How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way?
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.)
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.)
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.
I was raised in a left-leaning, progressive, atheist, LGBTQ+/minority-accepting household, but one surrounded by a white, largely conservative exurban community. I was raised to be inclusive of others, to be thoughtful, to be curious, to be polite and empathetic. I had good* parents who supported me, and taught me to treat others well.
In the middle of fifth grade, I transferred to a magnet program focusing on STEM concepts. It took me from a school that was almost entirely white, to a school which was very much multi-racial. I was really small for my age, nerdy, and the new kid. I'd always been bullied at school, but after the transfer it got a lot worse, and got pretty severely physical. A lot of the people who harassed me the worst were black. I honestly never understood the social circles enough to know what their deal was, and it certainly wasn't only a race thing, but the fact that many of my tormentors were black wasn't lost on me, to be sure.
When I was 11 or so, I used all the savings from a lifetime of cumulative birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc. to buy a laptop to play games on. Pretty quickly, gaming became all I did. It was an escape, and I enjoyed it. I played whatever F2P games I could. Diablo clones, random MMOs, shitty pay-to-win FPS games, whatever. My parents didn't supervise my activities very closely, and to be blunt, I quickly became way more savvy than them about subverting any surveillance they tried to put in place anyways.
Eventually I started looking into hacks for games. I found a really large forum (think 25k members) for sharing game hacks, and joined up. By the time I was maybe 13-14 or so, I was one of the highest-ranking moderators on the forum. I hung out in their IRC server (which definitely isn't the internet chat-rooms you're supposed to be careful about, those are different) all day, dabbled in making my own (occasionally illicit) software and hacks, and was firmly in the community. These weren't good people, but I didn't know that. When I got home from school and got online, they asked me how my day was. They cared about me, they played games with me, they were my friends. I remember I was gone for like 2 weeks when I was seriously ill, and one of them tracked me down and called my house to check in on me. I didn't think anything of it, because of course they could do that. I'd been in a Skype call with one of them who was screen sharing the array of webcams they had access to through their botnet. I didn't realize at the time that they were probably blackmailing people, or holding their data ransom. We just hacked in video games, none of that actually serious stuff. The malware I was toying with was just because I was interested in it, and of course, my friends must have been too, right? Just a learning exercise. I figured I might try to go into cybersecurity when I started high school and could actually start taking courses in computer topics. Programming was SO fucking interesting!
My parents didn't know what was going on. They should have. I was barely a teenager, I can't possibly have been hiding my tracks all that well. But then, their marriage had started to fall apart, and things were bad a home. I didn't know anything about that then, I was in my room gaming and running communities for terrible people. The headset kept their fighting far away from me. My parents didn't know who I was hanging out with. They had raised me well, but now they weren't doing what they should have been. So when my friends shared hateful content with me, "interesting" videos they'd found about how terrible women were, how violent minorities were, who was I to question it? They were speaking as those with knowledge. They taught me stuff, they knew better than me. And besides, I'd been physically harassed by black people before. I'd seen it for myself, right? My U.S. history teacher was REALLY smart, and she told us (in a MN classroom) that the civil war wasn't actually about slavery either! That was super interesting to learn! And the women they complained about weren't me. Just because a lot of the guys I hung out with had bitches for girlfriends didn't mean they hated women, it was just bad luck with shitty women. Right?
I was a good person. I mean, I was a weird socially outcast nerd, but I wasn't a bad person. My family was still caring. Still accepting. My Mom's apartment was always a refuge for any of our friends, even (and especially) the queer ones who had been kicked out by their own terrible parents. They had a place to come and be safe and be themselves with us. So I was a good person too, right? Good people, smart people, they keep their online lives separate from their personal lives. They don't talk about their online activities with others, and they don't talk about their personal information with internet strangers in chatrooms. The only people I talked with were my FRIENDS. I ran their Minecraft servers. I discussed the Jordan Peterson videos they shared. He sounds so fucking smart after all. I hardly understand what he's talking about, but I'm sure one day I will. And the parts I don't understand, other people can explain to me. I laughed at their racist memes. After all, it's just a joke. And of course, overt bigotry got stomped on. I was in charge, and I was a good person. I wouldn't tolerate that sort of thing. But a dog-whistle is just a tool for training a pet, and we'd only ever kept cats.
I eventually joined a different gaming group on the side. We played Jailbreak in CS:S. I got really good at it. Really into it. And I stopped hanging out as much with my older friends. I still kept in touch, but I'd found a new hobby. These people weren't good people either, but I mean, the fact that they liked my voice on mic wasn't that they were creeping on a 15 year old who they wanted to fuck, it was because I had gotten a new microphone a few weeks ago and must have sounded good on it. I had gotten lucky though. These people weren't great people, but they weren't nearly as bad. They weren't literally cybercriminals, just asshole kids on the internet. So when I became a moderator in THAT community and started running things, the community actually improved. But eventually that community collapsed, and I moved on again. And again. And again. I ended up with some Brits for a while, and "mate" settled itself into my vocabulary in a deeply unwelcome way.
I've been incredibly lucky. I'm 28 now. The last 14 years of my life, I've slowly climbed from one community to another, and mostly through random luck each of those have been better than the one I was leaving. I am surrounded now by some of my favorite people. They are TRULY good people. They care about others, and stand up for good causes. Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too. I wasn't a good person. I fell WAY down the alt-right rabbit hole. I'm sure that I've hurt people, and I've made countless decisions that sicken me now. But I've been incredibly lucky. If I hadn't been, I have no idea where I'd be now. Or what nonsense I'd still be believing, because everything around me told me it was normal.
