone burning to death; it’s simply part of the moral code of this (and virtually every other civilization) that aiding another person in distress is a good thing to do. It’s why babies in a nursery will all start crying if one of their neighbors starts–the vast majority of us are hardwired to feel empathy for the suffering. Those who aren’t are sociopaths. And these people are clearly sociopaths.