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leviathangourmet · 6 years ago

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In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that well-intentioned adults are unwittingly harming young people by raising them in ways that implicitly convey three untruths:

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

In their telling, the spread of these untruths, especially in the middle and upper classes, helps to explain a spike in mental-health problems among young people and recent tumult on the campuses of highly selective colleges. But if parents and educators change course, they argue, they can raise happier, healthier kids who’ll turn into better citizens.

I liked the book, which has its origins in a 2015 cover story in this magazine. The updated thesis, when fleshed out across detailed chapters, struck me as clearly stated, logically argued, and plausibly true—and the proposed remedies struck me as highly unlikely to do harm.

“Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology,” the authors advise young people, “you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals” if you do three things:

Seek out challenges “rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that ‘feels unsafe.’”

Free yourself from cognitive distortions “rather than always trusting your initial feelings.”

Take a generous view of other people, and look for nuance, “rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality.”

They even include practical advice for conveying those lessons in child-rearing. How significant are the ills that they identify relative to all the others that confront higher education or young people generally? I don’t know. But their prescriptions seem sensible, low-cost, likely to help some, and unlikely to prevent other reformers from addressing other problems.

Some critics have praised their work. Thomas Chatterton Williams reviewedthe book favorably in The New York Times. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth’s Washington Post review seemed to endorse the book’s advice in its last paragraph.

Lots of folks who responded to the book more critically argued that it gave short shrift to the thing they regarded as the most pressing problem in society or on campus. Few challenged its core arguments, whatever they were worth.

But I wanted to hear from critics of their central thesis. That’s how I found myself reading Moira Weigel’s review in The Guardian, having seen folks on social media flagging it as a devastating takedown. “Moira Weigel eviscerates with ease ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’” the biologist Stephen Currywrote. The sociologist Kate Cairns asserted that the review “systematically demolishes” the book, while another observer characterized the review as “an excellent shredding.”

Imagine my surprise when even that review contained a passage that appeared to grant the potential value of the advice at the book’s very core. Weigel wrote:

Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help. The tips it contains may benefit upper middle class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who arrive on elite campuses to find that, despite good intentions, those campuses have not fully prepared for them.

It’s the sort of passage that would usually appear in a positive review. It is no small thing to identify a problem that harms families from different economic classes and to offer tips that may help folks in each to help themselves.

But as it turns out, that passage is a brief aside, anomalous for its substantive assessment of the book’s thesis. The review’s first paragraph complains that the book doesn’t discuss financial hardship among college students (though the authors trace the mental-health trends that worry them back to high school and to the wealthiest families, not the ones struggling to pay tuition). An entire section complains that the book’s style “wants above all to be reasonable. Lukianoff and Haidt include adverb after adverb to telegraph how well they have thought things through.” Is it bad to want to be reasonable? Have they thought things through? The merits of such substantive questions are rarely Weigel’s focus, though. Many critiques are implied rather than stated, rendering them unfalsifiable.

The balance of the review is scathingly negative not in its arguments—a few pop up along the way, some concerning peripheral matters—but in its ad hominem attacks and other rhetoric disguised as argument as though its mere trappings confer heft. An argument can be strong or weak, civil or ill-mannered, calm or heated, edifying or misleading. Even the most frustrating arguments, though, offer readers more than the tropes pervading this frustrating review, and other journalistic work of the same genre: Let us call them Idioms of Non-Argument.

The Guardian review is a useful illustrative example in part because its entire mode is foreshadowed in the headline that announces the article:

The Coddling of the American Mind review – how elite US liberals have turned rightwards

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book sets out to rescue students from ‘microaggressions’ and identity politics. But perhaps they merely resist change that might undermine them

That display copy says: Never mind the merits of the book’s thesis—what’s important here, fellow leftists, is where the authors fall on a left-right ideological spectrum and what psychological factors may be motivating them. What’s a truth proposition when there’s an ongoing culture war to fight?

What unfolds over the body of the review isn’t quite a character assassination of the authors so much as a series of premeditated assaults.

The book is utterly in keeping with the longtime professional interests of both authors, and closely tied to Greg Lukianoff’s personal experience using cognitive behavioral therapy to fight serious depression. But Weigel dismissively speculates that they wrote the book “perhaps, because an article that they published in The Atlantic went viral.” Is she implying that the subject doesn’t justify book-length treatment? Some other dig? Is the line merely included to convey contempt?

