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• Humpty Dumpty Elegy 10 | Five Books On 🙉"Monkey Brains"🙈 •

Whatchu know 'bout incels?

If your answer to that is, "nothing." then I'm impressed. It's a dirty dirty word to describe dirty dirty people. Ignorance of them is a sign of a good soul. Bless your heart.

"Incel" is short for "involuntarily celibate". That name alone should be a bright red flag.

Now, most of the time when this word is used, it's just a way to call a dude unfuckable. Which is always useful. But there's so much more to it than that. It's not some passive state of being. It's a philosophy and a subculture for the most rotten shitbags on the planet.

The way they see it, they're not celibate by any choice of their own. The only reason they're not getting their peepees touched or smooched is because society is rigged against them. Because women are hypergamous automatons who all want exactly the same type of dude (Chads or Tyrones). Because they've got physical defects that absolutely nobody will overlook. Because they're neuroatypical. Or according to some, because they're not white... or because they are.

Take the heartless and practical cynicism of the "Red Pill" brought to us by the Men's Rights Movement and MGTOWs, then add nihilism, racism, pedophilia, zoophilia, rape/murder fantasies, a proprietary blend of quack evo-psych to make it all official, and thus you've got the Incel movement. Also known as, "The Black Pill".

[Here's a handy glossary for all the newspeak these gimps use]

Their problem isn't simply that nobody will give them a chance. But that even if they do get a woman in bed, it's a diabolical trap. That there's no point in even trying, because women just get knocked up by Chads, and then get a brainy betamale to raise their kids. Or that it's all an elaborate scheme to rope you into alimony, child support, or to have you thrown in jail over fake sexual assault charges just for sympathy and attention. Long story short, women are scary, don't go near them. But they should still paradoxically smooch our peepees, even as we're running away.

And this is where I get to my main point: "Involuntary," my motherfucking ass. These are just celibate narcissists, afraid to be rejected, afraid to lower their standards, afraid of catching feelings over someone and getting dumped, and afraid to admit that they're cowards. Assholes with a pathologically external locus of control; endless victims of fate, rather than of their own choices.

I originally thought incel forums were places for those with severe mental disabilities, or ghastly physical disfigurements. Which didn't offend me one bit. If a dude with werewolf disorder wants to commiserate with a guy who has an untreated cleft lip, I say more power to 'em. It's gotta be hard out there.

But that's not what they are. People don't blurt, "incel!" at those guys. They blurt, "Oh dang, that sucks, well uuuh... good luck I guess." Those real-deals make up an infinitesimal fraction of the incel movement, which the rest hold up as emblems. The remaining majority are two types of guys:

The first type of guy isn't evil. He's just lost. I had a friend like this, we'll call him Kabbage. Kabbage wasn't disfigured at all, he was just a bit thicc, pimply, had a big fat nose. He was also debilitatingly shy and anxious. But under all of that, truly one of the best people I've ever known; smart, creative, sensitive, a beautiful soul, double-plus dad material. If he lost the weight and cleared up his skin, he'd have very little to worry about. Plus, girls don't really mind a big nose, it's masculine. He's the one who introduced me to their subreddit before it was purged.

My reaction was immediate disgust and condemnation, and I assumed he showed me so we could rip on them together. But he got quiet, changed the topic, and I haven't spoken to him since around that time.

Kabbage, I hate to say, was a coward in many ways. His parents were identical to the Glouberman family from the show, Big Mouth. He struggled to ask for salt & pepper at other people's dinner tables, so as not to offend anyone. Imagine how scary he found asking a girl out. He felt lonely, and liked the sympathy he found among the incels.

The second type of guy IS evil. Humpty was this type of guy.

If I had to pull stats right out of my ass, I'd say the incel community is made up of 0.01% disabled/disfigured guys, 5% Kabbages, and 94.99% Humpty Dumpties.

And I'd feel no particular need to shit on these guys, if not for the incel community's growing body count. Most famously, Elliot Rodger, and Alek Minassian. The latter I've mentioned already, because Humpty was a fan. He said if Minassian succeeded in his plea of insanity, based purely on his autism, that'd open the door for a spree killing of his own.

There's more than two killers, but I'm a strong believer in strictly trying to forget about these losers. The best punishment is to send their names to oblivion, ignore any statements or manifestos they made, and just heap praise and sympathy on their victims. Suffice it to say, too many spree killers are proud incels.

Yes, I am embarrassed to have spent time with Humpty. I know how terribly this reflects on me. The RCMP would probably be coming after me with some questions if they weren't all busy kidnapping and murdering First Nations women.

