Maybe for those men lucky enough to have families. A growing issue is the large percentage of men who do not and will likely never have families to ever take care of. If we think deadbeat dads unstable, the incel community is a madhouse.
I don’t think it’s fair to call all these guys incels. As the article observes, most just have no expectations placed on them, and also have no way of attaining dignity and social worth through the avenues in life reasonably available to them.
What do you attribute this to? Is it mostly just lifestyle choice? Or would most of them prefer to have a wife/gf but don't have one for whatever reason?
In the 40s, what did a young man have as far as entertainment options? Books, theaters, cigars, racing his motor vehicle with friends, going to horse races, hanging out in bars, finding a public telephone box to call someone, etc.
In the 80s, 40 years later, you had all of the above, as well as basic 8-bit arcade machines (more social because of the high score aspect, going to the arcade with friends etc), then the advent of the IBM PC and cohorts (yes HN I'm skipping the PCs that beat IBM's product to market, hand wave with me please) which enabled computer games with interactive stories and explorations, as well as home media and basic, basic internet connectivity (BBS, Usenet etc.)
40 years later in 2020, we have all of the above plus social media, greater fidelity movies, television shows streamed on demand, the interactivity of the web has made itself available in our pockets in the form of smartphones, smart watches, and tablets, we have virtual reality headsets for even more immersive UX, and all of this is before said social media platforms and app makers started their algorithm iterations in earnest to increase engagement and maximize distraction/user attention time.
In the span of 80 years time we haven't gotten less social by nature, but the sheer amount of engaging dopamine hits we can get from entertainment has gone way up versus ye olde library book or baseball game, so the boredom factor that pushed us to hang out with friends and eventually pair up with someone special is much lessened.
I think even media has evolved to become less useful for meeting people. Of course because of the technology shift from simultaneous viewing/broadcast to on-demand.
Watching movies at the cinema -> you can/want to go with friends. Watching netflix -> you can't watch with anyone except a close partner, because everyone has their own progress point to continue from in whatever series they are watching.
I believe many relationship form after you get to know someone casually over time (classmates, church members) but many people, myself include, stopped going to classes after college and don't go to church.
That leaves at best dating sites but dating sites are super awkward because instead of getting to know someone first, like the examples above, you're instead in a situation where you're supposed to decide yes or no immediately ("do you want to date me?").
Is that true in the enlisted ranks, as well, I wonder? I believe that I saw you mentioned in another comment that you were talking about officers.
Anyway, I can tell you from experience that 20 years ago, around the bases I was stationed at, it was definitely still happening. We went out on the weekends, we partied hard, we hooked up, dated, some of them even got married, etc., with local girls from bars and clubs.
You probably mean stereotype.
It is Sunday morning. That means a lot of people are at church (and who is might be related to the demographic observation you've made). Is the message they're hearing one of hope or despair? Or are they not even listening? I'm not going to blame everything on religion, as tempting as that is, but for a non-trivial minority that might be part of who feels included or excluded and why they react as they do.
Despair. The average age at most churches now seems to be 80+, and those who are younger are there to support their older relatives. There is no chatting or mingling. Once the service is over it is time to begin the process of loading grandma back into the car. What I see of single people at church is the exhaustion common to all caregivers.
uh? by who and why? it's just meme that has various meanings
Something which requires luck to achieve is by definition unachievable by most. Something which requires good fortune could, in a better world, be had by all.
That's true only for people who play the same game, the same time. But life is a series of countless games, so both the law of probabilities and observation of people around make me think that nobody can be unlucky forever.
Having luck and taking advantage of that luck are different things.
Winning the lottery is both lucky and fortunate, while winning Wimbledon is only fortunate.
Not sure how much the dictionaries agree.
The vast majority of people have more quotidian difficulties. The fact that liberal tabloids and influencers are eager to refer to rich and famous men as "incels" when they obviously can't be reveals that the word is just an insult in many cases, not a product of a serious analysis of society.
They might not be beating their wives but let it roll unchecked for 20yr and it gets bad.
And yes, it is somewhat ironic society is making the exact same mistakes it has before: forgetting how destructive a large population of uninterested young men is towards society, without ever having to be violent.
What historical events are you referring to?
I consider myself a disaffected male, and am curious to understand my situation from a historical perspective.
I remember (and therefore don't have a source for) users on the web claiming the rise of fascism was enabled partly by strongman leaders engaging all of the disaffected men en masse to serve said strongman's agenda by offering them the things they wanted (respect, status, stability).
If my tripping of Godwin's Law is on the right track, then the GP may be referring to Weimar Germany where Hitler was able to take control over a very quick timeframe, starting with disaffected men and eventually spreading the message to the general populace, taking over the country's government sans violence (though there was certainly violence and intimidation near the end of the Weimar government and probably before then that I am unaware of).
Or, much more likely, the GP meant something else entirely, and I am Wrong On The Internet!
It all has to do with incentives and the role of men in societies which to some degree still apply today. Stop giving men incentives to have families or any other reason to care about younger generations, and they stop having a reason to care for the future. Don't give them an incentive to care about the now (wives, partners, comrades), and they stop having a reason to care about the now.
Not having people care for the future is a great way to make them live their lives as short-sighted and hedonistic* as possible, which further affects their reason to care about the now beyond themselves. Not having people care for the now is a great way to incentivize inner conflict and have a party rise to fill the gap.
*: Hedonism on its own has a whole slew of other problems I'd rather not get into detail with, but for the sake of comparison, online dating apps' meat market approach hasn't exactly helped younger people obtain more satisfying relationships.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Examples_of_...
