They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
Probably generally starting with either an inferiority complex, or being a sociopath.
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.)
suffered in bad childhoods
Just to say, but what causes those things are hate and fear.
The second one doesn’t require trauma.
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.)
To be fair, those involved in the bad childhoods also are likely to have bad childhoods themselves (the adults I mean).
Transgenerational stuff, victims becoming offenders and the likes.
Yep, you’re right, that’s what’s meant here.
Ok so your telling me since when I was bad in my childhood and spanked with a switch that I can become one?
Anyone can become filled with hate.
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.
It’s weird how some people turn into neo-nazis or incels after that and I just pay sexy Russian dom mommies to beat me within an inch of my life.
That’s certainly their rationale.
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.
Nah. I quit for quite a few months and my withdrawals largely passed, I no longer had any nicotine cravings by that point.
Then I started having serious problems with academic performance, insane mood swings, etc.
My stress levels were much higher, I had brain fog constantly and was either restless or super low energy.
I experienced zero benefits to quitting vaping in terms of physical wellbeing also, my lungs felt no different before or after, but I never smoked, but I did almost become obese after quitting due to the lack of hunger suppression.
I didn’t connect it to quitting nicotine at first and searched for psychological explanations, but I had no actual reasons to be struggling at the time, eventually I realized it started a few months after I’d quit vaping. When I started using nicotine again via patches, after some time I started feeling like myself again.
Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD - now professionally diagnosed so I actually was genuinely way better off on nicotine than off of it, it does the same thing as Adderall (Amphetamine) does as well, but more subtle and in a slightly different way, a combination of both has really made me a much better person, far more rational and just generally way calmer, but also way more productive. I now have an MSc and a decently paying IT career, a stable and healthy relationship, healthy weight and I’m always working on self-improving through exercise, learning or minimizing other vices like cutting out all sugary foods, no more snacks, more veg, less alcohol etc etc. I wouldn’t have had any of this without good ol’ nicotine.
From my discussions with the diagnosing psychiatrist, this is a relatively common thing amongst folks with ADHD.
There are a number of studies that suggest Nicotine’s potential usefulness in “neurospicy” people:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758075/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8741955/
One study suggested that poor cognitive performance overall being a good predictor for relapse among smokers could actually be explained by rhe fact that nicotine being a stimulant has wide ranging helpful effects for cognitive function:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6018192/
ADHD or not I can certainly relate. If I had to put a word to how I felt off nicotine, I’d say I primarily just felt like I was dumb.
Here’s also a science direct article that mentions cites a range of studies, including on that of its positive effects on people with Alzheimer’s;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027858462300009X
Drugs are drugs. YMMV. Assuming that chemical X is always bad when this isn’t the case isn’t useful to a productive discussion. Even if you want to dissuade people from nicotine absolutely - an approach that works far better to actually getting people on board is being honest.
On Reddit, subs like quitvaping and the caffeine quitting one are full of misinformation that is transparently a bunch of people RPing the war on drugs infomercials of the late 80s, not much different from the semen retention pseudoscience folks.
But also don’t smoke. Obligatory disclaimer but Inhaling combustion smoke just isn’t worth any benefit of anything, not nicotine, not devil’s lettuce.
Vaping is far far safer and so far is not known to cause any issues, (unless of course you count the tainted dark market unregulated american weed vapes which will give you popcorn lung), though as always, we can’t be sure, so best use something like patches.
You mentioned it turns out you have ADHD (turns out so do i) and that you began medication for that and it reads that this medication began at around the same time as you started on nicotine again.
I am inclined to ask the question. Do you think perhaps you are associating the effects of the ADHD treatment to nicotine use?
There certainly are some documented benefits to nicotine use. And much of what you say is verifiable. However, many of the benefits you describe can be associated with the treatment of ADHD aswell.
I accept i dont know your personal situation. I only read your comment and noticed the timing seemed to be a bit close.
On the subject of vaping, i personally experienced some sticky phlegm and trouble coughing this up as well as issues with lung capacity and the dependance on the nicotine made me extremely irritable and unable to concentrate until i vaped.
Also it takes longer than a few months to break a nicotine addiction. I still uphold the idea that there may have been some withdrawal going on there.
However i am happy to conceed the point if you genuinely disagree. As i said i have no idea about your personal situation.
and it reads that this medication began at around the same time as you started on nicotine again.
No, there was at least a few months between these two events. I should’ve phrased it better.
