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In other words, he betrayed us once it was no longer in his interest to oppose the woke.
He got rich and famous enough that he managed to get married despite being a textbook beta nice guy; what does he care now about the plight of the incel? He makes his money in the normie-ville of substack and his psychiatry clinic; what use does he have now for cultivating a following by spreading heresies? Being controversial now would only threaten all he has.
Telling heterodox truths is a game for anonymous young single men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Established men become assimilated into the system.
Betrayed? The man wrote hundreds of pages of content and gave them out completely for free. I guess you could make a case that he owes something to the people who defended him against being cancelled. But I figure that giving people hundreds of pages of writing for free has already paid for that. I don't see why Scott would owe anything to his readers at this point.
Also, as far as I know, Scott has never claimed any sort of alliance with either other anti-wokes or with incels, so there is no alliance to betray.
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The eternal problem of a theoretical incel revolution: anyone with the get-up-and-go to be of any kind of value will get laid.
You’re half right.
It’s not about value, it’s about status. Lots of virgins have incomes that make it clear what kind of value they provide.
Leading a movement makes you a leader, and leaders get laid. They have or acquire a certain level of confidence and extroversion by the nature of the thing - I’ve seen people change quite drastically just from a promotion. They also become famous: someone well-known enough in any group of a good size is also well-known enough to be a catch of a sort.
It’s the eternal problem of all male solidarity, not just incels. The socialists had exactly the same problem - trade union leaders where constantly accepting knighthoods and buying grand houses with union money. Male status comes mostly from power and experience, and doesn’t start degrading until your 70s so potential leaders always evaporate off the top.
All-male solidarity sounds hella-gay; there’s no problem with it because why would anyone want it?
Mencken preemptively dismissed the incels and feminists when he noted there would never be a winner in the battle of the sexes, as there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
And yet here we are. Mencken certainly didn’t predict S Korea. In general his lines are fun but there’s not much thought or truth in them.
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Who's "us"?
I agree Scott got soft, but stability and family making you more mellow and less of a firebrand is an eternal cycle, it's how things are supposed to be. It's why Kulak in his incessant calls for violence never actually talks about building things, starting families, falling in love, having children. Men who have lives and families to care about don't want to burn down the world.
I think it may be more nuanced than this. As a man with a life and a family, I don't want to burn down the world, but neither would I piss on it were it on fire. I'm content to let it burn and there are many areas I think would benefit from a swift hot fire.
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I don't think that suggesting that the SCOTUS should have the power to summarily execute people (because that's what his suggestion amounts to) counts as being "mellow and less of a firebrand".
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I would broadly define ‘us’ as some amalgam of ‘those who have had the pointy end of wokeness shoved up our rectum at some point’ and ‘readers of Radicalising the Romanceless’.
Especially as the latter, I’m pretty disappointed. Scott wrote a set of articles saying, “here’s a massive problem that makes lots of young men miserable, why don’t we discuss it, and can we at least agree on not accusing these young men of being entitled proto-rapists?”. Ten years later, having achieved fame and fortune on the back of his fans, and a wife and mistress thereby*, he writes another essay saying pretty clearly that, okay, nothing has changed, lots of young men are still unhappy, but ultimately he likes the system the way it is and thinks it would be inhuman to change it.
It’s not like he was ever a firebrand. He was never a Kulak-style writer, he never did anything as a young man he couldn’t do now that he has more stability. But when he was unhappy he wrote about young men’s problems, and now that he’s happy he’s decided that everything is fine even though nothing has changed except his own personal welfare. That’s just pure intellectual cowardice. If you’re going to ‘mellow’ as you get older, either you have to admit that your original beliefs were wrong and explain why, or else you have to admit you hold beliefs purely because they’re convenient for you and that you’re okay with letting your less fortunate peers sink.
To take an example that goes in my favour, it’s very common for young socialists to become capitalists when they become rich. But this means that either you have to be aware you really fucked up when you were younger, and understand why socialism actually doesn’t help the poor, and try some other way instead. Or else it means that you’re a coward who cared about the poor when you had no money and became willing to disregard them the moment it became convenient for you. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call the latter ‘betrayal’.
*he mentions somewhere that he explicitly dates by going to meet-ups and having eager young women come up and say “wow, are you Scott Alexander?!”.