Both authors have long records of producing work that is intellectually honest; neither happens to be an ideological conservative. Yet over the course of the review, Weigel compares them not only to Allan Bloom, but also to Dinesh D’Souza, and then, using guilt-by-association tactics, to the alt-right:

Hints of elective affinities between elite liberalism and the “alt-right” have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative about Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” for decades.

Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.

The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society. So, too, does it raise questions about the discipline of psychology – how cognitive and data-driven turns in that field formed Haidt and his colleagues Pinker and Jordan Peterson.

Are Haidt and Lukianoff correct or incorrect about Herbert Marcuse? Is Antifragile a good book? Is cognitive behavioral therapy a worthwhile approach? Is there wisdom to glean from the Stoics or the discipline of psychology? Weigel offers the reader no arguments of substance—just the Idioms of Non-Arguments that all of those things raise questions because ostensibly bad people are tenuously associated with each of them. God help Kevin Bacon if he’s ever the subject of a similarly crafted profile.

The apotheosis of Weigel’s vilification tactics comes a bit later. In the book, the authors recount what they regard as examples of “catastrophizing” on college campuses. But the authors also go out of their way to point out that today’s college students are sometimes behaving totally rationally when they perceive a threat to their physical safety. Among other examples, they flag an apparent rise in hate crimes, a college student’s online threat to “shoot every black person” at the University of Missouri soon after Dylann Storm Roof’s neo-Nazi murder spree, and the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

They write:

Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safety, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are not new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new wave of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress … The shock of Trump’s victory must have been particularly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Between the president’s repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long time that “white supremacy,” even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.

Judge for yourselves whether passages like that are fairly or unfairly characterized in the part of Weigel’s review where she likens the authors to a character in a recent Hollywood film, who kidnaps black people and steals their bodies:

Like Mark Lilla, Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama, who have all condemned identity politics in recent books, [Haidt and Lukianoff] are careful to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses— those who also hate identity politics and supposedly brought us Donald Trump.

In fact, the data shows that it was precisely the better-off people in poor places, perhaps not so unlike these famous professors in the struggling academy, who elected Trump; but never mind. I believe that these pundits, like the white suburban Dad in the horror film Get Out, would have voted for Barack Obama a third time.

Cheap shots like that serve no purpose other than to prejudice readers, and bear not at all on the quality of the book’s ideas. (And not that it matters, but famous professors in the struggling academy are, contra the inapt analogy to better-off people in poor places, a demographic that surely voted overwhelmingly against Trump.)

Vilification and guilt by association are not the only Idioms of Non-Argument. Misrepresentation is another.

Consider the treatment of intersectionality in the book. The authors sketch the framework as it was articulated by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, now the director of the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University, and they favorably quote an explanatory passage from Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge.

The authors write:

Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes act cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face various forms of disadvantage in ways that are often invisible to others. The point of using the terminology of “intersectionalism,” as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that “where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.”

Only then do they add:

Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself. It is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses. The human mind is prepared for tribalism, and these interpretations of intersectionality have the potential to turn tribalism way up. These interpretations of intersectionality teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression as ubiquitous in social interactions. It’s not just about employment or other opportunities, and it’s not just about race and gender.

Their argument is that while the originators of intersectionality and careful adherents of the theory offer important insights, some less nuanced interpretations are misleading students about reality by training them to see the world “in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked privilege and the other is oppression.”

By way of illustration they cite teaching tools like this one:

They reason:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Perhaps their reasoning is flawed or their concerns are not borne out by the facts. But how does Weigel distill that very carefully qualified argument?

For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt. They argue that intersectionality theory divides people into good and bad. But the scholars they quote do not use this moral language; those scholars talk about privilege and power. Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they have had it relatively easy – and that others have had to lose the game that was made for men like them to win.

Once again, there is a truth proposition, like Can CBT help master negative emotion? But rather than use the best available evidence to adjudicate something so plainly relevant to the book, Weigel casts doubt on the proposition in the reader’s mind by claiming that the authors “seem slightly hurt,” citing no particular passage, as if that should bear on our faith in cognitive behavioral therapy.

She then offers a misleading account of their beliefs about intersectionality—they are explicit that neither intersectional theory nor the scholars they quote commit the Us vs. Them fallacy—and concludes by asserting how they feel (which is to say, how her ideology tells her that they must surely feel) in a hypothetical situation that she made up.

Later, Weigel writes:

Predictably, Lukianoff and Haidt cite Martin Luther King as a spokesperson for “good” identity politics—the kind that focuses on common humanity rather than differences. But there was a reason the speech they quote was called “I Have a Dream” and addressed to people marching for jobs.

