What is an Incel

It is pretty rare for people to look at Hitler and have the immediate thought that pops up be "what did this guy go through to be THIS FUCKED UP?" Indeed, it is a rare quality to look at some psychopath or war criminal and immediately wonder what experience they had that perverted them in such a way. To think like this would require a mind filled with either extreme empathy or the purest psychopathy.

We see this phenomenon with not only Hitler, but also incels--those involuntarily celibate. Incels typically share a resentment toward the normies--people with apparently functioning lives--women--who, they consider, reject them emotionally and sexually--and chads--those that take all the (sexual resources) for themselves. A Lacanian psychoanalyst would have a field day with this group of people, provided that others didn't beat him to it, which, unfortunately, we DID beat him to it.

The concept of incels evolved from a niche terminology in a sub-culture to something widely recognized by the internet. Nowadays, incels have piqued the interest of most of the internet: people flock to judge, analyze, and "fix" them. Some utilize incels as an example of the decadence of this post-modern world, while others see incels as a testament to the alienation of people from technology in the information age. Eventually, the term "incel" became sort of an insult, thrown at whoever fits the category.

It is this phenomenon that interests me: as incels are brought to light, they are eventually de-humanized in the same fashion Hitler or any other terrible person is. Incels, the identity that a group of people describes themselves as, evolved into a term that can be coined on anyone, just like how "racist" or "fascist" can be coined on anyone (the irony being the far left and far right both calling the other fascists and racist). Now, a socially awkward misogynist nerd can be an incel, an online racist can be an incel, the Gypsy Crusader can be an incel. Then, it is perhaps not so surprising that the discourse around incels is one of social phenomena--taking incels as some social epidemic spreading via internet or some revelation on the alienation or whatever factor people considered to be fucked in this post-modern world.

The two stances essentially avoid the same question asked about Hitler: what is the psychology behind the creation of each incel?

Althusser's most famous creation is the method of symptomatic reading: reading into not what a text said but what a text omitted. And here, what is omitted precisely reveals a worrisome nature of our world: the omission of the discussion on the question regarding the psychological drivers behind the generation of incels precisely reveals our systematic dehumanization of them.

It is of course true that every person is a unique individual with a unique assemblage of experiences, and we do know this. Yet, when discussing the symptomatic group that is the incels, we ignore this fact, treating them as a social phenomenon or dehumanizing them into that of an insult. Why?

The misogynistic, racist, and mentally-fucked up aspects of incels allow us to dehumanize them on the same grounds we dehumanize Hitler--they did "something wrong." Isn't this the same conception most Germans held against the Jewish people before WWII (under Nazi propaganda) or what most Europeans hold against Gypsies throughout history? This schema of "X did something wrong so we dehumanize them" is precisely the schema of fanatic totalitarianism, and it is this schema that, apparently, we hold to this day.

If so, all we need to step into fanatic totalitarianism is a simple swapping of our moral judgment or who to "hate," which can easily be done through means like propaganda.

Perhaps, then, fanatic totalitarianism and dystopia are not as far away as we conceive them to be.

Then the question to ask now is where did this come from? How did we not distance ourselves from this schema of totalitarianism? The answer, surprisingly, mostly could be found in language--what is the fundamental account for the meaning of a term: what defines it, what shapes its meaning, what framework, if any, does it fit in? Then, it is time to ask the crucial question: what is an incel.