I sympathize with people who can’t get what they want. The problem is, most people can’t. A foundational error in the incel world-view is not that they are lonely, but that they are uniquely lonely.
I don't think it's unique to the incel worldview. In fact, it strikes me as rather logical that if crippling loneliness is the defining cause of suffering in your life, you'd turn to something that finds the solution in something similarly isolating/insular.
I've seen quite a few very lonely people turn to obscure cults, obscure philosophies, weird health communities, or smaller, sectarian movements within a bigger religious community. And from personal knowledge of some of these people, the underlying dynamic was always a kind of resentment towards and rejection of 'everyone else'.
One example that I found particularly painful to experience was a guy I met a few years ago. We got along well, but he had the extremely grating tendency to describe everyone as stupid ('sheeple'), unintelligent, inferior, etc. He was really taken with what I suppose you could call 'scientism' and gravitated towards the aspects of it that were mainly about belittling others. For example, he was a huge fan of some videos where Richard Dawkins would read semi-illiterate letters people had written to him, many of them religious obviously. All his colleagues were stupid too.
Over time I discovered that he'd had a shitty childhood (terrible family, school bullying), and this had just kind of continued on until his thirties. In the years he'd lived in our city he'd not made a single longer-term friend, and had never really had anything resembling a relationship. It seemed rather obvious that hating/rejecting the world because it never included him was more a defense-mechanism than anything.
What really hurt to see though, was that he was actually a pretty nice guy, he'd just never learned how to 'do' inter-human relationships! He was smart, funny, creative, sorta-caring and far from an 'inherent' asshole. He just truly never learned how friendship works. He never learned how to have a 'normal' conversation. And considering how much work and experience it takes to do social life right, it depressed me to think that he might never 'catch up'.
As an aside, I suspect this guy was on the autism spectrum. I think we often overlook how much effort, anxiety, and experience it takes for some people to even just pull off 'weirdo, but okay' socially.
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I sympathize with people who can’t get what they want. The problem is, most people can’t. A foundational error in the incel world-view is not that they are lonely, but that they are uniquely lonely.
I don't think it's unique to the incel worldview. In fact, it strikes me as rather logical that if crippling loneliness is the defining cause of suffering in your life, you'd turn to something that finds the solution in something similarly isolating/insular.
I've seen quite a few very lonely people turn to obscure cults, obscure philosophies, weird health communities, or smaller, sectarian movements within a bigger religious community. And from personal knowledge of some of these people, the underlying dynamic was always a kind of resentment towards and rejection of 'everyone else'.
One example that I found particularly painful to experience was a guy I met a few years ago. We got along well, but he had the extremely grating tendency to describe everyone as stupid ('sheeple'), unintelligent, inferior, etc. He was really taken with what I suppose you could call 'scientism' and gravitated towards the aspects of it that were mainly about belittling others. For example, he was a huge fan of some videos where Richard Dawkins would read semi-illiterate letters people had written to him, many of them religious obviously. All his colleagues were stupid too.
Over time I discovered that he'd had a shitty childhood (terrible family, school bullying), and this had just kind of continued on until his thirties. In the years he'd lived in our city he'd not made a single longer-term friend, and had never really had anything resembling a relationship. It seemed rather obvious that hating/rejecting the world because it never included him was more a defense-mechanism than anything.
What really hurt to see though, was that he was actually a pretty nice guy, he'd just never learned how to 'do' inter-human relationships! He was smart, funny, creative, sorta-caring and far from an 'inherent' asshole. He just truly never learned how friendship works. He never learned how to have a 'normal' conversation. And considering how much work and experience it takes to do social life right, it depressed me to think that he might never 'catch up'.
As an aside, I suspect this guy was on the autism spectrum. I think we often overlook how much effort, anxiety, and experience it takes for some people to even just pull off 'weirdo, but okay' socially.
No, the foundational error of the incel world is the denial of the fundamental humanity of literally everyone else in the world.