Daily Bard Digest 2024-08-29

At 08/29/24 21:54:00 in ContraPoints with a score of yall:

It's from Envy, the Slut Shaming segment, around 1:23,

I think a lot of incel discourse is really just malignant moaning. Right, it's not an attempt to diagnose or solve any problem, it's just a contagious expression of misery. A moan of pain that masquerades as a political agenda. "Sexual Marxism" they call it, the redistribution of s*x, state-mandated GFs. That's very valid.

Of course they don't actually expect any of this to happen. That's not the point. So, incels are kind of a universal punching bag online, it's very easy to point and laugh at them. But what's harder is to look in the mirror and notice how these exact same tendencies are rampant in our own communities.

So the incel Black Pill is just one instance of what I call an "ideology of resentment", a discourse that outwardly appears like moral or political critique, but which on examination is mainly just a resentful moan. The goal of resentment politics is not to improve conditions. In fact, the resentful person is full of contempt for any "morally compromised sellouts" who are trying to enact plausible reforms. They don't want victory, they don't want power, they want to endlessly "critique" power. Because for them, "critique" is an important psychological defense against feeling impotent. Scheler described it this way:

"It is peculiar to 'ressentiment criticism' that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism."

As a general rule, the more radical a political community claims to be, the more likely it is to be a community of resentment. Self-styled radicals will tell you, "superficial surface reforms do not interest us. The problem must be critiqued at its root". And then the root turns out to be this universal, all-encompassing evil right? Society itself, the system, the machine. A resentment ideologue always imagines himself engaged in a kind of Satanic revolt against an omnipotent, omnipresent enemy.

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And nothing short of total revolution counts as any sort of victory whatsoever. "We have to dismantle the entire system! Burn it all down!" I guess it's pedestrian to point out that this is the revolutionary utopian equivalent of Christians awaiting the Last Judgment. Our Kingdom is coming comrades! 😇