Genuinely, thanks for sharing your experience. I don’t think most people realize how insidiously easy it is to slowly slide down that path. I’m very glad to hear that you’re moving in a better direction these days.
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.
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.
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.
For the nazis, a big problem is the alt-right pipeline that plagues sites like Youtube, along with an unstable political climate, which generally causes radicalization (Weimer Germany is also a very good example of this phemona)
As for incels, a big problem is admittably a mental health crisis plauging many men, generally causing them to become resentful of women out of loneliness.
Yeah the Internet is full of traps that are engineered to draw men in. There's blood on Google's hands for just letting that happen. (And probably other companies too, but YouTube is big)
Related note: unchecked capitalism makes everything worse. Trying to get dates and the apps are just like "pay us $5 and maybe we'll show your profile to someone. Be a shame if your beautiful profile just never showed up for anyone."
The latter is aided by the same things as the former. Too many youtubers condition young men to think that women are the problem and the fact that they don't take care of themselves or socialize with others doesn't matter and it's really the fault of everyone else. I used to online game with a couple of these guys who weren't too bad until recently. They were both basically shut-ins who still somehow held strong beliefs about the outside world and why things are the way they are even though they didn't really participate with the outside world.
YouTube but also porn. As it's much less regulated in terms of tone and content, you get a lot of casual racism, misogyny and similar just thrown into the videos of pene and vagene
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.
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
Additionally to what has already been mentioned: People are susceptible to politics that confirm their prejudices. Right-wing political thought is largely based on confirming that whatever prejudices people hold, they are morally good and justified. Thus elevating an in-group above out-groups. That is a powerful lure.
Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?
By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.
The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren't pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.
Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to.
Nicotine provides a short term mental stimulus that's great for people who feel exhausted or have trouble staying focused.
That's why lots of people start smoking in school and lots of professionals continue smoking well past the point at which the health effects are obvious.
I know a pulmonologist who smoked until he was in his thirties. Literally "how do you expect me to do my job without this?" was his response when I pressed him on it. Lawyers still smoke like chimneys and for the same reasons
For me as a non-smoker, but vaper, it's not as if I "fell" into anything. I actively choose to vape and like it. I quit before and did not like it. I get way more benefits from nicotine than downsides. These are factual benefits.
It's a poor analogy for right-wing political beliefs which don't really work. They do not really lead to the goals they claim.
Would i wrong to venture the guess that you didnt like quitting vaping because you were suffering from nicotine withdrawal? I swapped to vaping after years of smoking and eventually quit vaping. It was not enjoyable to quit but i feel a million times better not being beholden to the habit. My lungs feel better, my brain feels better, my stress levels are lower.
What benefits does nicotine bring other than satifyi g your craving for nicotine.
The guy wasn't talking about vaping though, but smoking. The one we know for sure gives you a ton of issues and health problems.
Whilst I agree it's not a great analogy for right wing beliefs, I'd say it works as a good analogy for incel behaviour. I knew a guy who had fallen into that trap but managed to find his way out. When I asked him about it, he said it helped him cope, that it was easier to believe that it wasn't his fault things were so shitty.
I really respect how he was able to realise that the things he and the people around him were saying was bullshit, and it made me realise that a lot of these people are being taken advantage of by "influencers" spewing this harmful rhetoric.
The core of the issue is the "Just World Fallacy" sometimes also called the "Prosperity Doctrine" and a few other things. It boils down to one core idea "Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people." Basically, everyone tends to think of themselves as, more-or-less, good people. So when bad things happen, as they inevitably do, these people start going "Huh, more bad stuff is happening to me than I've done bad things. WTF?" So, they come to a reasonable if flawed conclusion that "someone ELSE is doing bad things, and I'm collateral damage." This isn't entirely wrong, although sometimes bad things do just happen. However, since at least as far back as the Civil War (and probably since time immemorial), the people whose fault it REALLY is (i.e., the people with power and privelege) have pointed at outgroups, commonly immigrants but also slaves or Catholics or trans people, and said "THOSE people are being bad. THOSE people are why you are suffering. Give me more power and I'll get rid of THOSE people."
There's a lot of information, there's also a lot of misinformation. Many people don't trust authorities, sometimes for understandable reasons, so they end up in the fringes.
Also, the Nazis, and even the Confederates, weren't all that long ago in the grand scheme. A couple generations. Many people learn these tendencies from their family.
Also incels are somewhat different from Nazis/fascists. There's obviously a lot of overlap. There's always been men who had trouble with women, but I think being a male virgin after a certain age is enormously more vilified these days than it was in, for instance, the 50s, even among more progressive, left leaning groups. Admittedly, that's anecdotal so I could be wrong.
Part of it is education and critical thinking. People don’t know what to trust because they don’t know how to test information for truthfulness and can’t reliably fact check. So they depend on an authority figure to tell them what and how to think, with expected results.
Note this isn’t limited to these people; some people just pick better authority figures than others.
but I think being a male virgin after a certain age is enormously more vilified these days than it was in, for instance, the 50s, even among more progressive, left leaning groups.
Not sure if this is true, but I'm pretty sure that research says that people were having more sex back then. So probably fewer virgins back then.
There was less to do for entertainment in the 50s, lol
Still a culture shift. Back then you were a stand up guy waiting for a dynamite gal to call his own, now you’re that weird 30yo who couldn’t get an easy lay in college and is too socially akward to date now.
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?
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.
Social media algorithms present different things to different people. So if you fall for a grift, the algorithm will just show you things that support the grift and never show anything that debunks it.
