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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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I think in part it would be the Just World hypothesis as @The_Nybbler indicated.

But I would also wager it's because almost all moral intuitions are tied into feelings of disgust or distaste which can be 'prerational.'

Consider the Halo Effect, where pretty people are assumed to be more moral, just, good, whatever. Positive affect towards a person in one area flows into positive affect in other areas. A guy who has successfully gotten married and maintained a relationship for years on end could turn out to have been a remorseless sociopath the entire time, but I wager most people would assume they're a good, well-adjusted person merely by seeing that some woman is choosing to show them affection. "If she likes him, he must be alright."

This can also work in reverse. A guy who is maybe less than perfectly handsome and has been single for a while and who complains about it even a little is likely causing a 'disgust' response in others, just enough to lead the onlooker to the conclusion that this person must be morally deficient and/or hiding some repugnant factor about themselves because obviously if they were a good person they'd have a partner already.

This is at least part of the reason why "incel" as an insult implies that the target is also ugly, because apparently being sexually undesirable is enough to justify the fact that people never show them affection/sexual interest.


Now, to stretch my thinking beyond what I can actually support, I think it is simply how people choose to resolve cognitive dissonance and 'manufacture' a consensus about a person's worthiness for affection and social acceptance.

Seeing someone without a partner, especially over the long term, is the sort of signal that nobody else considers them worthy of receiving romantic affection, which is to say they've been 'socially selected' against for a long time. And thus you, as the person who cannot detect any obvious reason for this, must be missing something. And so there's a tendency to jump towards:

It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.

And assume that they've got to be at best eccentric and at worst an evil, twisted person who cannot be trusted. So rather than assume that the unseen masses who have previously rejected this guy got it wrong, it's easier to manufacture your own reasons for why they may have done so and resolve your cognitive dissonance in a way that DOESN'T violate the (apparent) group consensus.

Or to put it more bluntly, few people (women especially) want to be the person who 'takes a chance' on the weirdo reject even if there is literally ZERO articulable reason for why he is worthy of scorn, because social reality means this is a risky chance to take, as you could cause the group to turn against you as well.