They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
Probably generally starting with either an inferiority complex, or being a sociopath.
Emotions are stronger then intellect, much stronger. And most of these people suffered in bad childhoods and were drilled or neglected into disempathy. (That’s not the necessary reaction to such childhoods but it’s a common reaction.)
suffered in bad childhoods
Just to say, but what causes those things are hate and fear.
The second one doesn’t require trauma.
Fear is a general human trait woven into our existences and should/could be reduced in a loving and supporting childhood. If love and support are missing in your childhood you don’t learn to handle your fears in a mature and stable way.
(I know I’m painting this picture with a very broad brush. It’s to point in the general direction of feelings as the most plausible and applicable answer to OPs question.)
Ok so your telling me since when I was bad in my childhood and spanked with a switch that I can become one?
Anyone can become filled with hate.
It’s weird how some people turn into neo-nazis or incels after that and I just pay sexy Russian dom mommies to beat me within an inch of my life.
No. Your response to such childhood is very individual. It’s a very common stance to live your life the opposite way of your parents lifestyle. That’s what produced the 1960s air of change in culture - hippies lived the very opposite of their parents ideals.
I simply point out well researched patterns in childhoods and their influence on character traits. Look up developmental psychology and transgenerational patterns. In Germany there’s a lot of research and publication about “war children” and “war grandchildren” (Kriegskinder und Kriegsenkel) which in general attributes a lot of the countries troubles and shortcomings to the upbringing of kids in a war and post war society with a lot of shame and guilt.
That’s certainly their rationale.
To be fair, those involved in the bad childhoods also are likely to have bad childhoods themselves (the adults I mean).
Transgenerational stuff, victims becoming offenders and the likes.
Yep, you’re right, that’s what’s meant here.
When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.
One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.
Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.
Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.
Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.
As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.
And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.
And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.
For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.
Fantastic summary! Thank you!
It makes a lot of sense when you put in like that, and makes me feel like helping people instead of ignoring/hating/looking down on them. How did you get these insights? Are you in the field of psychology?
As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.
As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.
Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?
Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.
A little empathy goes a long way. There are some truely shit evil people in the world, but most people are good people who werent given the same chances, lost their way, etc.
Ok, so this is my time to admit my very shameful past. I used to be racist, homophobic, and sexist(known as the big 3). I used my religion as an excuse for the sexism and homophobia and my father(my mom isnt racist and they are divorced) and dam near everyone on his side of the family is racist so I just grew up in that culture. Once I stopped talking to him and met a lot of people from other races, i learned we are all the same. Then I stated reading the Bible, and
once I did that, I obviously couldn’t continue believing in it.now I am an atheist and I don’t rely on a very very old book to come to my moral conclusions.So basically, it’s willful ignorance, and it is always easier to blame others for your own downfalls, and it makes you feel better about your own shitty life if you can hate on someone else.
Edited for clarification.
This is my story too. Leaving Christianity behind has been an amazing and humbling experience.
I can honestly say looking back idk if I ever really believed in it. I think I was just using it as an excuse to hate people while feeling morally superior.
I think that’s a lot of people in it. Moral superiority feels really good and hating others is a convenient way to avoid dealing with however you feel about yourself
I definitely did, and thats what made leaving so hard. I trusted the people around me, and they were telling me all kinds of things, so of course it is true. The indoctrination starts before critical thinking develops, so its just built into the firmware of your brain, you know?
Then I stated reading the Bible, and once I did that, I obviously couldn’t continue believing it.
Yeah nothing obvious about that. Your religion is idiotic, all religions are lies made up by con artists or crazy people. You cant be trusted if you need some book assembled over a 600 year period, edited and abused by religious leaders to control and manipulate the masses into maintaining and increasing their own powerbase, to tell you right from wrong.
Religion is just the old world version of todays billionaires
Couldn’t agree more. Fuck a safe space for insane blatherskite.
“willful ignorance” lol
Like I don’t wanna beat up on the guy but… fuckin hell.
Ya, I was willfully ignorant for a while in my life, and then I started to actually practice critical thinking and developing a sound epistemology. I admitted I was wrong and took steps to change that. So what exactly is there to beat up on me about?
Im glad they are a better person than they used to be, but that particular sentence made me laugh out loud
Question: does that sentence lead one to believe that reading the Bible made me think the Bible is against sexism and homophobia or does it lead you to believe that I am no longer religious because I read the bible?
Good for you.
I dunno it just made me think of that.
Fascists provide easy (but often fake) answers to hard problems. Loneliness, the fear of replacement, that kind of thing.