Someone going down a weird rabbit hole will stay on that for a long time, watching many ads along the way. Someone that starts to think "hey maybe there's something to this thing" then immediately sees something debunking it may conclude "well that last video was a waste of time" and may decide to go do something else that's a more worthwhile use of their time. End result, they watch fewer ads. Less revenue for the social media companies.
Weird internet rabbit holes are more profitable than seeing contradicting opinions. So the algorithms are tuned to send people down rabbit holes and not offer information contradicting them.
Yes, but it's important to note that confirmation bias is always present in our views of the world because our brain tends to keep things simple by prefering confirming to contradicting information. It just has been amplified by recommendation algorithms meant to increase engagement by showing you "more of the stuff you like", thus trapping you in a filter bubble you might not even be aware of.
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.
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.
Ironically, this kind of hate requires no effort, someone says "GROUP BAD!" and you just sneer and shout towards them. It's way, way easier to blame a group than understanding all the things that are making your life/city/country/world go wrong
"Of COURSE the evil jew gay black communist feminist conspiracy is the root of all evil, they hate MY way of life!"
There's also the point that most conspiracy theories capitalize on the "this is a secret THEY don't want you to know!", so it makes people feel smart (despite them believing in utter bullshit)
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.
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.
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.
Racism and bigotry aren't logical positions, but emotional ones. People have an emotional need to be part of a group and feel included. If the group a person joins is antagonistic towards other groups then the person will internalize that and become bigoted. The dislike of other groups becomes a part of their identity and belonging.
The documentary Behind The Curve illustrates this pretty effectively. They follow some flat eathers around and interview them and they all say the same thing. They love being a part of the group. They didn't have a group before and now they do. Their beliefs keep the group together and they're not going to get rid of them just because the beliefs can be proven to be wrong.
The desire to be a part of a group is strong enough that people will believe anything as long as it gets them some friends. There isn't anything wrong with that unless the beliefs of the group are harmful and hateful.
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.
"When dealing with people, remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity."
-- Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
The title makes it sound like a book on manipulating people, but it's merely an archaic headline. It's about the author's quest to understand people, his frustrations due to the lack of such an "instruction book", and learning how to become a better person. We might call it psychology or sociology now, but Carnegie visited and wrote many scholars of his time trying to find such knowledge.
If there's any book I'd say everyone should read, it's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Neat thing about it is, as the author says himself, you don't have to read and parse it front to back to benefit. Pick it up, flip to a random chapter, read. It pays to read over and over again, occasionally reminding ourselves of our common humanity by internalizing the things he learned.
One quick example; He learned to shut the fuck up and listen. He tells a story about a dinner party he and his wife attended. We get the impression the host was quite the talker, dominating the conversation. Mr. Carnegie sat and listened to the man, hardly speaking at all. At the end of the evening the host went on and on about what a fine orator and clear thinker Carnegie was!
And if it's the quote you take issue with, I don't know how to respond. That's simply how people are, you and I both.
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."
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.
Thinking, analyzing, and understanding are the hard ones. Emotion and hate require next to no effort, just some years of listening to Fox or Rush Limbaugh. They'll tell you who to hate and be angry at.
And like I said, hate is an easy emotion to have. If anyone is trying to tap into it, you're likely being manipulated.
emotion, anger and hate requires effort and as a very lazy person it seems like a whole lot of effort misspent
Not to me. Emotions just are. My parents taught me a lot of bigoted ways and those emotions just rise up. I had to argue with myself against those thought, after I moved out and grew up.
Naziism and fascism are broadly a response to the same material conditions as communism and anarchism (to an extent).
Liberalism does not put forth a response to those conditions because it created them and has no internal process to relieve them (instead it externalizes them) or stop perpetuating them.
When faced with a choice between communism or fascism people generally don’t perform an in-depth analysis of what’s best for them or their cohort but instead attach to the group that provides some relief or aid.
That’s why it’s important to always help people around you when you can.
As I've continued through life, my political and economic ideology has shifted a lot from Marxism and Marx-derived ideologies into a personal interpretation of collectivism that basically is just, "how can we make everything mutual aid?"
Both movements broadly point to the material conditions created, perpetuated and encouraged by liberalism as their impetus. Scholars within both movements have written extensively cataloguing the precise ways different conditions came to pass and how it’s the fault of liberalism.
Generally speaking your communist will say liberalism sprang from the class relation under capitalism and the bourgeoise, while your fascist will say it was “‘da joos”.
E: I tried to click preview but replied instead but it’s fine because I don’t want to summarize two centuries of political thought anyway.
If you have a specific example you want clarification on I’d be happy to give it but if you truly feel befuddled that a person could say that liberalism creates the conditions (perhaps, contradictions 🤔) for communism or fascism I can point you at a bigass pile of books instead.
One of my closer friends is on a weird path atm. He's full into Russian propaganda, anti-western stuff, flat earth, anti vaxx and whatnot.
I tried to reason with him. Turns out he doesn't even know how to verify something he's read online. Check sources? Nope. Google something you've seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
I came to accept that he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation, propaganda and lies.
Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
Those are hardly panacea, as you need a reliable frame of reference for verification.
I remember during the heyday of WikiLeaks, how conservatives and liberals alike dismissed the info dumps as misinformation and edited images/video. You couldn't talk about PRISM with anyone over 40, because all the Cable News outlets were claiming it had been debunked. You couldn't talk about Collateral Murder because it was endlessly getting blocked on social media as "disinformation".
