17 September 2025

Incel Alienation


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 This is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 here.

I think that a large part of being human is to be as others are, to be, in truth, one and the same. Those who refrain from partaking in that great project we tend to call "humanity" exclude themselves from the primary means of genuine meaning-making in the world, all of which are essentially collective. 

Those Special People who opt to exclude themselves of course exclude themselves while entirely unaware of doing so. This, in truth, appears to be part of the core functioning of that most total alienation which alienates to the extent that the alienation itself becomes obfuscated, out of view. We who understand that we are not special might, on occassion, have a hunch or impulse to thus turn the blame onto the Special People themselves. Doing so is fair, and should be done. But it also has to be done correctly.

What one often sees is namely a sort of reflexive blaming of those Special (and hence Alienated) people which assumes that in truth, their alienation is as much an illusion as their conviction of Specialness itself. True Incels must, all things considered, constitute a paradigmatic case of what it is to be "Special", even if some Incels (quite a lot, even) likely to manage to find some meaningful (if horrible) human connection with others who suffer the same affliction as them (even if they collectively are entirely as to what their affliction is; for in spite of their obsessive self-reflexivity, they come to negate their own agency and thus role in said affliction). Yet traditional media has often come to instead term Incels not as "alienated Men", but as "Men who feel alienated", as if the only factor was that of self-identification. This way of handling the problem of course becomes a vicious circle, for inasmuch as it negates the reality of the alienation suffered by incels, it only strengthens the vicious circle they find themselves in - confirming, rather than denying, that they are Special, impossible for Others to understand, and thus fundamentally and irreconcilably separate from the rest of the world. 

Yet if an Incel is really a kind of Special Person, how might we make sense of why the two categories are at all separable? Only a small minority of Special People become Incels. The difference cannot be reduced to simply Specialness as such, seeing as Specialness essentially claims to be irreconcilable with anything that is not itself. The answer, I think, has to be found in the way in which praxis related to thinking, both more abstractly, but especially how praxis relates to Special Consciousness. 

To be continued.

Next stop: A return to Neverland.