Today I want to explore the InCel (involuntarily celibate (movement and the Red Pill sights they are associated with. It is, of course, tempting to mock it –and many highly intelligent people do. But I’m not really sure that is the smartest approach. For one, it can only exacerbate the situation by taking (what seems to them, at least (a kind of “in-crowd” tone that is, in the sense of not being part of that “in-crowd”, the very source of their understandably painful experience of alienation. And this is important to understand since it may well be this experience of painful alienation that lies behind most of the mass shootings we’re seeing in America. I mean this could well be the reason this is mainly occurring in High Schools and Colleges, the outright cauldrons of narcissism and vanity in which being part of an “in-crowd” is everything. And I’m not blaming the victim here. Kids will be kids. But what I will suggest (and I apologize for my opportunistic Marxist jab (that a lot of this comes from producer/consumer Capitalism and the way it bombards us (via TV ads (explicitly with images of what it is like to be part of an “in-crowd” while implicitly implying that if you are not like one of those people you see, you are no one.
The thing to understand about InCels and Red Pill sites (and this is what makes it even scarier and relevant to our present situation in America (is that it is generally innocuous: a lot of beta males expressing and sharing their frustration with females. And what male hasn’t? And they’re not totally unjustified in their frustration as females are, by no means, saints. And they even prop their positions up with perfectly authoritative theory such as evolutionary psychology and psycho-biology. The problem is that it, given the bubble it works in, too easily succumbs to misogyny and rape culture. There are people on these sites who have literally argued that rape should be legal. Even worse (and more relevant to our present predicament, these sites are known to be prime recruiting grounds for Neo-Nazi and Alt-Right predators. And it is easy to see how that could happen given that those recruiters will basically be offering these guys an “in-crowd” to be a respected member of.
To take a philosophical route, what this results from is what Spinoza referred to as a sad affect: that which results from not having power over the other node in a given relationship. And the only thing that can result from that is the defeated node seeking other means to achieve joyful affects. Bill Maher (in a way I am fully sympathetic with (countered this by pointing out that he too, from time to time, had been an InCel, but recognized that the way you deal with it is by becoming a doctor or a rock star. As my Psych 101 textbook pointed out: it’s a matter of self worth. That’s the way I dealt with it. But unfortunately, not every male has been blessed with the same intellectual and creative curiosity as me and Maher.