Whenever people are like oh we need to empathize w/ incels, care about their feelings blah blah, I just think about what Lundy Bancroft said about abusers.
They need to learn empathy, and this excessive focus on their feelings is a barrier to them learning empathy.
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/iHateCogsci/status/1610409758120361984
But this is step 1 of “offering an alternative”: recognizing that it takes different skillsets/social conditions to get them well-adjusted, because for whatever reason they’re starting from a different psychological basis.
I agree that to some extent the whole idea of focusing on these guys is counterproductive. But focusing on them is not the same as making sure that our movement is equipped to deal with them effectively, without having to relive this generational moment over and over again.
They feel alienated from society because it feels unlivably complex, and they happen to fit enough heuristics of the power group that they feel entitled to deal with that complexity by violently maximizing their adherence to power.
The right takes advantage of this by a) being in power already, b) being the same kind of people, and c) happy to use these guys to further their own interests. So they offer the easy, accessible, lowest-common-denominator solution of just catering to that entitlement.
Of course “Be a good person” doesn’t effectively compete. But that doesn’t have to be the only narrative the left offers. We need the next step, a narrative that starts with “Be a good person” and builds it into a competitively epic cognitive reward mechanism.
Honestly just think this is a problem created by the internet drastically changing our society.
To completely oversimplify, for the unlucky less attractive people dating has always been a sort of numbers thing, the more people they meet the more chances of clicking with someone on an emotional level.
The problem is that the internet has drastically changed all the “natural” ways people used to meet and we’ve never really resolved the fact that massive amounts of socialisation online has had the effect of removing socialisation in person where meeting people and making up these numbers would happen.
The best way to stop incels, is for them to stop being incels by meeting people and making those connections that ultimately leads to the celibate part stopping. The problem is that they do not, and that the internet has given them the power to meet as few people as possible and then to complain about it. Then they fester in their hateful spaces only making themselves more and more unattractive and hating the world.
I don’t have a solution though, they need to meet more people, a lot more people, until they click with one. And the internet has moved a lot of people online instead of offline. I know pua types say that shit too but w/e I’m not advocating for the scum shit I’m just saying meeting more people definitely helps.
What were incels before the internet? Hermits?
I don’t have a solution though, they need to meet more people, a lot more people, until they click with one.
I think the whole obsession with “finding the right one” is part of the problem. What they need is more flexibility to enter, move through, and leave communities without the goal of extracting a person from them into their patriarchal household. It’s crystalizing into a specific mold/role (or failing to) that causes them to get stuck where they end up with no way out, hung up on their failures. Which is why we see them come up with all these stereotypes like Chad, Stacey, the Woke, Groomers, etc. People having a healthy relationship with a community don’t assign themselves into these strict stereotypical groups that they have to define themselves by. They just exist as themselves.
What were incels before the internet? Hermits?
Abusive husbands, hermits, cannon fodder, “bachelors”/brothel-goers
