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As you may or may not know, the first principle of Unitarian Universalism is defined as:

“The inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

It’s also the only principle that I can quote verbatim, which might tell you something about how important it is to me. It’s also first on the list, and short and catchy and easy to memorize. But being the very first principle on the list, it’s probably just as important to other UUs as it is to me.

But seriously, worth and dignity is something I think about a lot, especially since so much of my free time is spent on the internet. It’s incredibly easy to devalue other people on the internet. Instead of a face, you’re interacting with a username. You forget that there’s a person on the other end of that username, and so it’s easy to say things to that person that you would never, ever say in real life. In fact, some people on the internet make a habit out of bothering and insulting other people. These are what we call “trolls”. But even for the non-trolls among us, it’s still riduiculously easy to get into a fight on the internet. It’s incredibly hard to avoid, and we have terms like ‘snark’ and ‘wank’ and ‘butthurt’ and ‘flame wars’ to describe these interactions.

I recently joined a community on livejournal called ontd_political. Members post current political news stories and discuss them in comments. Being a livejournal community based on such a sensitive topic as politics, there’s a tremendous amount of conflict. People are very passionate about their views. The majority of people take insults and snark and differing views in good humor, trying instead to be involved in the debate intellectually or diffuse the conflict with a funny macro (it is an ontd offshoot, after all). But there’s still moments when a thread will devolve into an internet shouting match equal to the worst Youtube comment battles, only with less typos and better grammar.

Being respectful of other people in such a setting is not something that comes naturally, and this is where the first principle comes in. Your automatic response is to devalue someone when all you know about them is a silly username and an insulting viewpoint. I’m as guilty of this as the next person- when afa_mom tells us Obama is a secret muslim or when bludstone tells us the government is evil and Ron Paul will save America, I don’t want to think of them as actual people. I don’t want to be reminded of their inherent worth and dignity as human beings, I want to ridicule them, insult them, and take them down a notch.

But responding to them as faceless internet trolls, and not as real people, is what starts the thread wars. I have found overwhelmingly in my interactions on the internet, that if you take care with your words and make it clear that you take the other person’s response seriously, they will be more likely to take you seriously, and listen to what you’re saying. Even on youtube, it’s possible to hold a polite debate and even persuade a person to change their viewpoint if you treat them with respect and talk to them as people.

For me, being a good Unitarian Universalist in life means being a good Unitarian Universalist on the internet, too. It’s ten times harder to remember the inherent worth and dignity of the person behind every username, but just as important. If so much of people’s interaction takes place on the internet, then we have to adhere to the same standards as we hold ourselves in everyday life. As ridiculous as it sounds, there’s inherent worth and dignity behind every username, and I always try to remember that.

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