I was reading a bio of Joseph Goebbels yesterday; Goebbels became the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He wasn't an 'incel'; he was never long without a woman and he didn't lack for power and glory, either. He was, however, in search of a savior BEFORE he became a nazi. He even thought he might be one himself--talk about narcissistic delusions of grandeur. When he finally met Hitler, he knew he found the real savior he was looking for. It was apparently a transfiguration for Goebbels, a bromance at first sight, for real.

My point is this: hateful, retrograde movements have formed before without the assistance of electronic media or the internet. The National Socialist Party had a disgusting ideology, certainly, but it also a lot of strong ordinary person-to-person glue to bond it together.

This internet-based "incel movement" is a virtual community which likely aggravates isolation, alienation, and anomie more than reduces it. There isn't much of that person-to-person chemistry which holds a PTA, Rotary, Republicans, or the Socialist Workers Party together.

Several weeks ago we had a thread about relationships between women and men where I said that our society treats men with fear and contempt. This is a very good example. Lonely, socially awkward men are suddenly narcissists and psychopaths. — T Clark

One, your post did not get a fair response.

Two, right you are. I don't know any "incels", but I have known disappointed unsuccessful men all my life--indeed, I've been one at times. I don't think it's about sex. Even down and out men seem to be able to find sexual partners when they want to. It's more about not having a reasonable opportunity to gain self-respect. It's about lack of work, or bad work. It's about being devalued and not being treated as a worthwhile person. It's being discarded.

"Failure" smells bad and a lot of people shy away from the unsuccessful, and justify their distance by projecting negative characteristics onto them.

Can one criticize the botched, perverted, and sadly mass produced/manufactured Jungian collective unconscious, at all? How does one reason with this insanity? — Posty McPostface

“Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods ‘factors,’ which comes from facere, 'to make.' The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the ‘factors’ themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors.
To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously guarded supremacy of consciousness - which is in truth one of the secrets of human success - is questioned in the most dangerous way. But since ignorance is no guarantee of security, and in fact only makes our insecurity still worse, it is probably better despite our fear to know where the danger lies. To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem. At any rate we then know that the greatest danger threatening us comes from the unpredictability of the psyche's reactions. Discerning persons have realized for some time that external historical conditions, of whatever kind, are only occasions, jumping-off grounds, for the real dangers that threaten our lives. These are the present politico-social delusional systems. We should not regard them causally, as necessary consequences of external conditions, but as decisions precipitated by the collective unconscious.

C.G. Jung „The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

In other words, these people are manifesting the symptoms of our insanity; there is no "one" with the capacity to reason, living outside and immune from 'the factors'. Indeed the delusion of externality, and rationality is the most dangerous of all, as @Bitter Crank describes. Advertisers and politicians know what works, but have no idea of what work it does beyond the measure of 'sales' and 'votes'.

From what I've seen, it doesn't seem that many Trump supporters fall into the alt-right category. Does anyone have specific information about this. Alt-right tend to be reactionary. They want to go back to an imagined golden age when women were subservient to men. That seems pretty far from the populism of the people who voted for President Trump. — T Clark

A wide variety voted for Trump. I don't think it's wise to assess them "as a group."

Neo-Nazis are our kin. You can't expect everyone to have compassion for them.

Similar situation here.

Indeed the delusion of externality, and rationality is the most dangerous of all, as Bitter Crank describes. — unenlightened

There's a lot to talk about this. It can even be argued that, evolutionary, we're at a disposition to take things on 'authority' and trust in order provided by that authority. To apply lofty and worthwhile ideals, some force and external factor is required to maintain and enforce it (I'm talking about education). Plato talked about this, in terms of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I don't subscribe to the fatalism of Jung and Freud, and believe in things like what William James had to say about the will to believe, or Dewey, which I should come around to reading one of these days.

"Failure" smells bad and a lot of people shy away from the unsuccessful, and justify their distance by projecting negative characteristics onto them. — Bitter Crank

This is a link that @praxis provided three weeks ago which talks about death rates among white men. I think these are the guys you are talking about. While death rates for others have gone down, the rates for 45 to 54 year old white Americans have actually risen significantly since 1998. Leading the rise are poorly educated white men. Causes of death - suicide, drug overdose, liver disease, or, as the article indicates, despair.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/boomers-deaths-pnas/413971/

The extremes are always logical extensions of 'normality'. This is what we have made; these are the values we live. — unenlightened

. It's more about not having a reasonable opportunity to gain self-respect. It's about lack of work, or bad work. It's about being devalued and not being treated as a worthwhile person. It's being discarded. — Bitter Crank

These are a few aspects of the issue that I was drunkenly trying to illustrate last night. Apologies to @StreetlightX and @Akanthinos, although I still find your disparaging comments about these people reprehensible.

