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It matters because married men work harder and follow society’s rules. And that matters a lot; the vast majority of the productive labor to sustain our prosperity is gendered male. When they do less of it, it’s bad for everyone.
Or to put it more starkly but still perfectly accurately: You are free not to care about these men. And they are free not to care that you would prefer that they didn't engage in mass shootings, serial killings, and rapings against the people you care about.
@Primaprimaprima, do you feel comfortable expressing this argument when there's a lone wolf mass shooting (that is, not gang-related), which are almost exclusively committed by maladjusted and love-challenged men? Not asking as a gotcha, just genuinely curious. Are they just the acceptable and not particularly appreciable collateral damage of male disposability to you and not worth the general outpouring of rage and emotion that generally accompanies them? Have you expressed this opinion to any "normies", and how did they respond?
The fraction of total utility lost to mass shootings and the like is very small indeed. Anyone not caring about lonely men should also be fine not caring if one in every 100k of them commits a mass shooting.
I think the problem is more that having a lack of buy-in into society from a significant fraction of the population is a risk factor for all sorts of things. After all, these men can still vote, for one thing.
Yes, I agree in general with you (particularly that the subtle effects of men lacking investment in society are likely to be what corrodes it far more than the dramatic eruptions of frustration). But it's worth pointing out that while yours is the general opinion expressed in this subthread, it's a minority opinion overall in society. Whether they're just virtue signaling or not, a significant percentage, if not the majority, of people who express a lack of concern or disdain for lonely men also express severe apparent anguish at even singular instances of mass shootings and indicate that they would support quite significant societal changes to stop them from ever happening.
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I don't think rambling on about mass shootings or serial killings is the big issue.
I think slacker men is the big issue. Men do the vast majority of productive labor that generates and sustains our society's prosperity- that prosperity which keeps us from living in primitive savagery- and efforts to get women to do it have failed. Marriage incentivizes men to actually go do that labor instead of playing videogames and masturbating all day.
In a primitive society, you can motivate people by the threat of starvation instead, but ours is far too prosperous for starvation or even extreme boredom to be a credible threat. Getting men to do the unpleasant work that needs doing- which women mostly won't do- to run a complex society when they can fuck off to watch netflix is an important problem to solve, and 'your woman and kids depend on you' is the best way to solve it.
That’s just one aspect of it. Whenever this subject comes up here, a bunch of posters are always eager to point out that A) young, aggressive, unattached men are the sole threat to any social order but B) demographic implosion means that this group is relatively much smaller than in earlier times. Which is basically true. But the reality is that social stability doesn’t just stem from the absence of destabilizing factors and an aging population. It’s not only that men in general need to be productive for society to prosper, it’s that they need to be invested in society’s future to the extent that they’re willing to take up arms to defend it, as members of the army, the police, a militia, a vigilante group, a posse etc. In a demographically imploding society, it’s true that there are relatively few people threating the existing order, but there’ll also be few people willing to uphold it, so the demographic effects cancel each other out. And anti-social, unattached men, by definition, will not be invested in upholding the existing social structure.
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This is the kind of LARPing I was talking about.
"These men" by and large are not going to do shit. The vast majority of lovelorn men will do nothing but masturbate and seethe; they are not some sort of existential threat whose wrath anyone needs to fear. As for the tiny number who do go on a killing spree, I find it very unlikely that society could have done anything to help them - they'd probably have been the sort of person who goes feral even in a healthier society.
That said, we should care about people who need help, though I'd classify them as similar to drug addicts; they need to want help and recognize the degree to which their own choices have put them in this situation.
They run amok because they think they've got nothing left to lose, so all deterrents are void. Ensure that people have something worth living for and they won't run amok.
Citations: WP, some guy on the Internet, and my memories of the time I ran amok as a teenager (thankfully with a body count of 0). And yes, it was at the tail-end of a depressive episode.
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By and large, probably yes. But some of them provably do (and I dispute that they would have done it anyway in a healthier society). And when they do, it's often treated by most as something that should be prevented even in the singular case.
It seems like this site is different from average people in this regard though and doesn't see it as particularly relevant if the occasional Sandy Hook is part of the price of the issue. So I guess I won't be seeing too many condolences on this site the next time something similar happens, or at least that's what I'll expect if motivated reasoning isn't afoot.
Some men provably go on killing sprees for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every unbalanced person unhappy with life who decides to go out violently.