But GREAT NEWS! Humpty is fucking GONE! Humpty admitted to Wednesday that he never gave a shit about us or any of his ex discord amigos 😃. So Wens told Hump to officially fuck off! Yay! They were going to do a pity vote to maybe let him back into the discord this June, but not anymore. He wasn't reading this series. He never planned to. I don't have to act like I care about his wellbeing whatsoever. YISSSSS! Go skip rope you worthless fucking rotten egg!

I will still send him a link to this when he inevitably winds up in prison. But now I'm officially writing this for everyone else's benefit.

With that out of the way, what's all this "monkey brain" shit?

It depends. Like "incel", it's a question of who is saying it.

To some, it's a pop-psychology buzzword. A reference to Paul MacLean's "triune brain" model of brain evolution. The idea that our brains evolved layer after layer. Starting with our instinctual "reptile" layer, then developing into our emotional "mammal" layer, and culminating in our rational "human" layer. When people say "monkey" they mean the lower "mammal" layer.

To others, it's a Buddhist concept along very similar lines. A state of mind that is, "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable". While it's along similar lines, there are no Buddhist incels. Humpty was the least Buddhist dude I've ever met. He didn't throw out "monkey brain" to keep track of and tame his negative impulses.

Maybe some people came here thinking I had five books on that one scene from Faces Of Death...

nope.

To incels like Humpty Dumpty, "Monkey brains" is vague and versatile. Based on the dog-shittiest pseudo-psychology in existence at this moment in history. A simple get-out-of-introspection free card; an exemption from all moral responsibility. Almost like demon possession, it wasn't me, it was my gersh dang monkey brain what done it again.

Incel monkeybrainology is a confused mix of genetic and cultural determinism; a denial of the fact that one of the many wonderful things humans evolved to do was act civilized; a half-assed bastardization of modern neuroscience; and a complete romanticization of the worst sides of every impulse.

You don't just suddenly find yourself an incel (I don't give two shits about the Donnelly Study. It's a worthless woozle hunt). You find incels, and work your ass off to join them and conform to their blackhole gravity well of despair.

While I couldn't drag Humpty Dumpty out of that well, I might still be able to talk some sense into the Kabbages among him, or people that know some Kabbages. People aren't incels because they're unfuckable; they're unfuckable because they think like incels. OR, they're comfortably celibate, but not comfortable enough to admit it.

In fact, Wednesday is a perfect example: He describes himself as maybe the ugliest person on the planet. Now, I disagree, and think that's some obvious dysmorphia talking. But it's also true that Wednesday qualifies as "deformed" thanks to his crooked eye. He'll tell you it's been a real obstacle to dating. But here's the kicker: He's been slangin' dick since he started highschool. And for one huge reason: He's brave enough to constantly put himself out there; not too proud to beg; and not afraid to put in work only to lose someone. He didn't disqualify himself from a sex life before even trying. And you know, a pity fuck is still a fuck.

Wens could have given up from the start, and been a proud member of the incel community's 0.01% elite. But he's simply not that much of an irresponsible pussy. He worked his ass off for those peepee touches, and never once decided he was just entitled to them.

This is the one topic Wednesday and I tried the hardest to change Humpty's mind on, and made the least progress. This is a central pillar of the incel community. In this entry of the Humpty Dumpty Elegy I'm going to do my best to unravel the incel pseudo-biology/psychology that has thusfar gotten innocent people killed, and wasted the precious time of thousands of silly young men.

Meanwhile, for everyone else who is comfortably removed from the incel cesspit, and uninterested in wading through it, these are still five books that can give you a deeper and more endearing connection to this magnificent species we're all a part of. Modern psychology is founded on biology. A solid understanding of the latter can tell you more about yourself than any checklist, index, or diagnosis psychology has to offer.

• #1 The Moral Animal by Robert Wright •

Lets start with them genes, mommy 👖

It's probably unwise to be promoting evolutionary psychology on Tumblr. Evo-psych, or as it used to be called, "sociobiology" came into this world under a salvo of controversy. Its founder, E.O. Wilson was labeled a racist, sexist, fascist monster.

Academics, particularly feminist ones, lumped him in with social Darwinists (which shoulda been called "Spencerists" because Darwin had nothing to do with them), eugenicists, group-selectionists, genetic determinists, and any other goblin that made the 20th century so bloody.

To be fair, while the smearjob towards Wilson was wildly off-base, they did predict people like Humpty, and the blackpill movement. But not because Humpty is an orthodox sociobiologist. It's just that the old models of psychology made his warped philosophy more difficult to justify. And many of Wilson's critics had just as much of a bastardized understanding of the topic as Humpty does.

There was a fear that if you added a "hard science" like biology to a "soft science" like psychology, you'd get something especially dangerous and pernicious. But as Wright correctly pointed out, notions like "there's no differences between men and women" came from the social sciences, have done plenty of harm, and didn't rely on biology at all. Same with strict behaviorism. Social engineering is a risky game, period.

