The Incel Question

A couple of interesting things happened on Twitter last week. One was this:

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/990612769182507011

I'm a great fan of Hanson from years ago. Not of his weird sci-fi stuff, that I don't get. But his socio-psychology writing is top-notch. After an incel unleashed his Beta Rage killing several people on a van attack, the very word "incel" has reached the mainstream. And the normies are flabbergasted. What's an "incel"? Involuntary celibate? Like, some people aren't having sex? Well most male journalist aren't having sex either, at least by the soyboy-on-pajamas look of them. But they've been domesticated enough that they aren't unhappy about it. The thing about incels isn't that they can't get laid. It's that they dare to protest about it.

Mr. Hanson as usual didn't get the progressive joke. That's part of his charm, of course, it is his very cluelessness that pushes him to write, and to analyze well this kind of thing. But he's looking at things that the Left doesn't want him to look at; so he got burnt pretty badly. I won't link at Slate as a matter of principle, but Hanson is lucky that his patron is the dilettante, and secret Roissy/Heartiste fan, Tyler Cowen, and not some other normie academic.

Which brings us to this.

https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496

As I was saying the problem that normies have with incels is not that they are losers for not getting laid. The problem is that they organize, that they gave themselves a name. That they have class-consciousness of a sort. Liberal states have "freedom of association" in their constitutions as a relic of the time they were fighting the old monarchies which wouldn't give it to them. And they wouldn't give it to them because "associations" are a hidden-in-sight form of political conspiracy, and any state which wants to survive doesn't admit political conspiracies. Try to gather 50 people in public in China and see how long it takes for police to ask what the hell you're doing.

Of course liberal states, i.e. Western states have freedom of association as a symbol of their revolution against the old order; but they aren't stupid. They don't really allow freedom of association. Ask Roosh what happened when he tried to organize a meetup of right-wingish PUAs. Ask any club or association of size that denies access to women; or accepts only white men. The liberal state understands that only white men are potentially disloyal, and so any association of white men is illegal de facto.

Which brings us to incels: it's no coincidence that incels are now being discussed so widely. There's a huge question about incels. The current-year liberal state is based, as I've written at length, on the loyalty of biologically low-status groups of people. Bioleninism. White men, in white majority countries, are thought of as potentially disloyal given that their natural high-performance gives them other avenues of status-seeking.

What about incels though? Actually incels are a huge unsolved question in the Bioleninist framework. Many asked it in the comments of my Bioleninism essays: what about white leftists? What's their deal? I had actually meant to insert in the original essays a sizable analysis of the demographic represented by Scott Alexander. In the end I left them out because I didn't want to distract from the general theory; but now that incels are in the news, I've seen some people on Twitter discussing how to fit them in the Bioleninist framework. Which fills me with joy. Yes, that's exactly the thing that people should be doing. Bioleninism is out there, clearing people's minds, making sense of the world. Well, allow me to keep on helping.

Incels are, by and large, leftist. To the extent that some incels have organized qua incels, some of them have showed some mild disapproval over the progressive society which, well, prevents them from having sex. Something which 100% of their ancestors, every single one of them, was able to do repeatedly. But again, more broadly, the continuum that goes from 40 year old virgins to incels to married incels to literal cucks to average chumps, that is the Beta Masses of our societies are all loyal followers of the state religion. They are progressive.

And the smarter part of that demographic, the nerds, are enthusiastic progressives. It wouldn't be completely accurate to equate nerds with incels, but a vast majority of nerds are incels. Scott Alexander, which is a fairly representative member of that demographic, has been an incel for all his life, at least until his choice of medication rewired his brain to make a biological fact what was just a sad social circumstance.

Now this is an important point. Why are incels (or nerds at least) progressive? Where do incels fit in the Bioleninist structure? They are high-IQ white (I'll ignore the few Asians for simplicity) men after all. But... they are also nerds. Nerds are not high status. To they extent they existed in the past, they were never high status. The pre-modern world didn't have high schools, but extraverted early-maturing boys have been abusing the hell of introverted out-of-shape boys since social mammals first evolved. Probably since lobsters, someone ask Jordan Peterson about it. He won't answer my calls.

