Incel movement and hedonism
Incels base their entire identity and meaning of life around getting the punani. It isn't that simple cause their frustration and resentment runs deeper. They also have to face the problems that led to their inceldom. Those problems include looking ugly , mental disorder, terrible childhood or just bad luck ( being born as an ethnic in a dominant white culture, being born in a poor family etc.)
They claim getting laid ( not by escorts but someone you love ) is a fundamental need of life, similar to getting food and having a shelter. Since their basic needs are not met, they tend to give up on life and don't see a purpose in developing their personhood. Just as you won't expect a starving men to think about philosophy. The world of an unhappy man is very different from the world of happy man. I think incels would not feel like losers if the society around them didn't force the hedonist lifestyle as hard as it does now.
If pleasure and reduced suffering is all there is to life and is constantly present around us in the modern life, it's easy to see why Incels see themselves as failures. They feel betrayed. Their misogyny is quite ironic, they want to love a woman and see it reciprocated back but end up hating all women. While growing up, they were told about life getting better as you grow up or how consuming " this and this " will fill the hole in your heart, your craving for living a meaningful life. They think it's all a scam.
I deliberately didn't make an apparent connection to hedonism cause it is quite easy to see how it is one of the cause behind their disappointment/false hope.
Comments (44)
Considering the fact that life is a gamble of chance and random success. It's not far fetched to call life a joke. The contrast between every happy soul out there and every miserable bastard is mind numbing. It couldn't have turned out more ridiculous.
Keeping Innocence or losing it won't make a difference. You can't escape despair anyway. In the end, we regret everything that didn't happen and everything that did happen.
If life didn't end , we wont need to do philosophy anymore in order to make sense of our failures. Since it's not the case, we are afraid of turning our life into a single big failure.
I don't think philosophy is your thing, guy.
Quoting Wittgenstein
To who? The majority who can barely gather en masse without it turning into a mob/riot/fight? You are afraid of what you described, which is fair. So was I. However, it should be noted that one who can find purpose and value in what others deem as a "big failure" where the same struggle to find either in what is measured as "success" in material riches and influence should not be so easily discounted.
Feeling worthless is an impediment to success in any of these endeavors. The challenge then is to find another source of self-esteem, both instrumentally as it will help you to better achieve all those things, and intrinsically as a substitute for the self-esteem that comes from those things and (largely) makes them valuable to begin with.
This is the childish if not downright animalistic viewpoint one undergoes, experiences, then hopefully sheds like a snake sheds its skin prior to reaching enlightenment ie. true self-worth as determined by the individual. In a world where slavery was not only common but law, did no enslaved person ever experience meaning beyond that of what of what his master conveyed or prescribed to him? I think not. Rare as it may have been.
Not every diametric response is a contradiction, some are affirmations or otherwise directed at possible onlookers. Though, you are correct.
Here's what you do, you ask them this simple question: Are you entitled to someone else's body? If they answer "yes" you just ignore them because they're insane. If they answer "no" you then ask them if fate has somehow pre-determined that they'll never get laid. If they again answer "no" it goes back to the individual in question. If they answer "yes" to the fate question you've got to wonder why fate has conspired to punish them in particular and what the story behind that is. It sounds like it would sure be an interesting story.
Quoting Wittgenstein
Yes because ugly men, men with mental disorders, bad childhoods or ethnic minorities or poor men can't get laid. It's obviously impossible. Only 6'4 Chads get laid.
I am not sure about this connection. This message isn't new, and hypercapitalism has been around a while, and doesn't seem to have given rise to anything like "incel culture" until the first online generation. I think this particular movement has more to do with the internet as a "support group gone wrong" then with capitalism or any specific hedonistic philosophy.
I'd even argue that the Incel's view on life isn't actually as hedonistic as you make it sound. Because from talking to self-professed incels on the internet, I got the feeling that their problem was less that they craved something above all else. It was more that they had elevated their suffering to a defining element of their character, which then required them to find ever more reasons to suffer.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You're not going to get to any entrenched incels with reason. They're not actually all that much interested in having love and sex anyways. What they're actually interested in is being part of a community, where being like they are is suddenly an asset - because the worse you have it, the higher your status.
The supposed arguments given for why this or that character trait makes it impossible to be "truely desired" is just so much window dressing. What it's actually about is the emotional need for belonging, which they fill by being part of a tight-knit and community. They're kinda like monks, angry frustrated teenage monks.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I think I actually know this story. Fate here is genetics, and genetics has randomly given them the "never get loved" ticket in the genetic lottery. There was nothing they could have done (isn't that nice?) and there is no way out.
