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I don't think teenagers are inherently rebellious against authority. In fact, what passes for "rebellion" is quite easily controlled by authority figures.
Think about the Hitler Youth. Or think about the Cultural Revolution, in which rebellious youth were mobilized to eliminate enemies of Mao's regime. Or think about all those protests in which high school students walk out of school over left wing causes (applauded by their teachers) but never right-wing causes (certain to earn them actual punishment).
Youth rebellion exists in the space that is allowed for it to exist and no more.
As the UK slouches towards totalitarianism, it is the youth who are most likely to cheer this development.
Well i mean true, but the political outsiders have often tried to harness such people to get power for themselves. A speaker who can capture the imagination of young incels can use them quite effectively to destroy the old system. This has happened before, more than once. And it will eventually happen again.
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The Cultural Revolution was a bit more complicated. Mao had been powerful in the 1950s, but the disaster of the Great Leap Forward had led to him being sidelined, in favor of leaders (Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi) who were focused on nonrevolutionary governance like making sure that people had food to eat and that there was a functioning military, which he felt was inappropriate. He was more of a figurehead than someone anyone trusted with real responsibilities or power.
Still an authority figure, but it was more of a revolutionary coup than a consolidation of existing power.
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Teenagers are inherently “rebellious” in the sense that they pursue sex and fun even if an old man tells them not to. I suppose this is rebellious, but really it’s that the old man lacks any authority of significance: control over sex and fun. Terror organizations like ISIL were able to recruit young men precisely because they offered them sex and fun, even though this entailed a swap from one authority (being some Muslim kid in UK with an overworked Dad and a principal you never see) to a far stricter authority (literally a violent extremist religious cult which micromanaged daily routine). The sex came in the way of slaves, and the fun was multifaceted: brotherhood (highly instinctually appealing), war (instinctually fun), explosives (you already know)… but these are the more obvious funs. There’s also the aesthetic and fantastical pleasure associated with the apocalypse. There’s also the ingrained potency of religious language which, in a peculiar sense, places you in the center of the universe by totalizing the importance of your feelings, actions, and identity. All of those are quite seriously fun.
Incel ideology is inherently unsexy and non-fun. I don’t see anything coming from it, pun unintended. The dangerous incels are more likely to become Muslims and the smart incels are more likely to learn how to manipulate women (thus solving the problem) or visiting Southeast Asia. The Hitler Youth sprung out of a hippie-ish hiking and trekking brotherhood by the way, so its origin were very fun. And it took that fun and placed more fun on it, a quasi-religious identity package that is fun to dwell on.
Indeed the social reality is that access to sex and fun is directly and indirectly controlled by old men wherever patriarchal norms are still in effect, such as Mesopotamia.
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To be fair, I'm sure the majority of Hitler Youth and Red Guard members did earnestly feel that they were rebelling against an authority i.e. the existing patriarchal order that was constraining their lives up until that point. It was, of course, ironic to rebel against it in service of a new supreme leader who demanded total obedience, but I guess it wasn't something that went completely unnoticed by them.
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You are missing one key detail, and it is that those previous examples of totalitarianism offered young men a path to virtue and status by obeying the regime. The current example does no such thing. All it offers is misery today, misery tomorrow, misery forever.
In such a position rebellion is a natural occurence.
Rebellions only really occur when conditions improve. In the US, this wasn't a violent process (and doesn't tend to be- after all, the US is a far richer country); but if you were a man coming of age from 1945 to 1973 you enjoyed an utterly massive expansion in your civil rights [especially relative to women]- and that's because, socioeconomically, men were in such demand that women were completely unable to say no to whatever men wanted.
So you got a regulatory state [of society, not necessarily of government; remember, the 1920s were so woke that not only does the 18th Amendment exist, it was enacted without universal sufferage] that was much weaker than in the 1920s and 30s- free love isn't possible without conditions like this. Freedom only increases so long as society has a deficit of men; when it has a deficit of women, in the 1920s as now, oppression increases.
(And it is important to note that men naturally prosper in free conditions in the same way women prosper in oppressive conditions- it simply aligns with their biological interests. The distaff counterpart of catcalling men is quite literally "hello, human resources". It's also important to note that, while I call that 'oppressive', that is the male perspective of it; so if you truly want to be neutral it's not 'oppression' so much as 'privileging women above men', where freedom is the opposite. Oppressive societies are no less fragile than free ones.)