And that was before the advent of AI generated images and whole books churned out with LLMs. What do you say to the guy who is hip deep in "evidence" from the Heritage Foundation? What do you say to a TERF quoting from the Cass Report? What happens when you get a rebuttal in the form of a Tucker Carlson Interview from Moscow?
Yeah, you can just wave that off as "Fake News, doesn't count". But then so can they, and we're back to Square One on validating any kind of underlying truth.
he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation
None of us are immune to propaganda. Thinking this is a matter of simple intelligence is the first trap you fall into when evaluating a source.
It's so easy to tell yourself "I'm smarter, therefore you must be wrong" and work backwards from there.
These folks hunt for a bogeyman that "suits" the ills of their life, then apply the hateful stereotypes.
For the incel example: if they are a failure to launch and also can't get a girlfriend...
There's some social order conspiracy + a genetic lottery they lost. It's not their fault they aren't desirable, everything was stacked against them. Their enemy (super chads and stupid Stacys) deserve hate because they overlook the incel and keep them down
They never developed social skills, are disrespectful and only see women as sex objects/possessions. If they cultivated some hard work, maturity, and respect for others, they would be much happier with life, and likely find a partner.
The first option is way easier... Just blame everyone else!
Before incel was a thing and way before Andrew Tate..I thought my brother was an introvert. Because he could not get a gf in High School. Like me I just thought wait until he gets out and he will get one. Then I learned about incels this was about the time I heard Andrew Tate come on the seen. When my brother turn 21 I told him we are going to a bar and I am getting you drunk for the first time. Well we also smoked his first joint before hand and then went in. I was the sober driver and kept ordering cranberry juice. All the while I kept ordering him shot and buckets of beers and everything. I will never forget this put his head on the counter and I thought he passed out. But I shook him and he jumped to and started dancing on the dance floor and everything. I was like WTF. He then started hitting on girls/women and getting their phone numbers. He even got one to blow him in the bathroom. He came back to me totally messed up and told him we got to leave and we left. Well I almost had to drag him out to the car because he wanted more numbers. Long story a little bit longer I and I am probably wrong that incels need to get drunk or high and become more motivated like my brother was.
That knowledge needs active reaching out, otherwise you'll just be in the "bigotry is when irrational hatred of group for the sake of doing evil" camp, which can be easily converted with "experiences", "statistics", etc.
I grew up in a very prejudiced family, and my family liked to scream off their lungs at me when I called them racists, because racism was supposed to be done for the sake of evil like in a cartoon, and them having "extensive experiences" of Roma wrongdoings against them makes it okay for them to throw everyone of them under the bus, for the illusion of safety.
It's surprisingly easy to teach racism and sexism. Parents do it all the time very effectively. Not long after MLK was killed there was a classroom experiment done, which was later made into a documentary called Blue Eyes Brown Eyes. The whole documentary is an hour long, but I think even watching a shorter 5 minute clip from it will show you just how quickly kids pick up on bad behavior when authority figures feed it to them.
And there are so many other good answers that other people have already written. It's really neat to learn from so many perspectives.
As a young person who grew up on the internet, with no parental oversight, I can say it's because there is a lot of right wing bullshit online that media companies love to push on their users. When I was a tween I got suckered into it hard when one day youtube decided to put mgtow videos in my recommended feed. I never initially searched for them. I did eventually get out of it, and I'm not entirely sure how, but I remember as a 13yo seeing trump in 2016 bully that disabled reporter and it really put a sour taste in my mouth. And then over the next few years that led to me leaving catholicism, becoming a socialist, and realizing I'm transgender and very gay.
With me being transgender and pan, that adds another aspect to it, because I think I knew subconsciously that I was queer as a tween, but growing up in an environment where I was repeatedly told those things were wrong led to me feeling absolutely miserable about myself, and misery loves company. And this also makes me wonder how many nazis are queer and don't even realize it or refuse to recognize it.
Don't underestimate how much resentment and anger a privileged people can develop when they don't get every. single. thing. they think they are entitled to.
Remember that racial segregation in the US wasn't that long ago, historically speaking.
Some of children who lived through that era were raised with racism and these values were passed to their children who became Gen X and Y.
Religion also had a bigger influence in the previous generations. Homophobia and transphobia was normalized and you could even be arrested for being any of LGBTQ up until very recently and it's still the case in some regions.
Nazi ideology never really left either. And the way this ideology came to be was through disenfranchised people who were angry and needed someone to be angry against. Someone came at the right place at the right time and gave these people a scapegoat.
Fascism is kind of the same but with a cult of personality.
I know some people are born into these mindsets. I know what it's like to have been raised by a bigot; indoctrinated thoughts are the hardest to change.
I am convinced a large part of the problem is some people prefer convenient answers which make immediate sense, as opposed to nuanced truths.
Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.
Unfortunately my experience is nothing short of common. Our current generation is the most tolerant in history, so naturally our parents will hold bigoted opinions.
If you want to hear a fascinating story, listen to Megan, who left the "God hates fags" church, and now tries to explain indoctrination.
Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.
I have struggled to communicate what you said in your first sentence in less than paragraphs several times and failed. Thank you for giving me an example of how to say it succinctly. Let's hope I can remember/replicate that the next time I try to get the concept across to someone.
I overheard my kids talking about whites being replaced, and saying the big N word. YouTube and the internet in general is a great recruitment tool. Yes, I talked to them.
I would imagine it gives you the taste of "everyone is lying to you" and then latch on to... Other people still lying to you, but it's just randoms online, they'd never lie like govt or the MSM.
It's easy to fall into if you don't have the critical thinking skills to sift through what is/isn't bullshit.
