Hi, Jeff –
I think you are on to something with your idea that what motivates hateful responses is an instinctive desire to push back against existential fears. I recommend to your attention the work of sociologist Lonnie Athens, who studies violent offenders. Athens says we have the same kind of resistance towards understanding the mindset and thought process of people who do horrible things. We slot such people into two categories: “mad” (mentally ill) or “bad.”
Both categories – “mad” and “bad” preclude us from even trying to understand what motivates the people who commit terrible crimes. After all, how can we understand them, since they are either “crazy” or “evil.” These two states of mind – “crazy” and “evil” are often presented as fundamentally unreadable, unrecognizable, un-understandable, by anybody who is “good” or “sane” – we can no more see into them than we could see into a black hole. What Athens’ work points out is that this isn’t true: there is both a developmental process that violent criminals go through, and a thought process that goes along with such acts – but we hide that knowledge from ourselves not just because understanding the motivation behind such terrible acts means we have to confront the very existential terror you talk about here – but because of how terrifying it is that we can understand what people who commit those acts are thinking…which might indicate that those people are not fundamentally different from us.
If we were to port this over as a way to look at the problem of online abuse, we might imagine that one of the reasons this problem has proven so difficult to solve is that we may be protecting ourselves from seeing the Troll Within ourselves.