But I was not talking about the occasional loner who snaps, I was talking about the premise that lonely men in Western society pose a threat to social order because there are so many of them they will turn into a disrupting force. I don't think there are that many of them, I think very few of them will ever actually "do" anything, and I stand by my claim that those who do, were probably mentally unbalanced in the first place (and not just because they couldn't get laid).
This is incredibly simplistic, reductive logic, sloppy thinking that would not even remotely pass in regards to any other issue.
"Some cars provably crash for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every vehicular incident that ends violently."
"Some kids provably drown in bodies of water for lots of reasons."
"Some buildings provably collapse."
I'm sure you get the point. No, you probably can't realistically entirely eliminate men who have a grudge against society and are unattached enough to any of its benefits (which probably does involve some degree of mental imbalance, as history shows it is probably the normative human response to be placated enough by bread and circuses regardless of anything else) to choose violence. But obviously you can ameliorate the issue with changes to society, same as any other.
This again is just sloppy logic. Let's take Adam Lanza. Now let's put him in whatever his version of a dream world would be, the perfect society that absolutely caters to him (other than that shooting children is still illegal and life-ruining, if he'd actually still want to do that). You think he still shoots up Sandy Hook in that world? I doubt it. You don't think that if he lived in a world that was 10% closer to his dream world, his probability of committing the shooting wouldn't be lowered by at least 1% or so? So obviously there's a gradient here.
Of course there's a clear counterargument to this that someone might make, at least in regards to preventing his conduct: "I think Adam Lanza is nuts/evil/etc. and don't want to live in his dream world or any world that's even 1% closer to it." But I doubt this is true, what with the old saying about stopped clocks and all.
Unless you completely agree with the state of modern gender relations, or want them to be even more like the OnlyFans world they've become, where the traditional marriages that built modern prosperity are becoming increasingly less common and more antiquated (particularly among youths) than old grandfather clocks that a mouse might be running up in a nursery rhyme, then you inevitably almost certainly agree with guys like Lanza, Elliot Rodger, etc. to some degree on some things.
Are you aware of the 2023 Pew Research survey that found 63% of young men aged 18-29 to be single?
I am normally somebody who advocates for careful skepticism of Reddit-style "Source sweaty?" link-mining, but the fact that even a single survey from a relatively reputable organization was able to derive this result is objectively insane and I believe likely automatically renders false your assertion that there aren't that many lonely men these days.
Now in fact I unfortunately must agree with you on one thing here. I think the demoralization is too complete and the panopticon is so strong that we're unfortunately unlikely to see an uprising of dissatisfied men. The best case scenario for them is probably a mass exodus to AI-powered waifubots, VR, etc. (which is already happening, though not much yet as the technology is still primitive), a boycott that may eventually leave biological women in general in an actually far worse position than if they had just accepted the trad revolt (but far more gradually).
With that being said, when you have an issue that affects almost 2/3rds of young men of prime fighting age and at the peak of their virility, I don't think you can say anything for sure. If they decided they were sick of the issue and going to band together to fix it by any means necessary as soon as possible, I doubt anybody could stop them for long. Unfortunately though I also think the system is well aware of this and going to work very hard to make sure they don't get to that "if" (as it already is with the onslaught of feminist subversion and other various divide and conquer tactics). I think it will probably succeed.
I just don't think you can make any absolute statements about something that negatively impacts so many people. Complete societal-wide revolutions have been started before by far smaller cohorts (with many of the contributors to these also being relatively listless in their prior society, since after all if they had already been living such great, successful, and dynamic lives of fulfilling their ambitions and fully satisfying their hierarchy of needs they'd have had little desire to change much). To completely dismiss the capacity for violence and change of so many people with shared incentives is what I would call arrogant, cavalier, reckless, and just plain bad civilizational reasoning.
Using lots of adjectives does not add authority to what was essentially an empty assertion on your part. You are asserting that incel killing sprees are either a thing, or something we should be worried about. My assertion is that they are rare, isolated phenomena and that sexless men are of no greater risk factor in this respect than any other social malady, in terms of turning a few unstable people into killers. Your car analogy is more like "Sometimes car crashes happen because someone was transporting ducks in their car and the ducks got loose and caused the driver to lose control of the car; therefore, ducks are a threat to traffic safety."