So anyway, a shortcut to understand Bioleninism is "a coalition of people who don't want high school jocks to rule the world". Which is the natural state of mankind, for better or worse. I wasn't a high school jock, but as a white man I'd rather they rule than the girls rule, so I am not Bioleninist. For the more awkward nerds in class though, they probably prefer the girls rule, out of some extremely misguided hope that the girls will be somewhat nicer to them. That's the vibe I get from Scott Alexander.

Or maybe it's just that nerds are awkward, know they are powerless, and so tend to obey whoever is in power, and since Bioleninism advanced after the 1960s nerds have just bent the knee and dropped to the floor and kissed the feet of Women and Africans and Muslims and whoever the fuck they're told to kiss. That's the vibe I get from Scott Aaronson. I think I'll regret defiling my blog with the following quote, but I guess it's better if you don't have to read the whole thing at his blog. I did write about him before after all. Anyway, this is what Aaronson just published, in an hilariously misdirected defense of Robin Hanson.

Before going any further in this post, let me now say that any male who wants to call himself my ideological ally ought to agree to the following statement.I hold the bodily autonomy of women—the principle that women are freely-willed agents rather than the chattel they were treated as for too much of human history; that they, not their fathers or husbands or anyone else, are the sole rulers of their bodies; and that they must never under any circumstances be touched without their consent—to be my Zeroth Commandment, the foundation-stone of my moral worldview, the starting point of every action I take and every thought I think. This principle of female bodily autonomy, for me, deserves to be chiseled onto tablets of sapphire, placed in a golden ark adorned with winged cherubim sitting atop a pedestal inside the Holy of Holies in a temple on Mount Moriah.

Well, little chump, I don't think Robin Hanson is your ally.

At any rate, incels are leftist, either through mistaken affinity to the project of disempowering their chad tormentors, or out of sheer lack of spine. But none of this matters, and this brings us to Ellen Pao's tweet, who in case you are blocking embedded Tweets by some blocking extension said:

CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?

If you're not blocking tweets on your browser, here's one funny tweet of mine.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/993045595286790145

The Bioleninist coalition is made of many parts, some of which are really hard to reconcile. Say, Muslims and homosexuals. But there's one combination which is way worse than every other. Two groups which just can't coexist. Women and incels. Women hatred to incels is orders of magnitude greater than that of Muslims vs homosexuals. It is not just some vague disgust, or some religious commandment. No, women want incels dead, annihilated, out of the way, and they want it now. You see, the point of power is to get more of it. To get what you want. And what women want is hypergamy.

Hypergamy means that all women want the top men. The top 20%, the top 5%, definitions vary. Here's some data. But even with the most generous definition, women see 80% of men as being completely out of consideration for sex. They just won't sleep with them. If they do (and they do every now and then for money or other motives), and other women find out, well that automatically means they're lower status, certainly lower status than women who sleep with better men. Not even sex really, the mere company of undeserving men is like a skin disease for women. It's like an old rag worn by a leper. The attention of mediocre men is low status itself, it defiles women in their own eyes. So it follows that if possible, mediocre men should disappear. Just die.

Incel men being the most mediocre among the mediocre, they are at the top of the list for things women want to eradicate. They just don't want them to exist. Wherever they meet them they try to make them disappear. You might have heard about "women in tech"; i.e. women trying to get nerds out of tech. Nerds protest. "We were here first! We built this from scratch!". Yeah whatever. There's money to be made, so women want in. Then they saw nerds there, and they can't help their instincts. Nerds must go. Women just won't live close to them; the same way humans don't like living close to snakes or rats. That getting rid of the nerds would destroy the whole ecosystem is secondary. When tech collapses after women chase the nerds away, women will just migrate to somewhere else, as if nothing had happened.

Robin Hanson got screeching calls to lock him up when he suggested that men with no access to women perhaps have good reason for being upset. Seems to me he doesn't understand how hypergamy works. He was accused of promoting rape and slavery. Which he denied of course, but feminists had a point. Women want hypergamy. For a woman to sleep with a man below the top 20% is by definition not consensual sex. It is thus rape. For a woman to work for or live with a man below the top 20% is by definition not consensual work. It is thus slavery. This is no joke.

