Once upon a time, happyheathen joined a message board.
Initially, he seemed to be a reasonable, productive member. His opinions didn’t stray much out of a subset of the mainstream, but he did have interesting things to say, and expressed himself with wit and clarity. However, he discovered, as do we all, that many of his early posts went unremarked. He felt insecure and ashamed, wondering what was wrong with him that his opinions, once offered, failed to elicit much of a response.
Because, in fact, he was merely one of a teeming horde, jostling for attention and respect. He found that it was taking an uncomfortably long time to build up a persona on the message board, and that he wasn’t getting personal satisfaction from his contributions. Perhaps subconsciously, he suspected that he wasn’t doing enough to set himself apart from the thousands of other individuals, and wasn’t making much of a mark.
Then he discovered, possibly by chance, possibly by deliberate experimentation, that he could attract more attention by posting more outrageous opinions. To be sure, this earned him a share of rebuke and admonishment, as his forays outside the bounds of rationality and respectfulness triggered the ire of other members of the message board.
However, he had discovered his Holy Grail, a Shortcut To Identity. Rather than being lumped in with all the other individuals who shared the majority of his views, he could proactively attack those who disagreed with him, and thereby gain the notice of the board at large. The downside, perhaps, is that the image he created was of a hotheaded jerk, but certainly, he believed, that was preferable to suffering the shame of anonymity.
Unfortunately for happyheathen, he found that this strategy, while indeed a shortcut, was also short-lived: He had to engage in ever more outrageous behavior in order to continue achieving the same effects. No longer content with hijacking threads to attack people’s religious beliefs, he got sucked into a self-perpetuating spiral of abusive behavior, ultimately resorting to the labeling of his debate opponents as morons and subhumans in a misguided attempt to keep his side of the “discussion” afloat.
Eventually, his entire interpersonal grammar was replaced by insults and invective, and the formerly productive and informative poster was, to the eyes of everyone on the message board, replaced with a uselessly venemous curmudgeon who contributed absolutely nothing to any thread in which he participated. Sadly, the message board began to turn their backs on him.
The result, of course, is that it took even more outrageousness on the part of happyheathen to get the attention of those who had chosen to disregard him. The vicious circle continued: The more effort he expended to maintain his profile, the more the board collectively turned away. It got so bad that, toward the end, he was actually reduced to defending a person’s right to drive at unbelievably unsafe speeds with children loose and unsecured in the vehicle.
And finally, like a snake eating his tail, he spun himself into oblivion and vanished. But by that time, nobody was paying attention, and there were no witnesses to his final act of self-disintegration.
The end.
The Inevitable Sequel
Once upon a time, Eleusis joined a message board. However, he never had anything valuable to contribute from Day One, so when he finally slunk away to find a forum where his slopeheaded burbling would be better received, no one noticed at all. The end.