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.
It’s not a matter of luck—men in my dad’s village in Bangladesh start families, have kids, and live relatively happy lives in poverty even most poor Americans could not comprehend.
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.
It is sunday morning. I'm at work (military). Part of that job is checking in with people at a half-dozen other locations who are also at work on a sunday morning. they just happen to all be hetero guys, which is not unusual in the military no matter the day. So I asked in our chat whether they had wives/girlfriends at home today. "No." "Nope." "My car is my GF" and "Rocking a peppi shirt under my uniform". These are single guys in their mid-twenties and thirties. They have jobs. Most are university-educated officers. They look good in their uniforms, especially with the medals. But they work sunday mornings because they don't have families and don't go out saturday nights. I worry about this trend.
Military marriages are double hard due to the nature of the job. Couple that with broken marriages being more like the norm, one can't blame if they don't want to risk their mental and financial stability.
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.
>> Is the message they're hearing one of hope or despair?
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.
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?
A stable job just doesn't compete anymore. Single heterosexual girls want guys with prospects and/or family money. Some of these guys are afraid of dating, afraid that something might go wrong that could impact their careers. Deployments have also changed. Soldiers don't date or even talk to local girls anymore. Interestingly, many of these guys are also stone-sober. Not recovering alcoholics. They just don't drink. They don't ever hook up at bars. That bar scene you see in every military movie never happens. They always seem to be on guard for situations that might hurt their career. COVID-related lockdowns haven't helped either.
> Interestingly, many of these guys are also stone-sober. Not recovering alcoholics. They just don't drink. They don't ever hook up at bars. That bar scene you see in every military movie never happens.
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.
Moreso the officers, but its really all of the career people who are very careful about socializing. Those who intend to get out after a few years and try for better things in the civilian world, they tend to party hard.
Do they have other social life, or just their job? I would suspect we've changed into being less social, not seeing friends either (replacing it with other entertainment or stuff to do).
I would argue we are just as social as before, but our social needs are able to be satisfied in the short-term by entertainment more than ever before, which dulls us from pursuing slow-burning-but-high-long-term-reward rewards like a stable relationship/marriage in favor of high-dopamine, low-risk, convenient, low-effort rewards like immersive video games and ever-more-enamoring leisure options.
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.
Could it be social life is harder now? I'm atheist so this is not for me but if the majority of people used to go to church they had at least one chance a week to meet people and not only just meet random people to but to get to know people over time.
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?").
Oh, they are interested. Military guys get caught up in romance/blackmail scams all the time. It is a big deal when it comes to security clearances/background checks. They occasionally go out to bars, usually at the behest of their married friends. A single guy with a well-paid government job just isn't a winner these days. Our unit padre told me about a "singles" event organized amongst some local units/churches a few (10?) years ago. Total disaster. 4:1 male/female ratio and many of the women who showed up were not technically single but rather "going through a divorce".
You got that backwards. Teenagers are horny and want a "romantic" life in the bedroom. Once they get older they slowly lose that drive and finding a partner requires a huge amount of "activation energy".
The peppi (sorry, "pepe") le frog meme has become associated with the alt-right generally but the incel community specifically. I doubt he meant that he was literally wearing one as that would be a huge problem in our military. I take his statement to mean that he understands the question and its implication.
Yes. They also use telephones, eat fast food, watch sports, drive cars and do all they other thing that 90+% of heterosexual males do. Blaming video games is just the latest intergenerational boogieman. 30 years ago it was too much television. 50 years ago it was too many comic books. In every generation there is a new media technology that the old blame for corrupting the young.
While an answer in the affirmative would tickle your confirmation bias activations, I'll counter with my anecdote that I play "video games" and have been happily married for 13 years and have two kids.
From the wives I've talked to, a husband who is at home playing video games is still at home, which is a significant step up from 'at the bar' or any number of escapist male activities that involve dads spending free time far away from their children.
According to statistics websites, around 65% of adults in the US play video games, and around the same percentage of residences own gaming devices. At this rate, playing video games could be a "symptom" for virtually anything imaginable.
No, it's not really a symptom of too much time, considering this is an activity done by 65% of americans. If anything, people could be using video games to replace more more time-consuming hobbies like spending the night at the bar or building a motorcycle, which are better signals of spending a lot of free time away from the family.
right i m not disagreeing with you, just saying that if they are gaming more than average, it would probably be a symptom of having more free time, not a cause of something
My sense of the distinction: luck is rare. Not everyone can be lucky, by definition. Fortune doesn't have the property. For example, one could say that everyone who grows up in a liberal democracy is fortunate.
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.
Much like radical identity politicking Twitter users, the cultural impact and attention-getting of "incels" far exceeds their actual frequency in the population, and is frequently magnified for the purposes of scaremongering. It's not rare for radfems to cry "incel" whenever someone has a complaint about the new libertinism, just as it isn't rare for #metoo opponents to complain about "cancel culture" when someone gets in trouble for committing an actual crime.
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.
IMO outrage about incels is just a socially acceptable way to bully. It's a way to find an excuse to express their superiority over others while masquerading it with concern over women's safety. You're never going to see someone mock a successful man who beats his wife.