Incels are men with terrible personalities, who use every other excuse under the sun to justify why they can't get laid, with the focal explanan being women. By the way, there is all the difference in the world between young men who are lonely, shy, introverted etc., and may have difficulty talking to women (or anyone) as a result, and those that fuel that loneliness into wrath and resentment and misogynistic narratives. And speaking of Jordan Peterson, he absolutely helps to fuel this.

It's flabbergasting how similar the core-sample you've extracted from a random incel forum reads and feels to the style (and ideological contents) of the other groups I've mentioned.

There's a peculiar feeling that many of the headlines and bylines give rise to (I don't know if there's an english word for it). It happens when you see a claim or argument that you can immediately recognize is politically or emotionally controversial and that you know is specious, but because of its context or phrasing, actually addressing or responding to it would require a literary (literal?) mountain of ground-work. "Even 1 YEAR OLDS AVOID unattractive people" is a good example in the context of incels. It's a combination of revulsion at the tedious difficulty of offering a rebuke and anxiety over the chilling effect you know might occur if you do not (or if you fail).

Though for some, it must be like looking at hieroglyphics. "Giga Chad", "bluepilled, "deformitybaiting"... Giga Chad is an especially obscure symbol as far as I know (I could explain it but it's actually more absurd than the alt-right's stance on pornography which I revealed earlier). Their new language can sometimes be fun in context (example: referring to Putin as a "Chadlet": (Chad + Manlet)) but it also has the function of gate-keeping the communities. Generally only children of the internet wind up making it to these obscure destinations, and their journeys through various social media circles equip them with the underlying vernacular and facts that aggregate in the larger niche destinations, and function as language.

For instance, before Jordan Peterson unambiguously disavowed the alt-right, every alt-righter used Peterson's concepts, metaphors, and memes in their ideological nest building, and so unless you are yourself familiar with them, a chat-room full of alt-righters will erupt into derisive laughter when suddenly you're asked about whether Prozac will can help lobsters clean their room and not know how to respond (only if he's already already slain the Sea-Dragon of chaos) where failure to answer likewise loses you any chance of persuasion (because you would be uninformed. "Have you even read Siege?"). When Peterson finally did directly disparage the alt-right, (to be fair it was still coalescing into its contemporary form, so he was largely unaware of it), over-night those who sided with Peterson were gone from alt-right destinations and Peterson became a negative appeal instead of a positive one (though his vernacular remained).

In truth these-communities are deeply fractured and inconsistent, individuals with individual problems, and they are united mostly by shared emotions (emotions of discontent usually). They're somewhat fragile because of this and as evidenced by the many schisms prevalent in online social communities, which brings me back to the earlier point: without the cover and insulation that a niche corner of the internet can provide, a lot of these bad ideas would be disinfected by natural sunlight.

The internet and social media are not the original sources of our present misfortunes, though as has been made clear they have likely amplified them (in perception and effect). But when does the digital medium become the message?

In the world before social media "incels" surely existed, such as they are, but perhaps they did not have access to a digital environment which would encourage and reinforce resentment and instead would have generally resigned to work on themselves. This is a microcosm of one of the hidden features of the internet: it has something for everyone.

If the medium embeds itself in the message as McLuhan suggests, then online social media is the rat-king of all media, or rather, it creates them. The internet is great for anonymous complaining, and don't we all like to have our complaints validated? There's an emotionally validating community for everyone in this circus, and the niches continue to grow in number and diverge in intensity. It's not that the internet leads to incels, it's just aggregates them into one community (a community which has it's own demonstrable effects, such as in this case the breeding of resentment and vilification of others).

McLuhan didn't mean it literally when he said "the medium is the message", he meant that the medium warps and transforms the message; it creates an environment of it's own. When he followed that up with "And the content must be the audience", he anticipated online social media with prophetic accuracy and unfortunate understatement.

Thinking about the peculiarities of the medium, I see straight away that it radically equates doctoral theses and bar-room banter; everything is preserved and disseminated. This taking seriously of every passing thought is exactly like psychoanalytic therapy - except we are all as much therapist as patient.

So what is exposed is a lot of unconscious thoughts and feelings, much more so than previous media. It is the medium of the collective unconscious. Sex, and more sex, and even more sex. On the one side the activities of the powerful, who have always lived out their fantasies, and on the other, the frustrations of the powerless who have not. Incels are just Weinsteins with no power, but the web treats them equally, and exposes both.

We are exposed to ourselves, and the posturing of politicians about their weapons of mass orgasm and who's going to emasculate whom, the sexual sadism of ISIS, everything that was already there but hidden, is now arrayed before us as what we vote for, what we take seriously, what we have always secretly wanted. Tic Tacs are date rape pills of the imagination.

