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It seems to be the same kind of definition creep around "racist" or "fascist" where it is now simply a general term of abuse or denigration towards someone who is disliked or does not share the same political views.
Like, if you read Eliot Rodgers quotes online, you can see why he failed so badly with women and friendships, and it had nothing to do with his looks or his ancestry; he was so self-centred and so hung up on his image as the 'perfect handsome gentleman' and yet the way he says things and the things he says, you can see why nobody wanted to spend longer than ten minutes in his company.
There's a complicated problem here with people who are, to be blunt, losers in life not due to their own choices but due to genetic lottery failing them when it comes to looks, intelligence, ability to be not-weird, and so forth. And the problem won't get solved just by "be yourself", but it's too cruel to say "yeah, you need to work hard on making yourself more of a sale, and even then you won't get very high quality in return" even if it's true. Then there are those who put the blame for their own failings (like Rodgers) on "it's women, they're bitches" and that engenders the angry and mean responses in return.
I don't have a solution. Government-mandated girlfriends won't work, because if you want someone to love you for yourself, then someone who is being paid/compelled to spend time with you isn't what you want - they don't care about you really, they are doing their public community service in pretending to like you for the 'girlfriend experience'. Telling people they have to resign themselves to being alone even if they want love and companionship is hard and seems cruel, even if it's true. Telling people if they do X, Y or Z they'll get that girl of their dreams is lying to them. Maybe readjusting expectations? This is not the 60s and the first flush of the Sexual Revolution anymore, historically a lot of people never got to have love and sex, there were always a lot of bachelors and spinsters, the idea of having tons of great casual sex in your teens and twenties and then finding a suitable mate and settling down for marriage and children only worked for a limited time (because you could sleep around, or you could get married, but unless you were rich or very charming, you couldn't do both) and now the sexual market has adjusted to the new conditions.
Really, Elliot Rodger seems like the victim of his own coping mechanisms. His inability to attract women (and same-sex friends, by extension) seems to have been entirely social in nature - as he correctly noted in his video, he's fairly handsome, he was only an inch or two shy of six foot, physically fit, obviously of above average intelligence. Unlike many incels, he couldn't blame his lack of success with women on a physical deformity or a learning disability. There are many incels who, one suspects, would have had just as little success with women had they been born 100, 200 or 500 years ago, but I would not put Rodger in that category: born in another context he could well have ended up content and thriving.
Because socialising didn't come naturally to him, he must have found it awkward and discomforting. In the past, he would have had no choice but to power through this initial discomfort, awkwardness, and platonic & romantic rejection, and had he done so he most likely would have ended up a more or less well-adjusted young man. (This is no mean feat! By "initial", I recognise that it might have taken years of persistent honing of his social skills with very little immediate reward. But it would be quite surprising if he didn't eventually get over it.)
But because he found this awkwardness and discomfort absolutely intolerable and because he was born in the West in 1991, he had the option to, rather than powering through, instead opt out and retreat into online spaces, in which he had absolute control over how he presented himself and with whom he interacted. Spending time in these online spaces made it even more challenging and distressing for him to interact with people in meatspace, creating a vicious feedback loop. Besides depriving him of opportunities to develop his social skills, the other big drawback of spending time in these online spaces (social media, porn, video games) is, unbeknownst to him, how heavily curated and idealised their depiction of the real world is, which resulted in what Rodger wanted out of life becoming concomitantly unrealistic over time. As a teenager, he probably thought to himself "I just want to meet a pretty girl who's nice to me", but by the time of his rampage his goal had curdled into "I want a 10/10 blonde bombshell with DDs, and anything less is a travesty on a galactic scale. 'Everybody' of my social status has that, why can't I?".
Really, the modern "therapeutic" social paradigm criticised at length by Freddie deBoer among others - in which every discomfort or obstacle (no matter how trivial) is an injustice to be remedied by fiat; in which the powers that be must go to great lengths to ensure that every individual feels "valid" and "empowered" at all times; in which adversity is not a potential opportunity for growth, but something always to be ameliorated or avoided under the auspices of "self-care"; in which smartphones and social media to connect with like-minded people are an effective coping mechanism for the "neurodivergent" - seems tailor-made to produce an army of Rodgers. I've spoken to Americans younger than Rodger who've grown up fully immersed in this milieu, and they genuinely seem to see no distinction between "this made me unhappy" and "this is a social wrong". They legitimately talk about the guy they like not texting them back as if their civil rights were being impinged upon. I fear for this generation.
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