Nitpick: What’s responsible for this (not actually very organized) terrorist movement isn’t just “being a loser” or “inability to score the hot chicks”. Plenty of sexually unsuccessful guys are decent and principled despite being so-called “losers”.
What’s causing the terrorism and other antisocial actions is not the “loserdom” per se but the entitled selfish resentment, particularly the misogyny. Misogyny terrorism is what this is.
Coming from a cultural where arranged marriages are common, IMHO incel losers wouldn’t like it. Why? because most arranged marriages involve partners of roughly equal social status and usually equal attractiveness. Unattractive men only get beautiful wives if they can compensate with much higher social status (usually a lot more money and better family connections). The incel losers don’t want women who are equals to them. They are unattractive losers who think they should have supermodels.
The problem is is that these are people with poor social skills. They have existed forever, but have always been pretty much solitary by nature and definition.
The internet has allowed these people with poor social skills to band together. Interesting effect, but I don’t know if it is a good one. Instead of just being a lonely loser, you are a lonely loser who is sharing his outrage with other lonely losers.
Or else they “accept” their low-status ranking as “unqualified” to get a supermodel, but still perpetually sulk and fume and hate on women out of resentment for the shitty hand that they were dealt by Fate in the “romantic qualifications” department.
And the problem with arranged marriages in this situation would be basically the same as the problem with prostitution. Namely, we shouldn’t use either sex workers or assigned brides as sacrificial victims for “incels” to vent their frustration and insecurities on so that they’ll leave the rest of us alone.
:dubious: Okay, I promise to stop harping on this issue after this post, but I REALLY think that this persistent conflation of the socially-awkward with the hateful-misogynistic is unfair and misleading.
There are plenty of romantically unsuccessful “lonely loser” guys who have poor social skills but don’t resort to hating or blaming women for their problems. Some of those guys just deprioritize sex and romance in their lives and focus on other things. Some of them retreat into (non-stalkerish) devoted crushes or worship-from-afar for a female acquaintance or celebrity. Some of them keep occasionally trying to strike up relationships but just haven’t clicked yet. None of them deserve to be put in the same category with bitter, aggressive, blame-spewing “incels”.
Being a “lonely loser” doesn’t make you a misogynist “incel”, any more than being a laid-off rural working-class white man makes you a white supremacist or neo-Nazi.
The people who embrace hateful ideologies in response to their personal suffering choose to do so not merely because they’re suffering, but because on some level they don’t really mind being hateful. They should not get a pass on that. Nor should they be lumped together with the far better people who are going through the same suffering without resorting to hatred and bigotry.
I don’t know how far we are in disagreement on this, but I know that we are not completely agreed.
My take on it is that, yes, there are people who are hateful. And those people will find any excuse they can to display that hate. Whether it be through racism or misogyny or any other form of intolerance and bigotry.
There are other people who are not so hateful, but who have experiences that can relate to the things being said by those who are. The hateful guy says “Women are such terrible blankety blanks, because of this poorly thought out thesis.” and the person who hasn’t been able to get anywhere with his romantic attempts reads that, and it makes sense to him. It’s wrong, and it uses poor logic and probably worse citations, but it resonates.
Radicalization is a real thing. People who are just down on their luck with the dating game could become full on raging hateful incels in fairly short order, when if the people perpetuating their hate hadn’t been able to set that hook, hadn’t been able to take advantage of the frustration and even desperation felt by many they would not have ever even read the dissertation on “why girls are icky”.
Even those who do not take it that far, who may agree with some of the stuff about how it’s harder now to find romantic relationships, but they don’t actually blame the women for it, act as a crowd, a form of cover, for those who are more hateful to hide in. When the actual hateful people lash out, they are protected by the less radicalized, who justifiably don’t understand why they are receiving the anger they are, and who are more likely to become radicalized themselves because of it.
I am not “conflating” the socially awkward with the hatefully misogynistic. I am just describing a path that is there for the socially awkward that they may find tempting. If they take that path, I do not say that they should “get a pass”, but I do think it is important to understand that new misogynists are being made out of the socially awkward every day.
Incels may have legitimate grievances. Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that they do. But in order for them to be made happy, women who otherwise wouldn’t be interested somehow have to be forced to have sex with them. Let’s pretend, again for the sake of argument, that we somehow can do this. Now you’ve just replaced one unhappy group (the incels) with another unhappy group (the women who are being used as sex slaves or whatever arrangement would be required). No net improvement, and the morals of society say this action isn’t ok, so it’s not viable as an option.
So even if all incels became expert terrorists and were killing thousands of people a year, it probably wouldn’t make sense for society to cater to their demands.
Same with every other group of terrorists. Like the linked article, a bullied kid back for revenge.
The only measure that would be effective would be to make society more secure. Ban all private guns. Develop a network of surveillance cameras in all public areas, with automated activity detection, so that the number of un-punished crimes being committed is nearly zero. Make all the cars automated. Take the knives away - only robots inside machines can use knives. Knives as tools would require a license.
Now I know that many of you would say that such a society would be a dystopian hellhole. And maybe you are correct. But that is what you’d need to do to stop these violent attacks.
There’s also transhumanism (e.g., genetic modification to ensure that peoples brain chemistry stays within certain bounds) or simply better tools to detect and correct mental illness.
Sure. I was talking about near-term fixes. What you are talking about is far term. The reason being is that the ‘brain chemistry’ hypothesis itself is mostly incorrect, and this is shown in numerous clinical studies. That is to say, the brain is a large network of connections, and in few patients is there anything you can screw with globally that will be an outright improvement without side effects. Any neurotransmitter path you mess with will affect many systems.
Fixing it would require tools that allow for extremely localized changes. Rewiring small, specific regions of the brain that are faulty, not throwing in a drug that goes everywhere and isn’t even at a stable concentration over a 24 hour period due to pharmokinetics.