Which essay is that?
Love and Liberty
…
Forgot that one. Thank you!
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I'm not sure what follow-up to Radicalizing the Romanceless you're talking about, but from the summary I don't see the inconsistency. Recognizing that a problem is real, but disagreeing with its strongest activists' proposed solution and throwing your hands up helplessly, is a very common and coherent position on all sorts of controversial issues. (For example, I agree the plight of the Palestinians is worthy of sympathy, but have some pretty unsolvable disagreements with Hamas on what ought to be done about it. Surely I can express these two points even if I have no alternative miracle-solution to put forward?)
Scott himself puts forth a few ideas in the now-linked essay before dismissing them all. In general there are loads of potential policy ideas of many different strengths for encouraging people to pair up, discouraging them from behaviour that makes pairing up difficult, and facilitating people finding matches.
The Israeli-Hamas conflict is intractable because both groups want the same land, they can’t both get it, they both consider the conflict existential, they have powerful backers and they’re willing to be extremely violent. In contrast the problem of inceldom and birth rates is very tractable and historically was a mostly solved problem, it’s just that seriously discussing it gets you nobbled.
The answer to inceldom is not a tractable problem; the incels today mostly would not have been successful romantically/sexually in 1955 either. Granted, he would have been a different young man in 1955, and that young man would have done ok with the ladies, and probably would today too.
Seriously the incels' problem is with their behavior/attitude and that's unfixable. It's not because they're short.
Let’s say maybe 20% of the population is ‘long term without a relationship and unhappy about it’ as opposed to the specific incel subculture. (I freely concede that this number is pulled from thin air and intuition!)
My thesis is that about 15% of these people (us) are this way because relationships explicitly became opt-in rather than opt-out. I think it was @MaiqTheTrue who said that in the modern age things that everyone used to be able to do because they had no choice now split into skilled enthusiasts and unskilled avoiders. Incels being the latter.
In other times and places it was not this way. A friend of mine went back to his country after university and his parents immediately sat him down and said, “These are the sixteen eligible girls in our community, which would you like us to contact first?” Clearly such a society will have more men in relationships! And indeed the marriage rate for young men at 30 used to be much higher than it is now.
Many other potential policies have been floated on this forum: cracking down on men who juggle multiple girls, escalating taxes for singleness, government or church-organised speed dating, Victorian-England style ‘coming out’, and more drastic stuff. Arguments can be made against all of these but those arguments do have to be made.
At the risk of offending, I believe that ‘well, you don’t have a girlfriend/boyfriend because you have a bad personality’ is one of those evolved rejoinders that people use to avoid thinking about the problem. It’s trivially true, in the general form of ‘if you were the kind of person who could X, you would X’. And there are people who obviously have physical and mental deformities that render them unlovable, if backing evidence is required.
So people on the receiving end of this argument tend to shrink in on themselves and agree meekly to avoid humiliation, and people on the using end get to avoid having to defend a system they’re basically okay with. I don’t mean to aim this at you specifically, but I think this is how the debate generally goes and why.
I sort of agree with you- being a normal person who settles down in a serious relationship became opt-in at some point, so some people got worse at it. But some people got worse at it is the actual mechanics of the thing even if not the root cause. Your hypothetical young man in 1955 didn't have the option to not date a lass seriously but he was also less likely to be addicted to porn, video games, or weed, had better social skills, and also was much more likely to be stably employed. Likewise your hypothetical young woman of the time was thinner, better at home economics(not that fifties cooking was in general very good[it wasn't] but that the women who straight up can't cook or keep a house weren't really a thing), and more pleasant to deal with on average. 'Pass' is a valid selection and for the bottom whatever percent of appealing partners I don't particularly blame them for taking it as regards their opposite sex equivalent.
I'm totally in favor of social/community support for solving these problems, and I do in fact spend time thinking about the problem. But the fact remains that both sexes are less appealing as partners on average- physically, due to obesity, social skills wise, expectations wise(there was no sexting before smart phones, and while I'm not delusional enough to think that courtship between the two sexual revolutions had a high rate of waiting til the wedding night there wasn't much sex on the first date either), in terms of maturity, etc. This is an actual problem that has to be solved in order to make these community support mechanisms functional.
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I think this has always been Scott.