Keeping faith with the ideal that all humans are created equal means working to create conditions under which we might, in fact, thrive equally. In the absence of this commitment to making the dream come true, insisting that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land can feel a lot like trolling.

“Can feel a lot like trolling” is dense with weasel words, but what’s more notable here is the clear implication that Haidt and Lukianoff insist “that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land.”

Later, Weigel writes, “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.” No, they do not so insist! Lukianoff leads an organization—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—that constantly advocates on behalf of students facing unjust discrimination, and battles administrators who violate their civil rights. And their book explicitly states this about social-justice activism:

College students today are living in an extraordinary time, and many have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. They are identifying and challenging injustices that have been well documented and unsuccessfully addressed for too long. In the 1960s, students fought for many causes that, from the vantage point of today, were clearly noble causes … Students today are fighting for many causes that we believe are noble, too, including ending racial injustices in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal education and other opportunities for everyone, regardless of circumstances at birth; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other issues, we think student protesters are on the “right side of history,” and we support their goals.

Despite that passage, Weigel goes on to write, “The authors cite the ‘folk wisdom’ ‘Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.’ They call this attitude ‘pragmatic.’ The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance.”

The authors themselves, though, believe they are offering advice to young people that will make them more likely to succeed in building a new road.

That brings us to yet another Idiom of Non-Argument: reduction to privilege anxiety. Forget about counterarguments that address the merits of a proposition. Simply assert that its advocates fear losing their privileged status, and obviously acted in order to thwart the rise of marginalized people, and you will discredit their project without having to grapple with it at all.

Thus:

… the consensus that has ruled liberal institutions for the past two decades is cracking up. The media has made much of the leftward surge lifting Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But as this new left-liberalism gains strength, a growing number of white men who hold power in historically liberal institutions seem to be breaking right.

As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as “clicktivism” or mere “hashtags,” right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking up their monopoly on discourse.

One wonders: What makes the book’s thesis right-leaning? How has Haidt or Lukianoff broken rightward? Does democratic socialism bear on their subject matter in any way? If Lukianoff is motivated by frustration at web platforms for breaking up an elite monopoly on discourse, why does the organization he leads fight to expand the ability of leftist college students and faculty members to post their views without punishment on blogs and social media? And what, precisely, is it about their claim that students are prone to catastrophizing that preserves privilege? A review operating in the mode of argument and ideas would grapple with such questions rather than begging or eliding them.

The Idioms of Non-Argument reward those adept at using book reviews as a chance to denigrate ideological adversaries, ascribing to them motives that fit their in-group’s preferred narrative. But they do little for readers.

The Guardian’s review is terribly unfair to The Coddling of the American Mind’s two authors, but that is of comparatively little consequence. If the book’s thesis is correct and its insights are actually adopted, it could help a lot of people; if it is incorrect in a way most people fail to appreciate, it could do harm or impede a search for better solutions. That’s why it would be valuable to have a rigorous critique from a skeptical reader. Put another way, testing the truth of its claims really matters.

But Weigel’s look at the book—perhaps the most prominent skeptical review it received—spent little time arguing about its actual claims. Instead, it focused on the attributes of its authors and how they might be invoked to reify the progressive left’s notions of what ostensibly motivated them to write, or who has the better overarching ideological narrative to advance. This is the problem with the Idioms of Non-Argument. They don’t leave us any closer to understanding.

#ideas #regressive left #authoritarian left #social justice #feminism #article #identity politics #progressivism #progressive left #archive

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Sympathy for the Incel

If you want to know why young men are broken, ask them.

There is a cultural crisis emboldening the misogyny and violence of the little-known incel movement (an abbreviation for the self-professed involuntary celibate community of men) and which has now been tied to three mass murders: Elliot Rodger, Chris Harper-Mercer and, this week, the alleged Toronto killer Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 and injuring 15 people in one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in Canada in years.

One after another, media outlets are seeking to understand how this could happen while raising the question of how we got here. The Internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women, read the headline in The Verge. Can the radicalization of incels be stopped? asked the Globe and Mail. But one headline stood out, from The National Post: What should we do about the incels? Maybe help them. Shouting about what horrible women-hating losers they are (which they may be) is not going to prevent one of them from murdering again.

This, in particular, is the question Im concerned with, and why I am attempting to find whatever empathy or compassion might be possible for the disconnected young men flocking to the movement and who might be at a crossroads. One young man stood out in the countless hours I spent listening to podcasts, videos and chat room conversations within the incel community which I have been following for months now: 19-year-old Jack Peterson, a socially awkward Chicagoan who after hours of interviews agreed to reveal his real identity for the first time to The Daily Beast.