I've seen more than a few people assert "horseshoe theory" on this subject. Since the Far Left and the Far Right are the same, they turn you right by sending you left.
Anti-Americanism makes you a Trump supporter or Xi supporter or whatever. And these fucked secret programs from the 60s and 70s make you anti-American. Ergo...
If you want something to be true and feel as if it's true then you're likely to believe it's true.
Facts usually don't change people's mind and might make them defensive about their views because if they're wrong it will hurt them personally in the ego and self esteem.
I can fully see how something like feeling superior can fit into that. This includes others being inferior as a corollary.
Then you mix in anger. You are angry and stressed about the current situation and then somebody that speaks well and is smarter than you in your opinion says "blame immigrants".
This fits in the world view.
Then you can go online and see other people and they say "Nazis didn't have this problem because they fixed it". So you in your newfound and knowledge go out and tell people unapologetically and if anybody inferior, that makes you angry, says anything bad things can happen.
There's a path to become a Nazi. I think people don't intend to be bad, they care about people, Nazis don't think everyone should count as people. It's societal cancer.
That's a very complex question with many, many answers. No individual life can be boiled down to a single phenomenon. A lot of the answers I'm seeing in here are great, ans definitely describe a phenomenon at play, but it's important to remember that nobody's just outright stupid enough to fall for a single piece of rhetoric. Instead, them coming into bigotry is the result of a complex web of ideas that brought them to that conclusion.
That being said, I'll add my two cents that I don't see anyone saying: privilege. Privilege insulates people from how cold and cruel the world can be; in doing so, they don't learn the comraderie that grows out of shared hardship (aka empathy). They see others experiencing it, and assume they are weak, both for "allowing themselves" to fall into hardship, as well as for "getting conned" by others who have fallen on hardship. This too adds fuel to the fire that is all the other reasons people get pulled into hateful ideologies.
Imagine being excluded from some perceived secret club based on conditions you didn't have a choice in, and seeing women or bipoc or lgbt or the working class supporting each other. You too would feel resentment towards those who won't include you in their circles. Yet you never developed the proper understanding of the ties that bind them, so you only see it as hate towards you and your demographic; this then becomes a feedback loop: your hate hurts thode communities, making them even more interdependent on each other, making you more resentful and frustrated.
You fall in with people you don't really like because of a shared disdain for The Others, and then, because that's your only lived experience, assume all identity-based comraderie is necessarily just a loose collective of people that only get along because of a common enemy. This reinforces your belief that The Others hate you, only adding fuel to the fire of your own hate.
This is also why these people are so easily manipulated: all you have to do is control their perception of who hates them, and they'll do whatever you say to make it stop. This is why politics and religion are such great examples, and no "side" is immune. Want to make a leftist out of a fascist? Convince them that The Jews are actually just the bourgeoisie, who must be killed for the good of ourselves and our nation. An anarchist who fears authoritarians will readily agree to being a part of an exclusive coalition of individuals that determines the way society is structured, so, y'know, the authoritarians don't get their way.
In modern times? IDK, but historically female leaders tended to engage in more war as a way to legitimize their rule, whether instigator or not. Kosem Sultan, Queen Isabella of Spain, and Catherine de' Medici to name a few, but to quote a Quartz article:
"In fact, between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war, according to a National Bureau of Economics ... And like Isabella, queens were also more likely to amass new territory during their reigns, found the paper’s authors, economists Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish."
It's not a matter of knowledge, it's a matter of what they want.
One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is 'in' and 'out', as long as you are in the 'in' group of course.
So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the 'natural order' justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It's convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don't want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get "uppity".
Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.
I grew up watching WW2 movies and the Nazis were never shown as being anything other than Bad Guys. I would love to know how anyone grows up here in the U.S. and doesn't know that.
Many of these people overreact to good faith criticism and are narcissistic. There are some statistics that people become less self centered as they get older and incels definitely fall into that trap.
As for nazis etc, lots of that comes from like a lack of critical thinking about conspiracy theories. Its fine to think about conspiracy theories but the second you start embracing that like millions of people are conspiring against you to like stub your toe or something thats maybe the time to reign it in.
Disenfranchisement is a hell of a drug. A lot don’t believe in the ideology at first, but are forced into it because they lacked proper role models when they were young.
If you remember the post trump election memes about economic anxiety being mediaspeak for racism, this is basically where that came from.
Bigotry is a despair response, when the promises of normalcy fail someone, there's a chance for them to start looking for new meaning to understand a seemingly indifferent world, and in that state of mind, being told you're part of an exclusive club of inherent superiority is the ego stroke that gets them off.
From the moment they take that poison pill it basically plays out as an analogue of addiction. Even as they watch the sludge they're mainlining destroy everything around them it doesn't cut them off from, they just can't stop, because the validation of feeling that it's the entire world that's wrong instead of just you being shit out of luck is too much for a lot of folks to be willing to part with.
It also doesn't help that these people tend to get fired from jobs that don't put up with racist bullshit, turning the whole validation needing into a vicious cycle sort of deal.
This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they're the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think "just do a socialism bro" will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.
They literally think you can just pay the racists to stop being racists, and that you can pay a heroin addict to stop shooting up.
This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they’re the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think “just do a socialism bro” will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.
I have to admit - I'm having a hard time picturing how this would be expressed. Any particular examples you can point to?
All the "don't vote" leftists that think democrats not voting Bernie is less forgiveable that the Republicans closing abortion clinics and kicking gay kids out onto the streets.