It's an interesting phenomena. All people under 35 are having less sex, but particularly men 18-24, with those having no sex rising from 19 to 31% over the last 15 years.

More entertainment options, hormone disrupting plastics inundating the food supply, higher rates of obesity, there are plenty of plausible factors. Most don't explain the gender gap, which is more puzzling. Women 25-34 saw a drop, although not as large as men, but women.18-24 are ahead of 1990s figures.

There's an asymmetry there that obesity and chemical contaminants can't explain. Online dating might have some role. There is a huge gender imbalance in number of messages sent, as well as rankings of attractiveness. Male rankings of female attractiveness sort of approximate a normal distribution. Women's rankings of men is heavily left skewed towards lower numbers. Online dating filters the first step of mate selection through mostly visual queues, and that could skew things. That's just a single hypothesis I've read though, I don't know if it has much evidence. The other factor is that people tend to date those at the same educational level and men are attending college and grad school at lower rates and dropping out significantly more often.

Internet phenomenon? Sign of our times? — frank

incel = involuntarily celibate

There could be billions of people on earth right now, including men women children seniors etc... who want sex but don't have it. Therefore they are all incels.

There is also billions who could be vcel: voluntarily celibate, because they don't want herpes and child support or many other harmful things that come from sex.

Are you an incel?

Are you an incel? — frank

Right now im a vcel

really any incel could get sex if they just lowered their standards and asked more people lol

so almost nobody in this world is a true incel. only disabled people with severe medical problems.

It's a derogatory term.

It's a derogatory term. — frank

Watch how quick feminists are to label guys they don't like as incels. Yet in their next breath they claim to be accepting of mental illness haha. Total confusion and hypocrisy feeding their pathetic little egos.

Truth is they are just insulting disabled people. Who really are the only true incels.

Watch how quick feminists are to label guys they don't like as incels. Yet in their next breath they claim to be accepting of mental illness haha. Total confusion and hypocrisy feeding their pathetic little egos.

Truth is they are just insulting disabled people. Who really are the only true incels. — hope

You sound pretty bitter about the whole thing.

You sound pretty bitter about the whole thing. — frank

What about all the 40 year old women who can't get a date anymore, or a relationship.

How about we make up a term for them called insin = involuntarily single.

What is the point of this? I can also watch ethical porn and masturbate. In fucking some stranger, I'm after a hedonistic confidence boost. In fucking anyone else, I do want for them to have qualities that I can somehow appreciate. Lowering your standards is just simply unethical. You can fuck for fuck's sake, but, otherwise, there's some aspect of manipulation on the part of whoever does so, aside from that it happens to be completely dissatisfying.

Damn Sir! Excellent education on something I am unfamiliar with until it is explained.
I have three young adults living with us at the ranch and I have learned not to react to a topic I am unfamiliar with and work to remain open as I hear people's explanation or their position.
Thank you for taking the time to explain something to me and hopefully I can ask you questions as I encounter them.
Most recently has been the "imposter syndrome" and then TanaCon.
You have to respect this new generation.
Courtesy given, respect earned.
Well done :up:

Point is its all relative. Anyone can get anything if they are willing to compromise and do whatever it takes.

What about all the 40 year old women who can't get a date anymore, or a relationship. — hope

This is just making you sound more bitter.

It's entirely absurd for a man to voluntarily identify as being involuntarily celibate, as there is another party. It's also absurd because of that it is just kind of embarrassing. I haven't had sex in over two years and I am not proud of that, nor to I do feel a need to wage some sort of revolt online.

As far as a critique of seemingly Feminist inspired ways of digging at men in general go, I feel like we have come a long way from "nice boys" to "simps". They'll figure whatever out in good time, y'know?

This is just making you sound — frank

I'm simply showing the parallel. Women are the same as men, but in a different way.

s entirely absurd for a man to voluntarily identify as being involuntarily celibate — thewonder

They do, though. See Vagabond's coverage of the topic previously in this thread.

What is the point of so-called "compromise", though!? I've been on OkCupid and Tinder. The people who, without my exploitation of the aggregate, express interest have, in varying ways, let themselves go to a considerable degree. That would seem to be terribly thoughtless, if not cruel, on my part.

It's entirely absurd for a man to voluntarily identify as being involuntarily celibate — thewonder

He is basically just saying he can't get laid.

Which is no different then a woman saying she can't get a long term relationship.

It's because women are the gatekeepers of sex and men are the gatekeepers of relationships.

I'm not saying they're not out there. I'm just saying that it's like the equivalent of those poor young men who have to wear those hoodies that say that they are proud of their virginity because of their Christian parents.