To be clear, Peterson initially did not want to do any media regarding the group, particularly a profile on what the makings of an incel look like, but after considering my appeal that perhaps others might want to reach out if they could have a better understanding, he agreed.

Born Kalerthon Demetro in the suburbs of Chicago, Peterson (his mothers last name) is a high school dropout who lives with his single mother and whose father left when he was two years old. Peripherally involved in the online incel community for years, Petersons first reaction to the Toronto horror was to record a podcast specifically condemning violence and misogyny and underscoring that for the majority of participants, this is not their reality. For him and many like him, he says, the incel community is a means of supporting one another in a world when it sometimes feels like there is no one else.

To listen to the teenager speak, he does not seem psychopathic. He does not seem like he endorses psychopathy. On the contrary, he seems shy and awkward and lonely and angry. He laughs when other incels make dark jokes about killers, but he does not make them himself. He gets it. They are blowing off steam.

Being an incel is not about violence or misogyny, repeats Peterson, who is the only incel who has been on television doing interviews in recent days since the alleged Toronto killer pointed a finger at the incel movement in a cryptic post on Facebook confirmed earlier this week. Yes, for some guys it is, but not for me. Not for many of us.

The challenge in covering the incel movement is that in many cases the cherry-picked and sensationalist coverage reinforces these mens persecution complexes and drives them further into a pit of rage-fueled nihilism. Attempting to find any kind of compassion is in no way to excuse or normalize the deranged among them. On the other hand, it is to see what options we have left in reaching them at all.

In the groundbreaking book Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman writes, [The sense of self is threatened by any major change in the deep-rooted patterns of how we think, feel, and act, even a tremendously positive change such as leaving behind a life of crime and addiction. A change in progress demands new explanations for a past thats now cast in a darker light.

Essentially, reaching someone entrenched within a near-fanatical belief system is often impossible because the ego will put up a fight to the death in order to not deal with the psychic pain of feeling that everything that has been done up until this point has been done wrong. But it is possible.

In Deutschmans book, spanning extensive research on changing past negative behavior to future positive actions, one case study of a parole officer illuminates how he found the most success in reaching the seemingly unreachable. By realizing that the real reason why people dont change is demoralizationthe overwhelming sense of hopelessness and power he applied the theory that the most he could do is to inspire a new sense of hope and power. Indeed, this officer invited 14 of the most argumentative ex-convicts and spent 90-minute sessions listening to them rather than telling them what to do. The response was extraordinary. The parole officer recounted: In one and a half hours they calmed down. They said, These guys arent against us. Now they come back every week and say, At least Im being listened to. In the last year the difference has been huge. They want to make a change.

In speaking to Peterson on the phone, while a journalist is about as a far away from a parole officer as you can get, its amazing the difference that occurs when I listen to what he has to say about the reality of incel culture versus how he sees the media portraying its members.

In his view, as despicable and morally unfathomable as the psychopathic fringe is, the reality of the wider membership estimated in the tens of thousands of active members is far more complex.

The way Peterson tells itand as is supported by his digital footprint of videos, podcasts and commentsfor him and many others, to be an incel is to seek the camaraderie of a group of male peers who provide an outlet where, for once, they can honestly talk about the increasing fragmentation, disconnection, alienation and ostracization they feel in an always-online world in which, as far as they can see, they are not welcome or wanted.

Peterson compared the mischaracterization of incels to the xenophobic broad brush that takes a minority of radicalized Islamic suicide-bombers and uses it to condemn the vast majority of Muslims. Instead, he said, there is an acceptance that there is a vile minority who distorts the vision of the communitybut that it is not his vision for the group.

Like many in the incel community, Peterson essentially grew up without a strong father figure.

His mother kicked his father out because, in Petersons words, he used to beat the shit out of my mother and she got a restraining order. His father was the same age that he is now when he got his 39-year-old mother pregnant, and hes never met him, but they have spoken on the phone a few times.

I dont really have any feelings about him, Peterson says. He just kind of is.

From an early age, Peterson felt a level of social anxiety that was bearable but distinct. His kindergarten teacher asked him why he did not play with the others. He said, I dont know how.

Things started to change around the third or fourth grade. It was the first time the girls started making fun of him, he says, saying he was creepy and gross and weird.