They think perceived direct opposition to socialism is worse than something they believe will just magically go away once they finish bribing the racists to not be racist.
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
C'mon man! That's conspiracy thinking if I ever heard it. The truth is far simpler, and scarier, people are people just being people. And there are a lot of people trying to navigate a wildly complex world we didn't evolve for, one that's changing at breakneck speed. We almost have to boil our experiences down into more digestible chunks to make sense of it.
This article is so old that the formatting's been trashed, but I think you can parse the order of the text with a little effort. Few things I've ever read gave me a wider view of the world. It was so important to me I saved a PDF a few years back. If you don't like the humor, fuck it, there's still a strong message.
you are correct that I was a little lazy in not clarifying my statement and I can see that coming off as a Them conspiracy theory mind set but the powers at be that I'm talking about are NAM and people long dead now like birch and pew.
Also NAMs role in the Taft hartley act that hurt unionisation in America that we feel today.
and how NAM with the help of James Fifield warped churches across America as a response to The New Deal and FDR and fearing churches being a source of socialist thinking in the US.
If you follow this movement you will find people you know like Billy Gram and Ronald Reagan. Just look up the Spiritual Mobilization
look at the original poster boy of incel: Roger Elliot. he was physically attractive, well groomed, from decent money, clearly looked after himself but was one of the most unattractive personalities and complained he was constantly rejected.
You can still be well groomed and the biggest incel. that’s often their complaint against women. They are relying on getting by on looks alone and then complain about getting nothing because they overlooked women are deeper than that. They don’t wanna work on themselves. Easier to blame the women or society or feminism etc.
There are plenty of men who don’t even have half the physical attractiveness of Roger Elliot and far more well adjusted.
I guess maybe you could consider people’s personalities ‘unattractive’, but your phrasing comes across as abrasive at best in a NoStupidQuestions thread.
Going off your comment at face value: there are plenty of attractive people who are lonely. It could be due to all sorts of different factors. Things right now are pretty tough; mentally, physically and economically. A lot of people are struggling. And for men, that can manifest in things women see as ‘red flags’. And that only furthers the isolationism, which begins to fester and cause hateful feelings.
Because yeah, some of it is genuinely out of people’s hands.
I don’t feel like THAT is hard to understand at all.
Access to knowledge doesn't imply successful absorption of said knowledge. And a lot of the thing isn't about knowledge, but moral premises - things that are neither true nor false, but that you consider good or bad, and as others said here emotions and self-interest play a huge role on the later.
Yea but isn't knowledge a tool for understanding good or bad. If something someone tells me is bad or whatever I go and look it up read about it so I can have a discussion with them and understand their point of view. Am I wrong in doing so?
Not quite - knowledge alone is not enough to label something as good or bad. Because good/bad aren't attributes of that thing, they're only your attitude towards it.
That's important here because it's perfectly possible that a bigot knows that what other bigots use to justify their bigotry (like frenology etc.) is false, but still says "nah, screw them, I'm defending my own group at their expense". And that person would be still a bigot and should be treated as one.
But here is somethings I noticed from my journey out of the right wing from my high school days.
First we were religious and we choose good decisions and other people's choices were unwise and their fault but even though we lived in the same projects, our choices and how we lived their was unfortunate and their's was their fault. It wasn't explicit racism it was culture of racism. We were scared because we didn't understand and thought we were superior since we were trying. Then we got better off and were in church more we got inundated with right wing propaganda on the economy and Frieman econmics blaming the government and socialism. We wanted to protect our jobs and our jobs blamed the government why they had to end manufacturing jobs in America. I graduated high school in 2010. I saw hatred towards Obama and noticed my side was with the KKK and I questioned it. That is how I got out. But if I kept to my beliefs I would have hated black people and others more. Thinking I was superior as a WASP (White Anglo Saxon protestant) since I made good decisions. My parents told me I could work through college and buy a house and everything and not to take out debt. So I tried that. It was impossible.
I blamed myself for not being good enough but I also didn't do it right because I was testing it out and not using and abusing my connections. Which is how you get ahead. When I figured out I wasn't enough and started to work with the people I know I was able to do more. But I could have blamed DEI stuff why I couldn't get into college or get better jobs. But it was I just wasn't good enough and the market is barren in Delaware.
My few relationships break ups I could have blamed it all on women and got a negative attitude with that too. Also since I was raised in the church a bit I could have said they should be a trad wife. But bleh
Back to being a Wasp. I could have blamed my failures and society failures on racist things or the color of my skin but I was lucky to realize it was the rich who fucked us all and the governments fault for letting it happen.
Their evidence isn't your evidence. Your curation of facts are never the same as anyone else's. How you interpret these facts are reinforced by your family or friends. If you don't have either you find community where you can. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
This is the same for many communities. Where a person finds themselves isn't necessarily malicious. They are protecting what they value and think is what makes them unique. That is what makes them dangerous. It's all they have.
In fact they undermine their own logical thinking abilities, especially by seeking only that information which confirms that which they already believe in (because it makes them feel to good to "be right") and avoid or deny that information which disproves that which they believe in (because it makes them feel bad to "be wrong").
Even very intelligent people will reach the dumbest of conclusions because of how their own emotions control the inputs to their thinking, the kind of things they think about and even which conclusions they immediately accept without challenge and which they actively try and disprove.
Also add to this that only a small number of people are familiar with the practices of Analytical Thinking (such as used in Science) so are prone to falling for all manner of fallacies and observer cognitive errors (stuff like how one spots mostly that which happens, not the absence of things that should be happening, how others react to one's own non-verbal cues and shape their responses to one's expectations and other such things affecting what one observes and which led to things like Science have double-blind experiments).