The problem with bust times is that men (and women who are good enough to be men) are in oversupply, so as a result their socioeconomic wages go down and conditions get continually worse for them. And the de-liberalization of the 1990s through today is part and parcel of that, and the entire point of mass immigration is to consolidate that (just like it was in 1920, for that matter!)- the men of that age were all too busy making money to see that failure to treat the communists/immigrationists to free helicopter rides was going to end badly for their children, but any man would do the same in that position. And after all, what's the harm of allowing enemy speech? It's not like it's ever going to take over.
You're thinking of revolutions. That's what Tocqueville's paradox is about.
There's plenty of rebellions under worsening conditions. People who are getting fucked over never overthrow their ruling elite on their own, but they do often tend to be unruly and use the only real language of the masses: widespread ineffectual violence and vandalism.
Plenty of riots to go around, plenty more nihilistic terror to come.
Any aspiring dictator knows wanton violence is the siren song of the crowd lusting for better leadership. But the crowd never seizes power for herself.
This is not true, oppressive societies are a lot more fragile. You only need to take out the elite. And you have no shortage of potential allies. Ask Cuauhtémoc. Ask Saddam. Ask Mussolini.
The history of the world is full of god emperors whose rule is unquestionable until the day someone with a bigger stick comes about and the locals cheer the new management.
A tyrant inspires no loyalty. And they need the boys to die in their wars.
I'll happily give up my seat. No Chinaman ever called me an incel.
My number one domestic policy goal is to make sure they have no willing soldiers.
I'm not as convinced, but I'm also thinking about oppressive societies that emerge from the people rather than being imposed top-down.
Top-down oppression is fragile (especially because it tends to be obviously self-enriching, or rather, it becomes fragile when it can be reasonably perceived as self-enriching), but bottom-up oppression isn't, to the point that it's very hard to call it out. For instance, safetyism in the West is very much oppression, but everyone who perpetrates it does so with the approval of its own conscience. There's no Czar of Safety and therefore the problem is much more difficult to root out because it exists within every man, woman, and child; the senate and people of the US can't just send the 101st Airborne to topple racism for the same reason they can't send them to remove BLM rioters.
The only way to deal with bottom-up oppression is for an opposing nation (or reality) to throw so many bags of money at the people that they can start clearing the self-enriching parts of themselves away, while ensuring that no top-down version of that oppression arises. Contrast post-WW2 Axis nations with modern MENA; the US can blow up a good chunk of it in the name of feminism but the people remain in opposition to that.
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How many of those young men actually believe this? Like pretty clearly feminist dating advice is bullshit- but pretty clearly to adults, which these are not.
This is surely not an isolated example of progressive ideas supposedly benefitting young men by following them.
The younger generations spend a massive amount of time on the internet and information spreads extremely quickly. "Incel ideology", if you broaden it to include general red-pill concepts, isn't just an accepted fact of life among the zoomers but such a noticeable piece of their vocabulary that terms like "Mewing", "Sigma" and "Alpha" are frequently thought of as zoomer slang.
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Talk to young men and you'll see. They know they're getting a raw deal and nobody cares. I was even surprised at how much more unhinged zoomers are than myself. I still have some internalized ideas of civility even if I know intellectually it doesn't mean anything. They don't.
Now that's not to say that they're all right wing, but there is a very consistent rejection of progressive dogma. Which isn't surprising given it has absolutely no place for men in it.
I’m intrigued! Can you provide some anecdotes?
Are you actually surprised? Where were Zoomers even supposed to learn civility?
I will clarify that I didn't mean that exactly. They are not more right wing in my experience. They're just a lot more cynical that I've ever seen even Xers pretend to be.
In particular they don't give the slightest thought to the holy cows that are foundational to the boomer mythology of the Post War Consensus. The millenial reflexively shudders at criticisms of Israel that he knows are dangerous. The zoomer doesn't even know why he should.
Hmm… is it that the Zoomer truly doesn’t know why the cow was ever sacred, or that he (rightly or wrongly) thinks that Israel has milked the sacred cow dry?
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I wouldn’t say I’m surprised, exactly, just morbidly curious to hear examples of unhinged Zoomer incivility.
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Yeah, good point. I suppose that's why the Hippies rebelled. Serving the regime as a foot soldier in Vietnam didn't give young men a status bump, so why risk your life? And of course the benefits to free love were obvious. Nevertheless, the Hippies did have substantial institutional support which enabled their rebellion. 1960s counterculture was always a movement by and for the elites, which is why it eventually won.
I supposed today's young men might rebel, but since their rebellion will not be allowed or encouraged by the regime, it will come to nothing. These would-be rebels have no way to coordinate, and their rebellion will confer no status gain.
Today's rebels simply "lie flat", contributing nothing to a society that can't reward them, but not explicitly challenging the power structure.
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