I didnt understand it, he says. I was told either to act like a man or that girls could do no wrong. And yet I was constantly told that men were the cruel, bad ones. None of it made any sense to me. I was just extremely shy. I didnt talk to them, but the teasing was relentless and made me want to kill myself.

In the seventh grade, Peterson transferred to three different middle schools all in one year as the bullying followed him everywhere. By the time he reached high school, he says, one young woman started taking photos of him and sharing them with other girls who openly laughed in his face about how ugly he was and why they did not want him near them. He did not finish his freshman year at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, but dropped out after the first semester. His mother never knew the extent of the bullying he experienced.

I was just ashamed, he says. How do you talk about that?

The profoundly formative pain of youthful bullying has been around forever. When a classmate taunts you and proclaims your worthlessness to all your peers, if you are a kid, the humiliation of such an experience doesnt feel like its happening in a classroomit can feel like a worldwide-televised death sentence.

Very few kids on the receiving end of the cruelty know how to deal with itbecause of a lack of life experience that is just as undeveloped as their pubescent brains.

But for a kid growing up today, the tool of the Internet levels the game. No longer do you wonder, Will anyone ever love me? Now you can Google it, and find secret places and communities and bodies of knowledge that your parents dont even know exist. This can be exciting, emboldening, a total game-changer.

I remember the first time I found a site that even mentioned the word incel, I was like, Woah, these guys are outcasts, too, he says. I kind of felt like, maybe Im not alone.

At the age of 11, Peterson visited 4chan for the first time, and he saw his rage and loneliness expressed as well as the impotence of such advice as just get over it. He didnt know how to. He didnt have anyone to ask. He just didnt want any more ridicule.

It was kind of crazy to see and read a lot of the stuff I did, Peterson says. But it was also the only place where other guys talked about some of the things I was experiencing. Feeling so alone and rejected by the people around you. I was extremely shy then, and still kind of am, but it makes you feel really fucked up to be told youre a creepy loser by a pretty popular girl when youre just sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing, wishing you were invisible but instead being the quiet freak with the cystic acne all over his face.

He also received an indoctrination into the culture of these young men who accepted him and what they found acceptableand what he would need to as well if he were to finally fit in somewhere.

To understand the increasingly irony-rich language of the users, its essential to read Angela Nagles book Kill All Normies, which exquisitely captures the critical shift in online perspective and the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility that happened at exactly the same time Peterson began actively engaging with it.

In her brilliant book documenting the culture wars of the extreme left and the extreme right in recent years, focusing on subcultures including 4chan and incels, Nagle describes the attitude rebellion on the site against the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.

Peterson is one of the best representations of exactly how these culture wars are shaping our young mens identities.

When everything is ironic, nothing is. So they mock it. All of it.

Theres this big hypocrisy in the fact that so many people who say they are all about human rights and empowerment think its actually funny when boys get mocked, he says. I never said a single misogynistic thing growing up. And I was punished. Just because I was weird. I couldnt help it. I honestly wanted to die.

On the contrary, the incel communities he found online seemed different.

When I dropped out of high school, the one place I felt okay about stuff for a little while was when I was online, Peterson tells me. By the time I discovered the incel culture on Reddit, it felt like, Okay, Im not insane. I was reading all these other guys stories about how girls told them they were repulsive. I never identified with the misogyny, but I did identify with the rage at the hypocrisy of just how untouchable women were in society. No matter what, no matter what awful thing a woman did, it was always supposed to be like, Oh yeah, thats female empowerment. But when you have no friends and are getting bullied and humiliated by women constantly and are told to both man up and renounce your masculinity its like the one bright light you see is this community.

By the time he was 16, Peterson finally met in person a young womanfour years older than himwith whom he had been chatting online since he was 12 years old. She did not know what he looked like for some time, and when he finally shared his picture, she told him that she didnt find him attractive. He lost his virginity to her, after which he says she ridiculed his penis size and laughed at him. Later, she sent him copies of messages that she had sent on to other men she was cheating on him with where she explicitly described the sex acts she wanted done to her. (Ive seen corroborating evidence of all of this.)

I was literally cucked, Peterson says. That word doesnt have any meaning anymore, but thats what I was. I still wanted to see her though. She was the only girl who had ever expressed interest in me, even though she tore me down and told me how ugly I was. It was still better than nothing.

According to Peterson, the relationship finally disintegrated when she began choking him and tried to go after him in her car. He ran to a nearby store to get help, and has the actual footage of the security cam showing him flailing against the glass window. The police came, and to cover for the girl, he said that he was suicidal. He spent three days in a mental institution because of it.

This was a turning point for Peterson.