I've already said we should should try to ameliorate the issue, because I genuinely do feel sorry for sexless men living lonely, miserable lives, and not because I am afraid of them becoming mass murderers. My point is that what you are posting is incel LARP. And also that you seem to put 100% of the blame on "society" for not providing pussy to every man who wants it.
I did not assert that there aren't many lonely men these days. I asserted that they are not a threat, or really, something we should be concerned about threatening society in a major way.
Read more carefully.
The men with a capacity for violence and change are mostly not in the category of "can't get laid."
Yeah, kind of. There have been societies in the past where men without wives were a rounding error (and often were true lunatics, though with even many true lunatics still having wives too), so it's not impossible. If a future society had significantly less availability of information technology, I would also put the blame on that society for not being capable of providing something that is ubiquitous nowadays (unless they were capable of it and not providing it was some deliberate and well-informed philosophical choice about how they wanted people to live).
Sure, but you also seem to be paradoxically reluctant to grant that this might also reduce to any degree the propensity to violence of people who are already affected by it. And I don't see why.
???
In literally your last post on the subject in response to me you wrote:
So again: ???
Yes, perhaps you should read your own posts before making them.
Alright. If 63% of men between 18-29 not being a possible threat at all is what you want to hang your civizational and historical reasoning credibility on, then so be it. I simply happen to disagree.
I think pretty much any man has a capacity for violence and change. You don't have to be appealing to women to operate a gun, bomb, etc. You don't have to be appealing to women to have a high IQ (and often the opposite is true). You don't have to be appealing to women to have strength in the numbers (as the 63%) number proves. I mean, as the classic OKCupid survey shows, most men aren't particularly appealing to women. But if they still didn't have a capacity for violence and change, history would look vastly different.
Would you consider that you're within the realm of claiming that the only men with the capacity for violence and change are those who are already considered desirable by society (and thus again have very little reason to want to change it)? Would you consider why history makes this obviously wrong?
What exactly do you think "society" should do?
What is the source of your confusion? I said there are not enough sexless men to form a disrupting force. You were talking about hordes of young angry males forming some sort of incel army. There are "lots" of lonely men, yes. I don't think there are that many as demographic.
"Being single" is not the same as "can't get laid," or "being involuntarily alone." That 63% figure you're pointing at includes guys who are banging a different chick every day of the week. As well as guys who aren't interested in a relationship right now but have had relationships in the past and want one in the future.
Sure, but realistically, the threat you are proposing, of angry young men rising up to destabilize society because they can't get laid, will not be posed by the sort of men who actually can't get laid.
I'm not sure what "within the realm of" means. If you're asking if I think only chads have a capacity for violence and change, no.
What historical examples of a large population of sexless men rising up and changing society because of it do you have in mind?
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Which societies? In the US in 1900 apparently 39% of adults were unmarried, and that was certainly a society in which sex outside marriage was universally discouraged and certainly much more rare than it is today.
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Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.
When you are consistently creating the sort of circumstances that lead vulnerable/damaged men to snap, go berserk and then go on killing sprees, "Most of them just go masturbate instead" does not even reach the level of being wrong. Yes, the majority of these men will just waste away living lives of quiet desperation you are free to not care about, but as that population grows the minority who do in fact snap and go crazy will grow as well.
I have yet to see any causal link between whatever it is that society is supposedly doing to prevent sad men from getting laid, and spree shootings. If an incel goes on a rampage and says society made him do it, should we believe him?
And I don't know what that causal link is. My theory is that society is no longer properly socialising young men in healthy ways, and while some men can handle this just fine, some cannot. For a slim minority, this leads to them acting out in incredibly nasty ways.
To use a metaphor, if I fill a house with flammable rags soaked in gasoline, there's no direct causal link between that and the fire (it was the lit match thrown in the window)... but there's very clearly a relationship between the creation of those conditions and a massive conflagration, even if it wasn't the direct cause.
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what are the stats on this? Im' curious...
EDIT: looked it up, and wow yeah it's a 7.7% chance if you smoke 1-5 cigarettes a day. That's WAY lower than I'd imagined, and maybe the stats there are even cooked since anti cigarette is now the culturally accepted stance.
This ignores increased risk of heart attack and stroke. There's a reason it's the first question insurance companies ask.
Though it is undoubtedly exaggerated, and there is a puritan hatred for any nicotine product as a result.
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There are much lonelier societies with more sexless men and they have close to zero lone wolf mass shootings. We just make the tools of mass shootings very easily accessible.