As someone who used to visit incel communities (though I never supported the misogynist views), I think a lot of the appeal comes from the fact that they seem to be the only support groups for lonely men. Why aren’t there any non-toxic ones?
Few exist, but they do exist.
The issue is that many times in the past when men have tried to creat men only groups, they get called sexist and forced to open the group.
Men aren’t allowed to discuss their issues (men’s rights discussion is seen as hate), they aren’t allowed to discuss that they aren’t allowed to discuss men’s issues ( this is seen as hate ). Because men are seen as privileged.
I fully expect hate for this comment and I won’t engage.
The biggest reason support groups for men aren’t well supported, is due to men enforcing the ideas of stoic machismo onto men. This leads to numerous things, one is a lack of support for men who are struggling, failing, lonely, whatever. Men aren’t allowed to discuss their feelings because men have created a society that looks at them as losers for doing so. This is, very slowly, changing though.
The problem with a lot of men’s right advocacy is that is really does end up being misogynist. Most men’s right spaces I have encountered want to blame women for being lonely, for failing to make a family, etc. Meanwhile it is men that have had the primary hand in creating society, and it has been that way for thousands of years. We can’t really affect change if we don’t recognize that this is a bed that we made. If we are not happy lying in it, then we need to change, not women. I am also saying not saying women are just perfectly fine. Clearly everyone can have serious negative issues due to life. However, as it stands, the problems we believe are brought on by society, are the constructs of men.
We can’t really affect change if we don’t recognize that this is a bed that we made.
The problem is the men that are struggling generally aren’t the same men that made the bed.
Obviously, however that doesn’t make it not a problem with men. We still need a collective introspection, and course correction.
How do you propose we bring this change about about? The one’s who need to do it have no incentive. The rest of us can sit and think about things and blame ourselves for being men all we want but it won’t change anything. I can encourage and support my peers all day long but it won’t help them be more successful in life or get women to like them romantically because I have no social capital either.
You have to blame the men in charge, but also yourself, your upbringing, and realize you need to work on personal betterment just as much as trying to help other men. Real help, not just creating safe spaces to bitch about chads, and hate on women. Simply creating a place to support men, with actual counseling in mind, that diverts from just blaming women, will actually make things better, demographically. This social capital idea you have isn’t the all encompassing thing you think it is. I have seen very meh looking men, who were fucking homeless, and jobless, in relationships with women. Having support groups, that are just not echo chambers of hate, and instead are implementing counseling methods, that certified people use, that you have researched yourself (do not call yourself a councilor, or claim any professional expertise, diagnosis, etc. just offer as help, man to man, with the increased knowledge) will, broadly, increase other men’s sense of self. This will increase their personal confidence. This will lead to personal betterment. Then you push to branch out.
The idea that men need serious fucking help is already out there. Has been for a good while. It is slowly manifesting into society being more accepting of seeking mental health care, men processing their emotions, etc. Like I said, it is slow, but it is happening. If you are so inclined, do real research into the problems men face in society, like academic research, there is a lot out there to read through, and write a book. Maybe start a podcast, or YT channel. Sure you might not get anywere, but you got stuff out there, in the collective space, for others to see. Which is orders of magnitude more than any MRA, redpill, or incel community has done. Those communities just make the situation worse. They blame women, and even when they discuss men in power enforcing this, they just go “well this is a monumental task to change. Instead I will just stew, in this toxic echo chamber.” While they are just making people advocating for reform for the betterment of men look bad. Look for people who want to publicly advocate reform. From the soap box, and maybe, eventually, to the larger public domain.
I do work on personal betterment quite a lot and encourage my peers to do so. As for the rest of it, how can I start a support group or YouTube channel if no one gives a shit about me or what I have to say? No one with the power to actually make changes will listen to me. The rest already know change needs to happen but can’t do anything either so it would just turn into another echo chamber. Yes, a more positive one but still an echo chamber.
And women spaces are allowed to blame men but they dont get closed
Yes, there are instances where men’s support groups have shut down, due to misogyny, and there are women’s support groups that did not, despite being misandrists. Guess who is the primary factor in the creation of this society in which this happens?
It’s leftist groups that shut them down. Not defending the right, but that is what it is.
Can you give me specific instances so that I may scrutinize the situations?
Mens shelters for one. They got shut down for being anti feminist in my country at least. Shut down is kind of the wrong term. Maybe pushed out or gate kept? Please don’t think this me trying to get out of the conversation I just don’t have the words to describe my views. And I am exhausted from arguing with Republicans kn Facebook
You missed it lol
Then correct my aim.