It's after all not impossible that dating is really changing in a way that makes it increasingly hard for a group of people - perhaps mostly men - to find something like romance.
Oh yeah - I'm not expecting to. I was just saying since we're on a philosophy forum.... but yeah, in practical reality I'm not spending my time trying to convert any incels. I just thought this line of thought has some implications on bodily autonomy that some people might not initially recognize.
Quoting Echarmion
Gotta be tough to think this way when you do see burn victims and seriously disabled people still getting married and getting into relationships. Oh well, maybe they're just secret Chads, who knows. It's just those Chad genes.
Quoting Echarmion
This would be a worthy discussion topic. It would be fruitful than seeking to understand a worldview with a perpetual victim complex that divides the world into Chads, Staceys and incels and wallows in its own victimhood, because, you know, genetics.
As for how hedonism - the philosophy - fits into the Incel story, all I can say is sexual pleasure isn't on the list of pleasures that define happiness. J. S. Mill allegedly split pleasure into higher and lower categories and made it a point to assign carnal pleasures to the latter.
However, there's the other hedonism - mere pursuit of pleasure - that Incels will/should be more than familiar with. Sex is pleasurable and being celibate and involuntarily at that does diminish one's hedonistic expereience.
Also, I imagine, being a self-entitled jerk. Unless you're a rich self-entitled jerk, in which case you'll probably be fine.
Are you trying to imply something ?
If you are calling incels self-entitled jerks then you don't have anything useful to contribute here. I am interested in something else.
Agreed, l think you understand where l am coming from.
Thanks for being shallow as fuck. Nice cherry picking you got there. No one here is making the claim that you need to be a Chad in order to get laid. For every deformed person getting laid, you have 1000/10000/? or more incels rejected by women. Evidence doesn't work in favour of your argument either.
You are the only person here lashing out at incels. I don't want to defend them or attack them. I want to understand what led them to their POV. I don't see what is wrong with seeing things from their perspective. If they consider themselves as victims, then we should try to see whether it is true or not.
I think you got it right in the last paragraph. I would disagree with JS Mill on that though. I think sexual craving is stronger than any other need in life because everything else depends on it. As a result it's fulfillment brings a deeper pleasure. Food, shelter preserve life but sex allows life to continue on earth through reproduction. It isn't a mere pleasure though, it sort of connects every other pleasure in a nexus.
I agree with your diagnostic but the way to get around inceldom won't be that straight. Maslow's hierarchy of needs would make it difficult for incels to reach selfhood after skipping the essential physiological needs and in general ,love/belonging needs at the lower order of pyramid.
No doubt many of them are victims of some kind or another. The problem is that they've turned themselves into professional victims. Inceldom is all about victimhood. Which is why you'll find almost exclusively negative posts in any of their communities, reaffirming to each other how hopeless their lot is.
Perhaps one could properly call this mindset religious. The combination of victimhood, rejection of mainstream society, traditional notions of masculinity certainly seems reminiscent of religious movements, not least political Islam.
Quoting Wittgenstein
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not, however, the definitive theory of human psychology.
Yes, I'm implying that your list of reasons why incels are cels is incomplete.
Quoting Wittgenstein
Okay, calling them ugly is high philosophy, but suggesting their entitlement is a likely turn-off is bad, I get you. You do you booboo.
Ok now that that has been asked...moving on.
I can recall a number of us (6) growing up, from about 16-20 years old, weren't "getting any". I use that phrase now because we used it then. We had no girlfriends, no entertainment, and felt generally rejected by the ladies. This pissed us off, mostly because we had the impression (although with zero data to support it) that we were the only guys around in this particular boat. Looking back it's no wonder that we weren't terribly successful in love, or lust. We were angry, sullen, quiet and so focused on bitching about how unfair our situation was that none of us actually bothered to go talk to a girl. They scared the crap out us frankly. Most of us got through that crap and went on to have decent relationships, then marriages, as successfully as most everyone else. Last I checked one dude went the epic failure way, but he, despite being exceedingly physically attractive to ladies, was always an entitled ass and his personality killed whatever attention his physical features could get him.
Point is, there are likely as many frustrated ladies out there as guys, once everyone relaxes a little and actually talks to one another, amazing stuff happens.
The notion of "incel" didn't exist back when I was younger, but I had what felt like a long period of hopeless-seeming loneliness in my late teens and early 20s. I remember friends in similar circumstances at the time saying things that now sound retroactively like proto-inceldom, with which I at least superficially agreed at the time. At the time I thought that I was exceptionally unlovable and unlucky in love, that I and those friends like me were a special underclass of losers. In retrospect, I think my experience (my actual love life as observed from the outside, not my first-person interpretation of it) was probably pretty typical.