Societal collapse is probably something most people desire to avoid, and if the large numbers of disaffected men are the 'canary in the coal mine' and symptomatic of a weakened society, then we as a society also want to come up with solutions to ameliorate that particular suffering as a part of strengthening society as a whole
To quote Bill Burr "There are no feminists in a house fire"
too many soldiers
too many men, not enough solders
too many immigrants
not enough immigrants
immigrants didn't integrate
immigrants integrated too much
not enough defense spending
recession from too much defense spending
lack of scientific knowledge
proto-technocracy instead of realpolitik
too much like today
not enough like today
the worst thing to happen to civilization
not actually that badMost people interpret inflation as obvious government mismanagement, I interpret it as an inevitability because of the inherent conflict between medium of exchange and store of value caused by using gold as currency.
Saved money that is used as a store of value interrupts the circulation of money which then stops the payment of taxes which then forces the government to find a substitute for the loss of tax revenue. The answer is to separate the medium of exchange and store of value function into two separate "institutions". Cash is not a store of value, banks delegate the store of value by giving loans to producers of value i.e. companies and entrepreneurs. If you just save cash/gold, there is no guarantee anyone is going to produce value in the future. You are basically speculating that there are going to be people in the future that will gladly take your gold and then people act betrayed when that speculation didn't pan out.
not enough cryptoWhen you are born and live in poverty, hold jobs that amount to minimum wage or tiny bits above it, have no way to *see* a future of any sort of success; happiness, alcohol, drugs, and sex are the primary forms of feeling good or not feeling pain....
Yeah, you're going to have massive problems at a societal scale.
The elites of this country, along with governments bribed, gerrymandered, and installed by said elites made the volitional changes to social programs that keep people down in poverty. And we're living with those changes since Reagan went off about that "black welfare fraud woman". That was the start of poverty-austerity movement: the idea that cutting off most/all funding would get them to not be lazy.
The credit system instituted in the late 80's only has further cemented the idea that "if you were poor now, you'll still be poor and we wont help you". And housing has gone stratospheric, as have all other bills. And insert homeless numbers talk here - homeless are used as a tool of the elites to show what happens if you don't play along monetarily.
I'm honestly surprised that the political elites haven't instituted ST:DS9's "Sanctuary Districts" (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District) . Out of sight, out of mind.
Maybe it's wrong and I'd love to know if that's the case but from personal experience the only way I've seen out of poverty is interest in an in demand field leading to the building and maintenance of marketable skills that allow you to earn a living sufficient to attain economic escape velocity. That seems to me to be a whole lot do with luck at the ground floor. And fiscal and social policy can be as much of a burden as it is a boon all the way along the pipeline.
That said, that escape velocity was directly mediated by both the tax burden of the jurisdiction coupled with the economic opportunities of the jurisdiction and at the end of the day it meant the correct choice was to leave for greener pastures, both lowering the necessary target for escape velocity as well as reducing economic drag getting there.
In the meantime all those kids I knew back in the old neighbourhood are still there, mostly on subsistence handouts, firmly in poverty, and show no signs of that changing.
Would be interested to see any studies that indicate conclusively that any of this stuff does any good, rather than just making those who are politically aligned with it feel good, for anybody reading this that knows, not necessarily just the respondent.
I'm sorry but that is just an asinine thing to say and a textbook case of solving "my pet issue will fix the world" thinking.
Inter-generational poverty was the norm until the industrial revolution. While it certainly sucked for the people living it and we should definitively be taking steps to reduce it it is demonstrably tangential to societal stability.
It seems easy to say that societal stability isn't dependent on social mobility until the lower class decides that it's time to bring out the guillotines.
This causes unintentional and eventually intentional coverups when presented with someone “in your group” doing something obviously wrong.
I would lovingly and determinedly bully those who are so weak that they can't face the reality of bad conditions and their own inadequacies, those who show an emotional need to behave like they (just as they are) merit a sexual partner, and this not happening means women are evil scheming monsters who conspire to ruin the world and must be stopped and/or reduced to Gorean slavery for their own good as they're not really people. I'd bully those incels all day long. They are harming themselves by their own stubbornly held rationalizations and need to cut it out.
Properly having a sexual relationship means having a relationship, very likely with an opposite-sex partner if we're talking hetero incels, and it's not easy. I'm with a woman who is observably smarter than me and I'm a techie nerd. There are things we have in common, but there are also ways that we just don't operate the same. There's strengths I have that she doesn't (not physical, either), there's strengths she has (and sometimes expects out of me) that I don't, and won't. The male/female thing is compelling and interesting, but it's impossible to reduce to 'we are actually the same' 'cos we ain't :)
When you get anybody concluding 'therefore the enemy sex, being incomprehensible, is simply evil and must be destroyed rather than reasoned with', you gotta bully those people or they will ruin it for us all. They are being intellectually lazy and wrong, and causing damage and making it harder for everyone, and we can't afford that kind of wrong.
People that lack a partner are not incels, but incels lack a partner. Please spend a few minutes looking up what an incel actually is and what it means.
Male violence is quite high stakes so I could see if you have two people who carry out lower stakes violence then you could end up with higher rates of violence.
So those without mates are possibly not stable? Good luck finding a date if you work in an predominantly male area such as a northern mining town or military base. Good luck funding a mate if you are stuck in a bad job/career. Good luck funding a mate if you are stuck taking care of disabled/elderly family members. A stable personality guarantees nothing.
Of course not. You can be stable and not be interested for a mate. Or as you pointed out, there can be huge friction between a person and their mate because of a job or circumstances.
But aren't those cases a minority, a exception to the rule? Even people in the military or working in extreme areas don't do that most of their lives. And this isn't something new really, frontiersmen and sailors faced same issues in the 20th and 19th centuries (and since forever really).
I was thinking about a people who are stable and also have a chance and will to find a mate.