Its weird that you mention a need to be right. As a nurse we are taught to question everything and anything but when it comes to doctors we are suppose to keep our mouth shut. I took a semester on drug abuse and signs as an elective and you would be surprised on how many doctors who operate or diagnose patient look and act or exhbit the behavior of a drug addict.
Yeah, that's the thing: the things commonly associated with logic and careful thinking such as Formal Education (even in STEM domains) or Intelligence are no defense against one's emotional needs, wants and fears.
As I've said more than once: no matter how Intelligent a person is, their Subconscious is just as Intelligent and hence just as capable of subverting their Conscious mind.
Knowledge and Wisdom are two very different things.
Some people have problems in their life and it is convenient to believe they are do to an outgroup. You mention knowledge against it but these people live their lives and insert their instilled prejudices to explain the flaws, making them have (fake) first hand proof of their beliefs.
Ok while I may agree. But my father taught me when I was younger that a black woman has no place in this world so you will have to work extra harder to overcome hate and other things....my question is was he right? I say this as a now 41 year old.
Wrong on this half, in that the factors of your birth & immutable traits or public opinion of those can't prevent you from have a place here regardless of any opinions.
...you will have to work extra harder to overcome hate and other things...
You would know the answer from you past 41 yrs better than I would.
"so much knowledge against it"? We live in a n overwhelming ocean of information, what seems obvious to many people may be completely unheard of in other areas, we're not all getting our information from the same sources. Or some people have become indoctrinated by other groups and have become basically inoculated against "wokeism". Plato's allegory of the cave is just as relevant today as it was in his time (if not more so). There are people spending their whole lives looking at shadow puppets dancing on the wall, thinking that that's reality. Who knows, maybe it's us, but the point is, even though we're awash in information, ignorance is alive and well.
You'll find a lot of arguments for believing such things if you look for them. Some of these arguments are simply angry rants (and they appeal to angry people who aren't inclined to think analytically) but others are quite sophisticated. Have I refuted all the sophisticated ones I've come across? No, that would take a lot of effort, and maybe some of them are even technically true. I'm not convinced by them primarily because I have certain assumptions about the world: conspiracy theories are generally not true, most people just want to live a good life, kindness is usually reciprocated, and so forth. Someone who holds the opposite set of assumptions (every organization is corrupt, many people are inherently evil, kindness leads to being exploited, etc.) won't be convinced by your "knowledge against it" without even hearing you out in the same way that I'm not convinced by the arguments for it.
Incels at least is a natural consequence of the difference between society's expectations, the needs of an individual, and generally the lack of support and or direct toxicity towards men who need help and emotional support men require as humans.
That one is a societal problem around isolating people away from affection.
The rest I have no freaking clue how one becomes a Nazi in 2024.
Being an unloved —or worse, abused— child is quite often the root cause of a vast number of affective and personality disorders people develop later on as an adult.
That's what put me on track to that mindset back when I was in school. I was short and shy and a little weird so I was bullied constantly and girls wouldn't even talk to me. A large part of that bullying was directed at the fact that I didn't have a girlfriend which led to me being resentful towards women because I felt like they weren't even giving me a chance. No one ever supported me, not even my "friends". I felt stuck in that situation and saw no way to change things which led me to be very hateful. Fortunately I got into a different environment when I was in college with kinder people who accepted me and was able to pull out of it. A lot of people are not that lucky or get too deep in the hole to pull themselves out of even if given the chance.
As someone who's had several long debates with a neonazi on discord, it usually boils down to them saying "Goldbloom controls you, all your arguments are therefore nullified"
Their aptitude for dismissing information is amazing
Possibly yes but that doesn't help if one is morbidly afraid of approaching women for example.
However my point was that it's a bit pointless to ask why would someone become something when by definition it's involuntary. It's like asking why would anyone be under 6ft tall.
It's the same as it's always been. We gravitate towards what we feel.
The internet has just allowed certain groups who wmight be ashamed to announce their true feelings to say the quiet part out loud anonymously. This gets the next generation to not see a problem with it and go from there.
As an example. Take an impressionable young boy (14-18), he has trouble getting dates, doesn't have a great home life. Little bit of a loner. Before the internet, hed have to figure out a purpose. Maybe he'd start going to a gym or hitting the books harder to be smarter or something.... With the Internet he's able to find "friends", he finds a community, that community may lead him down dark paths.... Where some in better living situations may say "this is too much" and walk away, he doesn't have anything to walk to... So he gets more and more indoctrinated into the cause.
Any kind of liberal space for men to talk about our issues. Reddit has a community that likes to pretend that is what it is. But it's more focused on how horrible men are to women
I'm just a few drinks in spitballing, but I'd argue a pro mental health men's group would be valid, men dont have a lot of "unique" issues (that I can think of) but the demonization of MH would definitely be one IMO.
They are being constantly bombarded with algorithm-fueled targeted media designed to make them feel just good enough about themselves to keep watching the next video of 'woke woman gets owned on camera and everybody claps'.
Source: my childhood friend gets recommended this trash daily on his youtube homepage. I try to push against it without re-enforcing the narrative that The Liberals are the reason why he doesn't have any friends. I don't think it's working.
Humanity has this default setting where tribalism = TRUE, and social media gives you a place where you can form new tribes around anything and everything all of the time. As a matter of fact, it tends to encourage modern day tribalism. Why do you think antivaxxers and flat earth are a thing. In ancient times that sort of behavior was confined to the house of the local village idiot.