Do you think perhaps you are associating the effects of the ADHD treatment to nicotine use?
No. They’re wildly different in feel. I can tell when my meds wear off and when they kick in most days. That’s why I like having both.
i personally experienced some sticky phlegm and trouble coughing this up
This is far more likely due to the fact you used to smoke. I have anecdotally heard of some people who have issues with feeling like their throat is irritated, but they usually have crazy setups, like 300w 4-coil 0.24ohm temple RDAs with 1.5mg nic on a noisy cricket II in series or w/e. I have a hunch that the reason for it. Those were fun AF but I wouldn’t use it long term, it’s the equivalent of thinking that because a bar of chocolate doesn’t hurt you, then neither can a giant dump truck.
I’ve long switched to the rechargable elfbars with high strength (relatively) nic salts and low vapour volume which I’ve had no issues with.
and the dependance on the nicotine made me extremely irritable and unable to concentrate until i vaped
That’s true for sure. If I know I’m not gonna be able to vape I just use nicotine patches, I have no psychological addiction to vaping itself, only a physiological dependency on nicotine, if the patches match my nicotine intake levels, then I tend to forget vaping is even a thing at all haha.
Also it takes longer than a few months to break a nicotine addiction.
Yes, in terms of cravings, and those did pass actually, but in terms of such acute withdrawal effects? Nah - something is definitely going on there that wasn’t just pure withdrawals.
As i said i have no idea about your personal situation.
You do now that I wrote it out :)
Either way, have a good day!
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.
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.
TLDR: Poor mental health and instability
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.
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.”
Ahhh, your almost there at realizing that capitalism commodified dating and is basically predatory against single men.
unchecked capitalism makes everything worse.
Both in the context of this discussion and in society in general.
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
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.
I just confronted a guy I know who told me with a straight face that poor people struggle with budgeting and that’s why they’re poor.
I asked him where he got that info. He then sent me a bunch of YouTubers.
Payday loans sort of suggest this. Bit it’s more how society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Payday loans don’t suggest this. Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
When you’re one month from disaster and you break a leg, it’s a payday loan or your family doesn’t have a home/food when you work a job without paid leave. And good luck with the disability approval, because even if it eventually comes through, you are on the hook until it does.
Being poor has very little to do with budgeting. I’m sure a substantial portion, if not the majority of them, could figure out how to budget with a $100k income instead of a $30k income.
I agree. My point was that rich people don’t take payday loans, but i recognise that not being able to afford a safetly cushion doesn’t necessarily imply bad planning.
rich people don’t take payday loans
Some do, depending on their circumstances. But when you’ve got a big income it’s easier to get out from under the debt.
Most rich people just use credit cards, though. They’re arguably worse than payday lenders, since the credit limits are much higher. But they’re also very risk averse, so they don’t extend credit to the lower income groups.
Payday lenders and other loan sharks have to spend more on collections and run tighter margins as a result. Far easier to be a credit card company and simply wage a finger at someone’s credit rating to extort payment than to actually execute a repo.
Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Seems like you agree
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.
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.
You know how they say “Show, not tell” when writing? Excellent job mate, thanks for it
I’m glad you appreciated it! I think I can forgive the subtle jab xD
Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too
You sound like a good person to me. That level of self reflection rarely / never leads to being a shithead in my experience.
Crazy story but a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
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.
Great writing style too, for what it’s worth.
That was quite a read.
Thanks for sharing.
This is a fantastic read and a great explanation of how this can happen. You’ve come a long way and made it out the other side.
Fascists provide easy (but often fake) answers to hard problems. Loneliness, the fear of replacement, that kind of thing.
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.
Don’t Be a Sucker
This is an anti-fascism film made by the U.S. in the 1940s. It pretty much focuses on answering your exact question. It’s a decent film too.
Feels > reals.
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.
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.
now, this’n right here kids is a prime specimen of what those highfalutin desk jockeys call a “global citizen.”
I’ve been called worse
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.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.
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.
Fantastic summary! Thank you!
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
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.
I think that’s an understandable thought because they try to whitewash history. Once you whitewash history, it’s easy to convince people that a) it’s their own fault / pull yourself up by your bootstraps, or b) they want special privileges or treatment.
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/Ot_MO0-oZdc
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.
What is a “pick me?”
“I’m one of the good ones! I’m on your team!” Kinda like how many of us view blacks and gays who support conservative politicians.