(emphasis added)
Men aren’t allowed to discuss their feelings because men have created a society that looks at them as losers for doing so.
The implication here, that societal norms are created and maintained by only men, and therefore any aspects of it that affect men negatively deserve to be blamed on them, is one of the most pervasive anti-male sentiments that people try to fly under the radar with. Women have at least as much (arguably more) influence on societal norms and conventions, as men do.
This entire comment is teeming with this undertone; that is, until the end, when they come out and just say ‘all the bad stuff is men’s fault’ at the end, lol.
I didn’t say only by men, there is more comments for context to that statement you are leaving out, I said men have had most of the control through out history, so they have, by far, the greatest influence
The preferred alternative is a healthy relationship after enough therapy, the latter being a [pay]wall for some
There are more straight men who want a partner than women, so someone will be inevitably left out no matter the amount of therapy.
In case it wasn’t a typo, and just to help OP for the future…
It’s “this day and age,” not “this day in age.”
I know I’ll probably get downvoted for the pedantry here especially since everyone understands what was meant, but hopefully OP will appreciate the information about the common phrase.
Also to answer the OP’s question: inferiority complex. It runs rampant in society, especially among men.
External locus of control.
Bad things in someone’s life is not their fault, but the fault of whatever scapegoat.
Can’t get a girlfriend? It’s women’s fault.
Can’t get a job? It’s illegal immigrants.
Can’t afford to do the things you like? It’s the government taking too many taxes.
Whatever problem someone has, they are looking to blame someone rather than make any changes in their own life.
Nazis and incels need to be dealt with, yes, but the important thing to keep in mind is they are symptomatic of suffering swaths of the population. People don’t just do hate because it’s fun.
We let big businesses and the rich steamroll entire communities and industries, pay lip service to helping people who’ve been damaged by capitalism, and then after the election cycles are over leave their communities to rot. They are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren’t any others.
We allow entertainment and advertising to blast our society with a particular view of what relationship “success” is, and accept mockery of those who cannot thrive in that narrow definition due to social anxiety or other mental issues as fair game. Those men are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren’t any others.
Yes, Nazis and incels are absolutely awful, hateful problems that must be dealt with. And by the time they reach that point, I’d argue they probably can’t be saved. But they don’t fall out of the sky. They come from normal people whose cries for help went unheard, sometimes for decades, or generations. They’re the product of systemic injustices that we can mitigate with outreach programs and getting serious about mitigating the social problems that create the soil they spring from. Stopping them is a necessary band-aid, but the real solution is to address the situations that allow them to thrive in the first place.
symptomatic
Still reading your post and came across the word symptomatic being used correctly and if I had a hat I would either tip it to you or say my hats off to you…no sarcasm.
if I had a hat I would either tip it to you or say my hats off to you
Hat inequity… yet another social ill we need to address.
during gamergate i started going down the alt right rabbithole (at some point i stopped when i realized this was associated with out right nazi shit and re-evaluated my beliefs)
I was one of those “i am very smart” people as a teenager but I’m actually an idiot I was also a pick me (I am a woman). I found those video clips of feminists everyone was sharing at that time and became convinced that feminist = man hater it can be easy for people to twist fringe beliefs from a group and present that as common among that group. Due to this and me being a lazy idiot who didn’t fact check because I thought I was to smart to be mislead I went further down the rabbithole
I also blame poor us education on civil rights issues my state (new mexico) is on the bottom of the list for education i think it was around 49th at the time I was in school they presented civil rights issues as if they were solved so i thought “these sjws don’t want equality they want women/minority superiority” I thought they wanted to oppress the previously oppressive groups as revenge not realizing that civil rights issues have not been solved that we haven’t attained equality even though the law was supposedly equal.
I believed in equality but it got twisted by fascist lies into opposing actual progress and equality.
I can see how people went further down the rabbit hole one of the things these videos talked about was how the crime rate was higher for black people and that’s why there is more police brutality against black people. I can see how someone could take this information out of context and start thinking that black people were more crime prone inherently and that’s where some of these people took it.
ignorance is one of the biggest causes of prejudice.
I thought they wanted to oppress the previously oppressive groups as revenge
Essentially, certain people want to enslave and dominate others. That’s how their brain works. So they project that’s what others want to do to them. They can’t mentally process that people want actual freedom and equality for everyone. They push this message out into the airwaves
Yes, that’s how their brains work! Not so much a moral failing, they’re wired different. Hard to get your own wiring around that.