When men get what they want; you get, well, Gengis Khan. What is best in life (for men)? Killing enemy men and taking their women. That is not a very stable situation but when men have all the power, which has happened now and then during history, the result is understandably not very agreeable for women. After all sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive. The optimal strategies for males and females are adversarial. That's how it's supposed to be. That's how evolution works: conflict.

Well, what is best in life for women? What do women do when they have all the power? What is the female equivalent of Gengis Khan. We are finding out lately. It includes, obviously, complete privileges in every area of life for women. These two recent tweets were very illuminating. One complains that 19% of journalists killed were women. The other that 1 in 4 homeless are women.

https://twitter.com/framegames/status/993274599679954944

https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/993361737943482368

Well, say cucks, that means 81% of journalists killed were men! And 75% of homeless were men! What the hell are women complaining about? Well obviously they complain that there is even a single women being victimized, when it should be 0! When an Englishmen said that 10% of victims at something in colonial India were Englishmen, he was right to complain. We fucking rule this place, why should even a single of us have a rough time? That's what Indians are for. Well that's how women think. We are women; why should a single women have trouble? That's what men are for! There is no irony in this. It is only the cold logic of power.

And women have more power than they ever had. As I mentioned before; much of the power distribution between the sexes depends on the birth rate. The sexual targets of a man are, generally, women of his age or lower. The opposite for women; they are attracted to men their age or higher. Well, a declining birthrate means there's increasingly fewer amounts of women younger than any given man. Which raises the bargaining power of any given woman. Because every year there are fewer women being born to compete with her in the sexual marketplace.

When did men had a good time? In the 1950s to 1970s, when the birthrate was increasing and so every year more women were being born than before. Any woman had to shut the fuck up and be nice to men if she didn't want to be outcompete by the younger hordes being born every year. Now, though, it is the opposite. Women have the advantage. And they are using it. It won't be pretty.

[…] The Incel Question […]

> What is best in life (for men)? Killing enemy men and taking their women. [...] the result is understandably not very agreeable for women. How is not? weaker men die, stronger ones survive to mate, it's pretty much the definition of hypergamy.

Well men have had the upper hand since forever so women have evolved to be accommodating to it. But I figure having ones children and brothers killed wasn't very agreeable to women. And polygamy isn't very nice to older women who get no attention at all after a few years.

> For the more awkward nerds in class though, they probably prefer the girls rule, out of some extremely misguided hope that the girls will be somewhat nicer to them. One would hope those geeky men would be a prime target to awaken.. what do they have to loose?

I'm going to give a little bit of pushback here. I think BioLeninism is a bad conceptual framework and the High-Low alliance vs. the Middle (or Brahmin-Dalit vs. Amerikaaner) is still the best theory we have. If you go on the internet you see loads of freaks, weirdos, perverts, shouty ethnics, and people with mental problems and it sure looks like BioLeninism. But the real world is full of liberals, living functional lives, earning good money and then dutifully voting for black delinquency and tranny perverts. If I only read blogs, I wouldn't know this, but I have American family and most of my business dealings are in America and whenever the functional, high-earning people I work with reveal their politics it is always TRUMPHITLER. Of course, my experience might not be representative, but this seems to be what Charles Murray has found in his research. One of the ways that Moldbug represented a qualitative leap forward is that he inverted the normal distinction between liberals (misguided) and the Left (evil) with the assumption that the goal is to convince liberals to be less Leftist. In reality, the distinction is between liberals (the people actually in charge) and the Left (irrelevant sideshow that only exists in a parasitic relationship with the Left). If BioLeninism is an emergent phenomenon its that the competent White/Asian/Jewish liberals don't have enough children to make up the numbers, but they can't just dispense with democracy because that's the basis for their rule so they have to let in more and more weirdos to the High part of the High-Low alliance. This theory predicts that, as this process continues, the system will fall apart as, arguably, it already is in California.