He finally aligned himself fully as an incel. He was, in the words of Internet argot, black-pilled.

Anyone who has dabbled in understanding Internet lingo is likely familiar with the term red-pilled (inspired by the film The Matrix, where Neo is offered a blue pill where everything stays status quo or a red pill where the ugly truth is supposedly exposed). Adopted by mens rights activists around 2004, to get red-pilled is to subscribe to the particular ideology that feminism is a cancer and men are the real victims. But what does it mean to get black-pilled, as many refer to this communitys belief system? It sounds as bleak as it is.

Essentially, the philosophy is that everything is broken and the answer lies in refusing to engage in a meaningful or constructive way with society. (The phrase black pill first appeared in 2012 on a blog called Omega Virgin Revolt.) A critical part of being black-pilled is recognizing, with zero sentimentality or euphemism or explaining away, that women do not like genetically inferior men. They now have infinite options in the form of men who are higher status (be it, economic, physical, or intellectual) because of the breakdown in societal monogamy and now high-status men can game apps and use hypergamy (or dating up) to their advantage. (Meaning, a less attractive woman will nowadays reject a less attractive male if she is suddenly able to have meaningless sex with a high status man, who can juggle multiple women. This leaves men who are not as good-looking in the dust.)

Incels theorize that once you are black-pilled, you are finally given the gift of brutally honest Darwinian truth that, essentially, the game is rigged, so why bother? With such entrenchment in the truth of the doctrine comes freedom. No longer do you have to run around in circles. You can accept the world for what it is and settle back into your status on the lower rungs.

If you are red-pilled, you might take this theory of female behavior to use it in manipulative pick-up strategies to try to game women into thinking you are higher status or to find the weakest prey.

If you are an incel and have never had a single successful romantic attempt or only disastrous ones, this type of theorizing provides that wonderful feeling of certainty that comes with confirmation bias and the emancipation from regret of knowing that nothing could have been done anyway. Which is why many incels describe being black-pilled as an awakening from humiliation. Like finally realizing that you have been the subject of a joke that everyone else has been in on the whole time.

For a young man like Peterson, spouting such beliefs, he seems not so much a product of toxic masculinity as a failure of masculinity itself.

No one is teaching these men how to be men. This doesnt mean men in the sense of mens rights activists, but a healthy, balanced (not extremist) definition which includes someone who treats women well but also treats himself well by not being afraid to think for himself with opinions that deviate from the loudest, most hateful elements in the community.

But isnt the worst parts of the incel community hate speech? And shouldnt such hate speech be eradicated?

In Nadine Strossens timely new book Hate, she makes the case for countering bad speech with more speech, and illustrates how in countries where hate speech speech laws have been enacted, support for racist and xenophobic politicians has risen. In Europe, hate speech laws have in fact been used as a means of stifling dissent amongst the disenfranchised.

Equal justice for all depends on full freedom of speech for all, she writes.

Not only that, but as Keith Whittington argues in his new book Speak Freely, offensive speech is crucial to safeguard because of its utility in generating, testing, and communicating ideas.

One of the most brilliant defenses of the subject is Jonathan Rauchs 2013 essay, The Case for Hate Speech in The Atlantic, where he thanks the loudest and most noxious voices he faced along the way in his fight for gay marriage. [W]e won in the realm of ideas, he writes. And our antagonists–people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card–helped us win.

For the incel community, of course, many of the ideas espoused are in defense of their identity as the losers of society, which frees them of the need to take personal responsibility.

I think thats a valid criticism, Peterson says. I get sick of the guys who seem like they just want to keep others down no matter what. Its almost like you are scorned when you experience a little bit of success.

The podcast Peterson recorded after the Toronto attack represents the incel community as not seeming as extreme as a cursory visit to the incel-tracking site We Hunted the Mammoth or the incel-mocking community Incel Tears might lead you to believe. On these sites, in the communitys most chilling screengrabs, posts include suggestions that in order to truly terrorize the women who have rejected incels over the years, perhaps mass acid attacks and rapes could be coordinated in order to inflict the same damage upon women that these young men feel has happened to them.

In contrast, Petersons podcast discussion contains an unusual degree of literacy about sociological phenomena, including the Japanese trend of hikikomori, or isolationism and utter retreat occurring with young men, which many incels predict will spread around the world in due time.

But at its core, it is still a conversation littered with misogyny and resentment.