I often see this in the idea of life being a zero-sum game. If someone gets a thing, that thing was taken from someone else. If blacks and gays get rights, my rights were taken!
See all the complaints that gay marriage diminished hetero marriage. Illogical and incomprehensible as it seems, keep in mind the zero-sum thinking and it makes far more sense.
In my case I thought that we already had equality so anybody asking for more or complaining wanted special privileges and therefore they were trying to ruin that because they wanted to be the oppressor. In my twisted mindset I thought I was on the side of equality.
though I do definitely think there are some people who follow the mindset in your comment.
I think that’s an understandable thought because they try to whitewash history. Once you whitewash history, it’s easy to convince people that a) it’s their own fault / pull yourself up by your bootstraps, or b) they want special privileges or treatment.
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/Ot_MO0-oZdc
What is a “pick me?”
“I’m one of the good ones! I’m on your team!” Kinda like how many of us view blacks and gays who support conservative politicians.
This video is actually shockingly relevant right now, and does go through (some of) the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’.
Remember that tradwife/incel/etc shit is all just fascism boiled down into specifics. The Nazi’s sent women who wouldn’t marry to camps just as easily as Jewish people, gypsies, etc. We think of the Fascist movement as specifically anti-Jewish people, maybe throw in some gay people/etc, but Unionists, Communists, Socialists, and Women were targeted as well.
The reason it works is because it offers easy answers, and the average person has been made to be so lazy they’ll accept what they’re told, especially if they’re told everyone else is doing it. They aren’t a Nazi, they’re part of the Nazi’s.
We also have a huge backlog of emotional baggage for men post the 1980’s. At some point we all accepted that men wouldn’t show any emotions except anger, rage, frustration, etc, and then kept doubling down on it. Now you have groups of young men fed directly into a pipeline of Facebook/Youtube/whatever platform that spoon feeds them fascist garbage. Why? Because it makes them tame and easier to control. You notice fascists aren’t out there killing rich people, they’re killing minorities? That’s by design, because the wealthy know they’re fucked if young men turn that rage against them, the real perpetrators of said poor people’s suffering.
The wealthy love fascism, it gives them everything they want. They don’t see the poor people below them as human, so it’s all just a giant menagerie to them so they can have their Line Go Up Faster than the other rich people.
that YT link doesn’t need anything after the and-sign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
Removed everything after the ampersand, thank you. O7
Watched five minutes of it and bookmarked it. Thanks for the link
What they get is blaming others for their problems.
Seriously? So they fill themselves up with this shit and are ok with putting it out there? I will never understand it because I am very very lazy and it kind of seems like hate requires alot of effort.
People become lonely, disaffected, and negative towards the world they live in. They then reach out to other communities, and due to one thing, or another, primarily their personality, they don’t get accepted. However, communities based around hate will gladly take them in, as long as they fit a profile they are looking for.
"Are you a young, white, male, that is dissatisfied with their life, and the world? Well, we accept you here. These things are not your fault, it is the fault of others. You aren’t the reason you cannot get a relationship with a women, it is the women who are fault for this. The reason it is so hard to get a good paying job? Immigrants. Why is housing so expensive, and hard to get, at least anywhere with a large enough job market to really advance somewhere? The Jews. Why can’t you rise on the corporate ladder where you work? Progressive policies… also jews, and immigrants. You are a white man, you should be rightfully at the top of the hierarchy. Women should be given, by their fathers, to men, on a mutually beneficial, transactional, basis. Women should submit to your authority. "
Or, in the case of incels “Are you depressed? Have no friends? No social life? No relationship with a woman? Are you an adult virgin, loser? Well that is because women are evil. We will accept you, unlike the evil female species.”
So in that thought women are prostitues? Because a beneficial transaction?
Not prostitutes. A lot of these groups believe we need to go back to when women were literally their property. You got a women because it created bonds within the community, and they often paid you to take her.
As I don’t believe in women being property but I would totally take Majorie Taylor Green as property. Then I could smack the shit out of her until she quits saying stupid ass shit that riles the American public in anger
Well, if she gets the hyper conservative, very old school, way of doing things, that she wants, you wont have to worry about seeing, or hearing, her again. She will be in the house, and not be allowed to be in the government. I mean she won’t even be able to vote.
Because they provided simple answers to complex problems. Doesn’t matter if the answers are wrong. If a government is providing the simple answers, it’s because they don’t want to solve the problems for whatever reason.
Don’t Be a Sucker
This is an anti-fascism film made by the U.S. in the 1940s. It pretty much focuses on answering your exact question. It’s a decent film too.