Not agreeable to them personally, but the mantis sacrifices himself after mating to provide sustenance to the children; we seem to be programmed to get sexy genes, more or less regardless of what happens to us. Would a woman not prefer Gengis Khan, no attention in older age and all, than a nice cozy beta provider?

Certainly the interests of individual men are at odds with those of women, since they would want to impregnate all. But to achieve this a man would have to defeat all other men, pretty much certifying they are sexy stuff. My understanding is women like to see men fight, specially if there's some indication they "fight for her" (similar to a society in which men attempt to "kill your enemies and take their women").

> pretty much certifying they are sexy stuff. pretty much certifying *he is* sexy stuff.

Don't mean to be heavy handed but you may be referring to the beta-conspiracy (civilization). As opposed to Gengis Khan/Conan-the-barbarian, which is actually pretty bad for most men, but sexy stuff for women.

Sexy stuff for women's genes but not for their emotions. it's a conflict. Women want the security provided by betas coupled with the genes provided by Alphas. So regardless of whether they are in Genghis' harem or living in civilization, they are unhappy. Women are always unhappy and if they are not they will not rest until they find a reason to be unhappy and then wallow in it. They are not meant to be happy. Nature/Gnon does not intend it.

The real world liberals that you come across are merely signaling liberalism. Come Emperor Xi, he who has the mandate of heaven, they will quickly turn into real world monarchists, living functional lives, earning good money, delivering devastatingly clever one liners mocking democracy, dutifully paying taxes and all that. They know which side their bread is buttered. As do I. My co-workers also think I am a Leftie.

Some backup for your observations of how women will use their power: Mercilessly & destructively. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691817305917 Men who defeat competitors for power then cooperate with them. Because they are glad to take them onto their team, as a subordinate. Under the leader's guidance, that larger team can function better and win more status & resources for them all to share. He just needs to keep an eye on his defeated competitor & keep him from trying to scale the dominance pyramid in the future. Whereas women who defeat their competitor then try to make that competitor disappear. Women don't do functional, well-defined, competence-based status hierarchies. They do flat networks based on personal connections & animosities. A defeated competitor isn't a productive new team member who needs watching. He or she is a constant threat, who could be weaving new networks to undermine the top woman. So they have to be destroyed, by being rendered so radioactively low-status that they cannot create a new network, or some other equally drastic measure. As Western society grows more feminized, we are seeing this dynamic become the default behavior in our politics & culture. Forget the idea of an honorable "loyal opposition" that you begrudgingly work with. Mean Girls gotta Mean Girl.

Come Emperor Xi, he who has the mandate of heaven, they will quickly turn into real world monarchists, living functional lives, earning good money, delivering devastatingly clever one liners mocking democracy, dutifully paying taxes and all that. That's what Moldbug thought too. I agree. My co-workers also think I am a Leftie. But presumably the reason why you need is to pretend is because the others aren't pretending or, at least, enough of them. Probably the proportion who are just going through the motions is steadily rising; Moldbug thought that too. There's also the question of to what degree anyone really believes anything: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/corrected-evidence.html

"Scott Alexander, which is a fairly representative member of that demographic, has been an incel for all his life, at least until his choice of medication rewired his brain to make a biological fact what was just a sad social circumstance." lol you're serious, or I'm missing the joke?

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

brilliant observations.

They are definitely not happy these days :)

If a lot people not only want governmental redistribution of income, wealth - and now sex - why stop there? We lack any means to redistribute life time, but there is also great inequality in life time. If technically feasible, would the leftist crowd also try to enforce taking life time from those who have more of it than others? What if those with longer life and health spans worked hard and disciplined at it, living strictly healthy, while others live more lazy but unhealthy? Partially, we could even technically do it today: Enforced organ donation comes to mind.

[…] perhaps not. For a far more comprehensive elaboration of the Incel Question, I refer you to this cask-strength post by the blogger known as Spandrell. (Caveat lector: don’t leave it open on your desktop at the […]

Life expectancy distribution is not as skewed as sex or money. Not even close.