My current girlfriend of the past 8 years has really driven that last point home to me, as she hadn't had sex or a real boyfriend at all until we met at almost-30, so from her perspective my past whiny teen self -- who lost his virginity (depending on how you reckon that) 10 years before she did and only missed out on 3 or 4 Valentine's Days in the 12 years of adulthood before we met -- sounds like an entitled little brat who doesn't know the first thing about what real loneliness is.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ycPZPrhkYZgxYj5EpGQ4VSTnxF7y_ivYJ2npjVapCmw/edit?usp=sharing
You seem to be missing the fact that "incel" isn't predominantly a slur we use for others. People self-described as "incels" first. In a convoluted way, to the incels, being as they are is a badge of honor.
So the central premise of the essay seems misguided, and it's definition of what an "incel" is seems to bear little resemblance to how members of incel communities describe themselves and their views.
How we describe the incel is one thing and how the incel describes himself is another thing. I don't think that my essay really requires me to address the details of the way incels describe themselves since it is really about how we describe incels.
How are you going to talk about incels, or talk about talking about incels, without first establishing who you consider an incel and why?
Are you talking about the people labeled "incel" by others? Then your essay seems to lack any actual examination of just who is called an incel. You pretty quickly claim that when we say "incel" we really mean "looser", but how do you arrive at that conclusion?
It's an analysis of merit. Basically, you could take two people with the same misogynistic attitudes and obsession with punani, but it is the one who is the critic or social outcast who we denigrate as an "incel" while the one who enters a predetermined "acceptable" social channel (soldier, corporate slave, or expatriate) gets a green ticket to be treated differently.
You know, it's ironic you ask me for reasoning when you didn't bother to look at my essay.
You could point out to me where you justify your view. To me it seems like a naked claim, a premise that is taken as granted from the start.
1. If I justify my view, I simply offer another set of premises which are equally unjustified. You may refer to Aristotle's Prior Analytics for a discussion of the possibilities involved.
2. If you ask me to justify a definition, what form would the argument take such that the definition itself is justified? Ultimately, I can only point to usage, in which case I provide just such a justification immediately above the part of my post which you quoted. Furthermore I wrote an entire essay on the subject, which you are ignoring the existence of. At this point you are arguing in bad faith and doing nothing but harassing me. Honestly you should stop.
You're making an empirical claim. About how people use a term, what they associate with it and what their motivations are.
Quoting Garth
But it's not a definition. You're not saying "I define incel as a looser". You're describing how other people supposedly see the issue and what causes these views. Those are claims for which you can - and should - supply evidence.
Quoting Garth
I have looked through your essay. It doesn't discuss the actual usage of the word beyond a single example. And even in that single example your explanation of what's going on is highly questionable.
It's really quite clear that your essay takes the worldview often expressed by incels as it's starting point, and really seems intended for their consumption.
Can you provide evidence that I'm making an empirical claim?
Quoting Echarmion
According to whom? You? I don't particularly care about your opinion. So I don't see why I should provide evidence for my claims to you.
Quoting Echarmion
If you can't identify any problems with my explanation other than calling it "questionable" and giving vague commands to me to clarify or provide evidence, you aren't bringing anything to the discussion and so should not bother typing anything out.
Quoting Echarmion
If you really intend to finish a series of demands that I do this or do that to help you to understand with the assertion that my essay is written for incels I don't know what to say or how to help you.
Why white? Why male, even? Not saying that these adjectives don’t work here, they do, but why do people not call ‘incels’ those young females who never get laid? And whats do we call the young black males who don’t get any? Nobody cares... they are not called anything.
This points to a sense of white male entitlement being at the core of the incel psychology. People who lack this sense of entitlement are apparently not developing this particular form of mental illness. So an incel is a young white male who thinks he deserves some but ain’t getting any.
And who or what does the incel thinks he deserves? The cutest girls of course, the ones he wanks on on his cellphone. Here is the real tragedy, because there are thousands of girls out there not getting any either... and quite a few of them because they want the cutest boys too... If only these sexually ambitious boys and girls would lower their aim a little bit (considering that the cutest girls tend to go with the cutest boys and vice versa), they would easily find a mate.
So why don’t they? Why do folks stay alone all their life rather than ‘settle’ for what they can have? The answer to this is in Houellebecq, e.g. in Extension du domaine de la lutte.
Then what are you doing here? It's a forum. If you cannot deal with criticism, perhaps avoid inviting any.