I guarantee you that if you threaten normies with visions of dark brooding virgins rising up they will (1) laugh, and (2) support further repression of said virgins. If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat (not a bad idea IMO), stories like this one are how you get it.
That's true. It's good that America has the 2A so its men who have been failed by society have a more productive and direct way (at least compared to suicide) to address their grievances that is capable of somewhat effectively targeting society (though of course as pointed out far too few still take advantage of this opportunity or especially target people higher up on the totem pole who are truly more responsible for their issues).
And then they will still cry like fools at the next Sandy Hook and demand to know how anybody could do such a thing. They're not exactly imposing given their constant buffoonish contradictions and contextual flip-flopping.
Escorts would love the business this results in.
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If you think that sounds implausible it's the law in some countries right now. I believe at least Canada's gun licensing regime- one of the more liberal ones, globally- requires an interview with an intimate partner, although it's aimed at domestic violence prevention. I would be surprised if it was the only such example.
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While I am not @Primaprimaprima, my perspective on lone wolf shootings is that most of them are done by a specific sort of maladjusted man that isn't really that hard to notice and that the vast majority of these could be prevented pretty easily by returning to a much broader regime of involuntary commitment for dangerous lunatics. The kids at Sandy Hook died because our society values the freedom of lunatics more than the safety of innocents. The problem with the approach to Adam Lanza isn't that he was treated with too much disposability, but that he wasn't treated as more disposable.
The original /r/cringe thread on Elliot Rodger is legendary for a reason.
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Though Adam Lanza had received mental health treatment, apparently (going based off of Wikipedia here) he'd stopped any contact with mental health providers by 2006 to never return, and his most dramatic documented mental health issue before anyway was clean freak-esque OCD. It doesn't seem like he was on the radar of law enforcement at all before the shooting either (and wouldn't have even had a gun to his name if they ran the records, as they were all owned by his mom).
So what makes you think Sandy Hook had anything to do with society openly valuing the "freedom of 'dangerous lunatics'"? It doesn't seem like Lanza was known to anybody before the event as a "dangerous lunatic", not even his mom (who certainly must have known he was an eccentric recluse, but given that he killed her too presumably she would have taken better measures to protect herself from him had she thought he was actually dangerous).
If you were to cast a net on "dangerous lunatics" wide enough to include people like pre-Sandy Hook Lanza, not only would everyone on this site almost certainly end up in it, while you might solve perhaps the problem of lone wolf shootings, you would have the much bigger problem of an open "incel" insurgency to deal with. After all, if you're going to jail them anyway for potential mass shootings that most posters in this subthread admit that most of them statistically-speaking won't even commit...
Here's the rundown:
I don't buy the claim that this is such an ordinary history that the dragnet would catch Motte shitposters. I suppose it is true that his utterly amoral parents protected their precious psychotic baby as he devolved from merely being an isolated lunatic into a murderous lunatic and that there might not have been much anyone could have done about it after they elected to do so. In any case, there is simply nothing anyone could have done to make this guy less of an unloveable incel.
I don't see anything about any violent tendencies there. What, are you suggesting that if society didn't "value the freedom of lunatics more than the safety of innocents" they'd bust down doors and drag away everyone who doesn't follow up on their OCD treatment? Sounds like a great way to make sure no one ever voluntarily visits a psychiatrist ever again.
It's especially odd to suggest this given that recently society doesn't even have the capacity to keep incarcerated the people who are provably guilty of actual histories of real violence. Plenty of "mini-Lanzas" (that is, post-shooting) have been released on to the streets (mostly if they're black).
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IIRC there are a few polities in the US that will revoke (or are at least empowered to revoke; I believe Washington is among these) your self-defense rights, and seize that property, if you do this and answer the psychiatrist's questions
honestlyincorrectly.Safety culture is inherently not capable of dealing with "unsafe tendencies" in a constructive or well-reasoned manner because the only thing it can respond with is violence.
New Jersey's even better -- if you've ever seen a mental health professional at any time since birth, you have to tell the state their name and hospital affiliation to even apply to be able to buy a gun. Don't know it? No gun for you.
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Mass shootings (non-gang related), serial killers, and stranger rape all of have one other thing in common: they're extraordinarily rare. Most incels just descend into listless stagnation; they're not going to be agents that fundamentally change society.
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Columbine was a tragic love story between two men. It didn't have anything to do with being love challenged.
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