Not that confusing, really. I've spent decades unable to find a sexual partner. I'd also make a concerted effort not to fall into the conclusions and habits of thought found in those getting bullied as 'incels', and in fact hooked up on Reddit of all places and am in the home of my lady friend now, working with her on various stuff and steadily building lovemaking skills (we're on the older side and there's a lot going on so opportunity isn't always there).
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.
It's the modern "virgin" insult but worse because they are supposedly virgins who have been rejected by a lot of girls. They aren't virgins for a lack of trying.
It's not, and you're conflating the term incel with people whom lack a sexual partner. Incel is a label that people apply to themselves that carries a whole lot of baggage, anger and a mixture of racism/sexism.
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.
At least initially, when people used to make fun of incels, it was specifically in reference to "the government MUST find me a girlfriend" types, but it seems it's frequently 'genericized' to people who don't have a sexual partner, regardless of if they're even interested in it in the first place.
It's not about "dont give a fuck". This is about intergenerational poverty, and the costs that we all will have to pay because the elites decided to destroy social mobility for the poverty-stricken classes.
When 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.
That's an entirely separate, perhaps even more dire, problem. And it undoubtedly compounds for those men intersecting both categories. But the passive men phenomenon is not directly caused by intergenerational poverty. That is evident by how men in all socioeconomic classes are "affected."
Do the elites really get to choose the degree of social mobility in their societies? Do you have any comparative figures to back this up or further data? All I have is anecdote having grown up in poverty in what would likely be considered a relatively left wing first world economic environment, and to the best of my knowledge, none of the kids I grew up with except me ever escaped poverty.
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.
The elites in the US lowered the top tax brackets considerably, and intentionally moved education funding from grants to loans in previous decades. Both of these moves feel like they have lowered social mobility, but I haven’t seen studies.
Same thing happened to Australia where I'm from originally, and it doesn't seemed to have changed a thing anecdotally except of course the aforementioned escape velocity equation, and still not nearly enough to be competitive with the leaving option.
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.
>It's not about "dont give a fuck". This is about intergenerational poverty, and the costs that we all will have to pay because the elites decided to destroy social mobility for the poverty-stricken classes.
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.
I don't know if I would call it exactly tangential to societal stability, since we have multiple historical examples of what happens when inter-generational poverty goes too far. And usually the end result is not pretty for those in charge.
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.
Men who DGAF aren't the same as "incels". You and GP aren't at odds with one another.
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.
Look up the societal collapse of Rome in particular. It's one of the most named and covered anecdotes. A few other societies follow similar patterns, internally collapsing and being taken apart piece by piece rather than aggressively overtaken. Wikipedia[0] names several societies (I don't keep sources at hand to my own discredit).
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.
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
The best thing about the fall of Rome is how you can read literally anything into it
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
i.e. take your pick of
too much like today
not enough like today
as well as
the worst thing to happen to civilization
not actually that bad
Honestly, my favorite explanation is that gold currency is a ponzi scheme that forced the roman empire to conquer more and more gold bearing land until its territory was so large that it was difficult to defend while simultaneously invading new territory. The moment they failed to conquer an ever growing mass of land, they had to pay the army while all the wealthy people have hoarded gold and kept it out of circulation which destroyed the medium of exchange function of money and therefore forced Romans to issue additional coins with less gold to pay its soldiers as hoarded gold coins do not pay any taxes.
Most 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.
I'm not GP and can only guess, and not even a particularly educated guess, but I will try, because I too am curious, and everyone knows the best way to get an answer on the web is to post a confident-sounding answer so someone can 'correct me' therefore giving me the actual information I'm hopeful to receive.
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!
Good question. I wonder if this type of societal situation has lead to wars of conquest in the past. Is there research or studies on events like this? It seems like something that may be difficult to study historically, but who knows.
I think in lesbian relationships it is higher than in heterosexual relationships. Don't have any good links off the top of my head. But here is a BBC article which claims it is higher in same sex relationships: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29994648
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.
Incels are a part, not all of that group. But they are a percentage. A greater number of perpetually single men, those who do in fact want a family as opposed to thise who chose not to have one, does mean a greater number of radical incels.
Even without going full radical incel, a great many single males lose hope and lose thier drive to achieve. I work with some. They just dont care about work/money/stability/future in the same was as people with dependant families.
It's actually how the term was originally coined - the first person to identify as an incel was a woman. Perhaps without the "radical" adjective, though.
As a brother of two sisters I would say that (unsurprisingly) the proportion of incels is the same in both sexes, they just express it differently. Women incels are not nearly as visible, but they're there.
One thing they do have in common though is a tendency to get fixated on someone/something, so they're over represented in IT.
Who cares what they call themselves? That's theres to decide. Do you want them in or out? If you want them out, call them incels, if you want them in, give them the dignity of any other human and call them men.
Is that really an issue?
If you are a stable personality finding a mate isn't that much of an issue. Especially today with high mobility and dating apps if you put your back to it you can find a partner.
>> If you are a stable personality finding a mate isn't that much of an issue.
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.