Quoting Garth
We might start with this paragraph:
For one, why would someone normally express "rage and hatred" for being rejected? That'd already be a sign of an unhealthy approach. For another, why would we then conclude the only possible reason people object to such an expression is because the person is "unwanted by women"?
What about all the other possible reasons? The unflattering portrayal of the behaviour of the woman in question? More general negative views on female promiscuity? The feeling of pity for a person that witnesses someone they love be with somebody else?
I agree.
Quoting Echarmion
Because people didn't object to this man's rage and hatred in this particular instance. In fact, they offered him support. Yes, I admit that considering the counterfactual in which he wasn't then approached by the girl requires a bit of imagination, so it doesn't qualify as more than speculation. I don't claim to make an empirical claim since I'm not an empiricist nor a scientist. But I am fairly sure that if he had simply voiced complaints at a girl he likes sleeping around nobody would have said anything nice to him.
The point of my essay is this: The substantive question about incels is what phenomena in our culture produces them. Sure, we can all get together and poke holes in incel ideology but doing so is at best a waste of time and at worst completely ignoring more substantive sociological questions. Indeed, the very act of pretending to entertain the notions of their ideology only for the sake of disassembling it not only risks accidentally legitimizing it but also fails to even search for the emotional component without which it could never make sense.
As to the definition of incel, etc. I think it is a very valid self-criticism to point out, as I have in response to your question, that I am not using incel as incels label themselves. But the nature of words like this is they are not purely assigned according to self-description. Trump, for example, does not call himself a fascist nor are we likely to accept a fascist's definition of what fascism is. So I see no reason to even bother reading incel ideology. We should decide what the incel is. To me, the word 'incel' is clearly a pejorative, regardless of whether some proudly call themselves that. In this sense I can think of synonyms for "gay" or "black" or "woman" that function similarly. And most of the other people in this thread also treat it as a pejorative since you so smugly mock the ideology and speculate on the fixations of incels not for the sake of helping them but to fantasize about how you are better than them.
Quoting Olivier5
First, I should step back from that synopsis because I hadn't thought about that essay for at least 9 months. I wrote it up quickly without looking at my own essay and didn't think it through carefully. But What exactly is the thesis of my essay? I wrote it all in one go, because I was receiving therapy at the time and my therapist turned out to be a men's rights activist who showed me the movie The Red Pill and made me read Mark Manson articles. Although I am personally a leftist, I found myself feeling sympathy for right-wing activist types and started to see them as people to be pitied rather than creatures denigrated as less-than-human as most of my (former) Antifa friends did.
So to be honest, the subject of the essay isn't incels specifically but poor, right wing activists generally.
Quoting Olivier5
This is a huge question. I think that having an attractive girlfriend is a facet of the notion of "being successful" and is part of a harmful set of expectations that these men have internalized. It is roughly analogous to body image issues that women face. I know that I've personally internalized this from a young age. I feel sorry for my father having to be with my mother who is so fat and ugly in her old age. I don't see how someone could honestly say they love someone who doesn't meet some minimum level of physical attractiveness. But such a thing can't simply be explained to me, since it results from my own childhood of emotional neglect and subsequent inability to form meaningful friendships or for that matter develop emotional control.
Finally, I should mention that I'm not an incel. In fact, I'm the opposite kind of person in a way. I can't make male friends but happen to be tall, intelligent, attractive, and have slept around with a lot of women in my life.
So, for one your last sentence is clearly an empirical claim. But apart from that, I don't see why we need to ignore the differences between the two situation. Complaining that a person you like doesn't return your affections is one thing. Complaining that it took someone a year to figure out they like you is another.
I don't think I agree with being angry in either case, but one is certainly much more relatable than the other.
Quoting Garth
Quite. It just seems to me that your approach is a very narrow and idiosyncratic one. You are apparently very concerned with the plight of young men and the damage caused by "liberal elites". I think your conclusion is meant to fit in your pre-existing worldview.
Quoting Garth
There is a difference between not taking people at their word and not looking at what they actually believe. If we want to find out what causes fascism, we need to look at what self-described fascists actually believe. If we're only interested in why some people call others fascist, then of course the social significance of the appellation matters.
What you seem to be interested in is not what causes incels to arrive at their own views, but rather to criticize society at large, for which calling someone an "incel" is merely a convenient example.
ya because back in the day we didnt have dating apps that women now use for hypergamy
which has created 80% of the women whoring to 20% of the men and left 80% of the guys out of luck
"Incels" are just another bad byproduct of modern feminism
but hey, these incels should be happy they dont have herpes like most modern women have by age 25 now