At one point, someone says that women use men like emotional tampons. Another brings up the possibility of mandated girlfriends (or state-sanctioned rape, as shown on the new season of The Handmaids Tale). A joke is made that the best-case scenario is when incels go ER (or Elliot Rodger). There is discussion about the evolutionary benefits of sexual violence, which harkens Rodgers infamously deranged advocacy of a program where men could kill all women because if women were able to choose their own mates, their inferior brains would devolve humanity completely. Someone laughs about the idea of blackmailing women into having sex with them by threatening to post nude photos online. Peterson himself brings up the idea of access to assisted suicide for incels to prevent future attacks, and he suggests that talking to those who wonder about incel culture might help with improving our image, especially if you attach a face to the incel phenomenon, I think that that makes it more sympathetic.

Peterson clarifies to me: He was not suggesting it be him.

I meant someone else, but then it turned out, I guess I was the only person dumb enough to show my face in videos I made online, he says. So here we are.

When I ask him about the references in the podcast to Rodger, he responds, That guy was fucking nuts. I dont really joke about going ER, but I dont tell the guys who make those jokes not to do it because I know theyre being sarcastic. All this shocking stuff is often just the guys trolling. I would argue that I dont think anybody is going to be stupid enough to believe that sanctioned rape is being talked about as an actual suggestion. Sometimes the most ridiculous shit makes me laugh, even though I dont condone it. So if I do laugh at some of this stuff its probably me laughing at something because its fucking stupid.

The psychopaths are the problem, not the incels, he says.

If someone is going to carry out an attack like this theyre gonna have to be severely mentally ill to be capable of that, he says. Making jokes or being active in the incel community doesnt cause it. Being mentally ill does.

But what about when jokes arent just jokes?

I mention how last year when the Nazi website The Daily Stormers guidebook was leaked online, it contained the message: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. So what about when such humor is actually a means of subversive propaganda?

I can see that, Peterson acknowledges. I mean, Ive had guys tell me some really fucked-up shit, and Ive told them, you know, get some help because I dont want you to hurt anyone. But I do think that making dark jokes for people who arent mentally ill helps keep a lot of us from going crazy.

And how exactly does he feel about the disparagement of women in saying that they use men as emotional tampons? Men do the same fucking thing, Peterson says. Thats not a one-sided thing. Men can use women emotionally, too.

And what of the suicide idea?

What it really comes down to is that Id rather these mass shooters and attackers just kill themselves than kill 10 or more innocent people. So maybe if it was easier to commit suicide wed see less of these attacks. Im not condoning suicide but I prefer that to innocent people dying.

On the incels.me forum, a stated list of rules for participation include guidelines that are stricter than most elite private clubs in America.

No women allowed. No exception.

Yes, this means that a forum dedicated to decrying success with women has as one of its primary rules a focus on enforced isolation. Other rules also brutally shut out any chance to provide advice or mentorship to other young men.

A few months ago, when Peterson was using the forum, he suddenly found that he was banned from having certain privileges in the chatrooms. Even the incels, it seemed, were rejecting him.

In response, he filmed and put on his YouTube one of the most astonishing, hyper-granular deconstructions of modern Internet life Ive ever seen.

It is bizarro land for anyone not deep in the world of Internet language.

To create the video, he spent three days nonstop (two days spent up for 24 hours straight in between passing out) to create a meticulous 30-minute PowerPoint video that he filmed objecting to the ban and making his case that he in fact was a genuine incel using a barrage of evidence and minutiae and dictionary definitions and failures of logic to try to break down the bullying he felt he experienced on the forum.

And, if you want to get brutal about the absurdity of the exercise (and the insanity such subcultures can create amongst its members), to prove exactly why he was just as reprehensible to society as the rest of the incels.

It was pretty ridiculous, he says in retrospect. Its like American Vandal, Netflixs mockumentary on super-deep-dive crime docs, except with the heartbreaking element of seeing how brainwashed a young man is into trying to obtain peer approval.

At one point in the video, he even includes a diagnosis that he is paranoid schizophrenic as evidence that he ought to qualify as an incel because of this mental illness. The reality is that after he was given that diagnosis, another psychologist said he was not. Instead, the doctor told him (and is evidenced in the video), he was making himself sick with his own thoughts.

All of this humiliation is laid out for his fellow community of incels to seeand all of it to get back into good standing in the incel community. Thats how bad isolated young men want status and the reassurance of having a community to call their own. Even when the group identity is in how perversely low and entrenched their status really is.

Is it any wonder that these boys need a father figure?

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) has been known to be moved to tears in interviews when discussing the crisis of alienation he sees amongst young men today and the need to provide them with tools that will reach them.

