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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?
It's probably both, but I like to see the ignorance of the zoomer as the blood of the lamb washing our sins. No grudge lasts forever. You have to not even comprehend the question of which pill to choose to really escape the matrix.
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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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