I came to SSC because I liked his writing and he sometimes had some good insights. But he's always been the guy you're seeing today.
As the (deeply obnoxious, terribly hateful, easily hated) phrase goes, "skill issue."
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Your general point is valid, but you're going off track with this. I don't recall Scott ever wanting to burn the world down. It's more that if he couldn't even stand the heat when he was single, there's no way he'll risk exposing his family to the psychos that came after him.
I'm not saying Scott used to be a firebrand. But it shouldn't be surprising that getting married and establishing a career means he's not as willing to stick his hand into the fire. Hence everyone complaining about him losing his edge and not writing bangers like he used to.
That said, I never thought he was courageous or even particularly principled. He's always been a squish and something of a coward, and it surprises me that people are surprised by this now.
Ehh... he shut down the old blog because of his old career, and then his main income became writing, he got an undisclosed (?) but presumably cushy windfall from Substack on the reputation of writing the occasional banger.
Totally agreed with you otherwise, none of this is surprising and I'm glad he hasn't gone an even more obnoxious failure mode (of which there are many; boring is a mild sin), but I would've expected the career change to incentivize recapturing the old spark, not give up on it completely.
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Perhaps it’s the result of different bubbles? Reading from a liberal university, stuff like “Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell” and “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” was mind-blowing stuff, and the anti-feminist essays were unthinkable. I really, honestly looked up to 2014 Scott as the epitome of someone who didn’t even have right-wing views but was willing to follow the truth even when it was ideologically uncomfortable for him. So seeing what he became is hugely disappointing, even putting aside the stuff I wrote in my other reply. Not just the careful avoidance of anything likely to upset, but the pigheaded blinders he puts on when defending his actual ingroup and beliefs. (EA not Jews, to avoid doubt).
I think part of the problem is that he got really full of himself because of Dominic Cummings and COVID and the substack income. He started treating himself as a Public Intellectual. Lately reading his stuff makes me feel like I’m being communicated at rather than to, like I’m hearing what Scott wants me to think not what he actually thinks.
There was a little glimmer of something interesting in the WWOTF review where he allowed himself to be an outsider for a little while, and then the blinders clamped back into place. Sad!
WWOTF?
What We Owe The Future, MacAskill's book. Part IV where he says logic is fake, Bertrand Russell was a witch, and playing the philosophy game is bad comes quite close to undercutting much or all of his utilitarian project, IMO, but since then he's not addressed those ideas/issues.
He had to have been aware of that, since the very next day he posted Tower of Assumptions, quite cheekily playing the philosophy game, though it doesn't go so far as getting your eyes pecked out by seagulls.
Thank you!
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He did? Did he make us any promises?
Disappointed would be a preferable phrase, indeed.
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We supported him. We defended him against his critics. We evangelized his articles.
When you catch your buddy fucking your girlfriend, do you feel mollified if he excuses himself by pointing out that, actually, he never promised to not sleep with her?
The degree of parasocial relationship here is absolutely remarkable to me. He's fucking your girlfriend? Really?
I think you’re reading too much into the specific example. But yes, SSC was a purely organic phenomenon that succeeded pretty much through word of mouth. Scott started out as just another poster, and even when he made SSC he was a frequent commenter. Now he does meet-ups and community content. He asked fans to write to the NYT for him.
When you have such a close relationship between blogger and readers it’s inevitable that there are mutual expectations. It’s not like having a crush on Daniel Craig and thinking he owes you something because you once bought a James Bond poster.
I've experienced it myself with podcasters and bloggers, where I've had good feelings towards a content creator and wanted to support them. I don't think that's wrong.
What strikes me as odd is the extremity of the reaction towards what strike me as at most pretty mild alterations in position.
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He stopped doing his thing from ten years ago and we stopped supporting, defending and promoting him.
Calling this a betrayal seems very overdramatic.
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To put it in the vernacular, “dance with the one that brung ya”. Of course, which one this is is a question with more than one answer (e.g. one plausible answer is ‘Paul Graham’) but I think that readers of ‘Untitled’ and other ‘things I will regret writing’ are not small among them.
He had me at “Radicalizing the Romanceless”
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That’s where I was going with that, yes. I have no illusions that I wouldn’t do the same but it does kind of make me feel used. I wrote to the NYT on his behalf - I can’t imagine modern day Scott returning the favour.
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