There is a lot of good books (or audio books) I could suggest. This has been also a interest in mine. The reasons are different and also the same. Many of the top comments touch on some of the points.
Short answer: it's basic human nature if you don't specifically work against it. Many people work against it, but not everyone. The ones that do not work against it mostly don't because the environment they grew up in doesn't do this, so they never started working against it. Later in life it's difficult to change and admit you were wrong.
I mean the specifics like who you hate, in what way, is learned, but the hate itself is basic. You can't tell me hate isn't one of the most basic human emotions.
It's a slippery slope. First it's either a community they can share anything with, or it is a subject dear to them that they see people give solution to. Then, slowly, one idea at a time, they get litteraly corrupted. Ideas are imprinted through repetition, values are suggested. Then, or before, you imprint the idea that the others are lying. This is key because it seed doubt in everything, but as he is closer from this group, this group get to imprint its own ideas through repetition alone. Distance is built with relatives so that the group is the only group he has. Then if he starts to disagree, he will be kicked, sometimes also punished, and he'll be left alone, or at least he must be convinced of it. Once there radicalisation is a process that's hard to stop.
Doubt, distrust, and a group to be with are the key ingredients. Liberalism is a fertile ground for this because it promotes individualism when humans are social creatures. So it's very easy to find people in need of a social group that gives belonging. And racism makes the easiest pretense : you belong because of your blood, or because you're born here.
For sexism, it's mostly a reactionary backlash, and secondly this liberalism problem of promoting individualism to humans who seek belonging. Feminism did won, and the old way of treating women is being addressed. But it is a process, and while we know what's bad, we don't have much new examples to follow. Yet most people have been trained in the old way, so now they are at lost. It's not the first reason why they're alone, liberalism has this place, but it is far easier to blame it on women and feminism than to try to build a new society. And also, it again gives them belonging with men like them that understands them and give explanations and solutions to their problems. Not good ones, but that's not the point.
Ok got to ask and if you don't know thats ok....how come it seems females are not in this type of group.? Or is there some and we just don't hear about it? I only bring it up because you kept using he and men so thats what got me wondering...but really want to say thank you for typing all that out and a thought provocing answer....no sarcasm
For the first, it can be women too. For misogyny it's harder. But there is a trend currently to attract and radicalise women into conservatism too. The trad wives movement. I don't remember the names but there are movement for spirituality and naturalism that are also linked to trad wives. That is also a slippery slope : first you hook them spirituality, and at the end you have JK Rowling who is an anti-trans activist.
Women and men are not in the same groups simply because conservatives are misogynistic so they like to separate men and women.
Overall it is a culture war lead by the far right.
That plus being an ass in general I'd say. I'm 25, haven't ever gotten laid and struggle with loneliness all the time, but still don't think all women are sluts and are obligated to fuck me.
So there was a town next to where i grew up their claim to fame was that they had a lot of neo nazis. What they basically did was going around and picking up people and outsiders and befriend them, turning them into racists. I think it works like that with a lot of these groups.
It's a term that's taken on some additional baggage/meaning. Originally it simply meant someone who was involuntarily celibate - wants to have sexual relationships, but doesn't. Now it usually refers to someone adhering to a kind of peculiar set of ideologies around that (see: social value theories taken to some often ridiculous extremes; good ol' fashioned misogyny/perhaps misanthropy; etc.).
There's a kneejerk reaction to incels in the latter sense because so much that comes out of that is pretty awful. That and it's often folks who engage with the latter stuff who are more inclined to identify with the term incel - most others who just fit the former definition just say they're single.
IMO the latter usage is just more proof that we are failing and continuing to fail men, badly, in terms of community and mental health supports.
I mean, involuntary anything isn't really a choice. It's right there in the name.
But the original self-professed incel was a woman, complaining that she was "unfuckable". The term now tends to describe mostly men who feel fury at some social system that prevents them from caging a TradWife into their house, rather than the 00s era college NEET who just feels like their youth is being wasted because they aren't getting laid.
The cliquishness might be a choice, but the condition certainly isn't.
Wiccans name men incels, the name itself, involuntary celibate indicates they are there of some one else's doing. They do this to ugly men, quiet men, and men they see as a threat.
So why do you think they made themselves some thing involuntarily through not having knowledge? Are you trolling, or genuinely confused how the wiccan rape cult has destroyed society?
Or are you just looking to attack men you think are less than you?
Word matter, so how does a shy or fat guy deserve to be incels for how they look or act? Or do you not care about your victims?
This misandrist sexism you're pushing is tired and out of date, it's literally what broke society. You need to rethink your entire thesis on society, because you're deadly wrong, and society is changing with or without YOU.
The wiccan rape cult also finds its roots in Nazism as it came here after the fall of Germany. Men aren't the problem, but if you feel they are, you're definitely part of the problem.
There's a difference between someone who is an incel and someone who would like to, but can't find someone to have sex with. It's like how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Not all people who can't find someone to have sex with are incels even if they are technically involuntarily celibate. There is a lot more that goes along with the incel community than JUST involuntary celibacy.
A shy or fat guy who can't find someone to sleep with might not classify as an incel for example, but someone who thinks like your comment very much does.
If you think not having sex is so terrible it's basically torture, the problem isn't that you haven't had sex. It really isn't that great, and you need to stop idolizing these things
What you're actually missing, and misinterpreting as "sex will fix me" is genuine human connection, and that is a skill that takes a loooot of practice, mistakes, heartache, and even at times, being "cringe."
But it's easier to think that sex is some magical experience that a secret organization is denying you.