As he told Tim Lott of The Spectator late last year about his 90 percent male audience, Im telling them something they desperately need to hearthat there are important things that need to be fixed up. Im saying, You guys really need to get your act together and you need to bear some responsibility and grow the hell up. The lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward and the denialism these kids are being fed on a daily basis is undoubtedly destroying them and that is especially true of the young men.

Lott then observes the author of The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos displaying a level of vulnerability on the subject that is striking.

At this point, to my astonishment, Peterson begins to weep. He talks through his tears for the next several minutes. Every time I talk about this, it breaks me up, he says. The message Ive been delivering is, Find the heaviest weight you can and pick it up. And that will make you strong. Youre not who you could be. And who you could be is worthwhile.

As psychologist William Pollack articulates in the documentary The Mask You Live In about the boy code that warps masculinity from an early age: The way that boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity When theyre most in pain, they cant reach out and ask for help because theyre not allowed to or they wont be a real boy.

In fact, boys express depression in a completely opposite way than girls. They act out. But most people see it as a conduct disorder or just a bad kid.

After the Parkland high school shooting in March, one of the foremost activists in trying to address the crisis of reaching out to troubled young men before they become killers met with President Donald Trump to say his piece. Every single one of these school shootings has been from young men who are disconnected, said Darrell Scott, the father of the first student murdered at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. In response, he founded Rachels Challenge to intervene with action rather than yet another toothless spectacle of condemnation of the empirically condemnable violence itself.

In a tweet rant posted during this same time by Martin Daubney, the editor of the English lad magazine Loaded, he articulated a similarly jarring portrait of collective angst from young men who feel callously tossed aside and branded as innately wrong, which only serves to compound the sense of victimization even further.

Im mindful of a seminal TEDTalk by Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, Daubney wrote. He looks at school shootings, and says: Boys who hurt, hurt us…They say todays boys feel part of some grand problem. You could frame it as #ToxicMasculinity: the notion that all males are to blame for the actions of a minority of damaged individuals. This is identity politics at its most destructive. Because we live in a world where every male indiscretion is used to attack all males. Im saying this: many boys are switching off. Were losing them.

How does an incel feel about all of this concernextended within the realm of ideas and intellectualism?

Itd be nice, Jack Peterson says, if he just had someone else to talk to about it.

I like Jordan Peterson a lot, he admits in a tone that sounds more upbeat than the rest of our conversation. I was going to go see him with another incel but that guy ended up not being able to go. But I bought a VIP ticket so I get to meet him next week.

In the wake of the Toronto attack, Peterson is unique in that unlike many in the incel community who have scrubbed their social or taken down their WordPress blogs that chronicled their life, he decided to see what happened when he went on TV to talk about his life in this widely reviled community now most associated with mass murder.

The decision to do so was gutsy. Especially considering the against-the-agenda talking points he is now presenting in condemning misogyny and violence.

The reaction he has received from other incels has been negative. And the public certainly doesnt like anyone who might be an incel.

Its an unwinnable place to be for someone who might still have a chance of climbing out of the twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy gutter that such dangerous places can become for young men who dont think they have anywhere else to go.

But Peterson doesnt regret doing the media and putting his face out there.

Instead, he speaks with an inverse of the perverted sadism of the Toronto attacker. It is a nihilism of potential that is in stark contrast to the nihilism of murderous revenge.

As he describes the decision, you can almost hear an epiphany clicking: When you dont care when you have nothing else to lose, it can be used for good or evil.

I dont know why I said yes to identifying myself as an incel, he says, mulling it over. I just felt like, you know What do I have to lose?

Of course, within the incel community itself, the answer is clear.

He could very well lose his status as an incel.

They called him all the predictable names. He was a cuck. He was a status-seeker. He was an opportunist. He was a number of slurs that are not fit to print. But for an incel, the worst insult he received of all was that he was a fake.

And, this being incel-world, the name he was called was targeted and precise.

You see, for incels, each man within the community self-identifies with how they qualify for their incel status. For instance, mentalcels achieve their status as a result of mental illness. A braincel is that way because of intelligence. A truecel has never had sex, a relationship, any kind of success at all.

Thus Peterson was called a fakecel. No, Peterson says, thats wrong. He definitely still is an incel. He is a part of the group. Where then does he now belong?

Peterson is quiet as he considers the answer.

I think something where I can help people, he says. I like talking about the positive stuff more, even if its frowned upon.

He considers a while longer.

I dont know, he considers, maybe Im a hopecel.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel

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