This is why it's so important for incels to get the full picture. Many of them say things like "It's evolutionarily adaptive for a man to have a drive to rape." but completely ignore the other side of that coin which says, "women evolved an equally adaptive hatred towards being raped".

Society is just a bunch of individuals negotiating compromises over their competing, often opposing, self-interests. Incels just want the world to compromise 100% to them. They're screaming babies.

Incels love to conveniently look at random primates for justifications for everything, ignoring the fact that each primate species is hugely different from every other one, including us.

When it comes to relationship fidelity, what are we? Winner-takes-all tournament animals like gorillas? Klingon-style rape monsters like chimps? Slutty bonobos? Or saintly Victorian gibbons, who pair for life and serenade each other from the treetops each day?

Answer? We're humans, asshole. We're the primates who evolved to build civilizations. We're the ones who have all of those possibilities within us, and more. And this is the point of Wright's book: Humans aren't inherently moral animals, but we're all potentially moral, which makes us one-of-a-kind.

A lot of our behavior evolved to be, "frequency dependent". Basically, as we grow up we observe the people around us to decide where we plan to fit in. When there's too many cooks, try your hand at being a waiter.

Like with the "Madonna/whore" or "Dad/cad" dichotomy, if you grow up around Madonnas, it might be wise to try being a whore. If everyone's a cad, try acting like a dad. If everyone has a hipster beard, you'll look cooler with a clean shave. There's not one "naturally" right strategy for life. It depends on the environment.

"In your genes" is practically meaningless a good chunk of the time. In the tug-of-war between nature vs nurture, or genes vs social environment, genes do only between 1/3 to 1/2 of the work in determining who we are.

This is why determinism is such a sin, genetic OR cultural. This book deals with the genetic side, while later on The Blank Slate deals with the environmental side.

A huge thing incels like to believe is that their placement in the social hierarchy has been completely determined for them. They believe they're stuck firmly on the bottom. In fact they romanticize their lowliness. That icon at the top, of a slouching bitchboy, is the symbol of their wiki.

This is how the black pill makes the red pill, despite all its flaws, look 100x more healthy and productive. A pickup artist would tell you there's no excuse for not standing up straight or grooming yourself, and a MGTOW would at least tell you to take ownership of your choice to avoid women.

Nobody is born a winner or a loser. Take the leaders of fraternities for example. Aka, "chads". If you tested their serotonin levels just before entering the frat, they'd be extremely unremarkable. It's only after they ascend the ranks do they have a surplus of serotonin.

Serotonin gives you confidence, similar to the effects of alcohol. People don't become leaders because they're full of it, they're full of it because they became leaders. We evolved it to maintain status, not to determine who leads and who follows.

And here's an important detail about male hierarchies: They're extremely fragile and dynamic. Today's chad could be tomorrow's homeless guy, reminiscing about the days he was hot shit. Bill Gates never had to be sexy to take over the world. Charles Darwin was a gentle little niceguy, with an ugly face, who didn't touch a woman until well into adulthood, yet he had 10 kids and was buried in the same cemetery as Isaac Newton.

The incel definition of an "alpha" = Duke Nukem... and that's it. Because once again, they're just stupid narcissists.

There are dozens of behavioral changes a man can make to encourage some endogenous serotonin production. Taking on responsibilities, setting and accomplishing goals, exercising and taking care of your health, etc. are a good start. In a way, this whole series is partially about facilitating that. But disturbingly their main focus is on cultivating "dark triad" personality traits. Based on the asinine belief that women prefer abusive men, and that that's the only way to keep them around.

Really, they just think like criminals. Criminals, especially the ones who commit impulse crimes like robbery, assault, or rape, actually have a massive deficit of serotonin, not a surplus. One hypothesis suggests that people in that state of mind commit crimes to kickstart their serotonin levels back up to baseline.

But like I've said, that's not a good excuse; crime is not a valid antidepressant. Ruining your rep and getting punished for bad behavior is a great way to lose all your happy brain chemicals. The dark triad scheme is a terrible gamble. This is where the concept of "reciprocal altruism" enters the picture, and it's one of the key details incels leave out when they discuss the evolution of human behavior.

Like with all other primates, the social hierarchy cannot be ascended alone. If you think you can just max your strength and ignore your charisma, you're in for a mutiny. There's no future in abusing your way to the top.

The incel sour-grapes attitude towards high status men is a fairly natural response. Generally speaking we all have a tendency to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to luck, and the reverse for others. They never look at a guy with a healthy social life and assume he earned it. They blame it on some halo effect, because he's got "hunter eyes" or some stupid bullshit like that. And they never look at their own awkwardness as a result of isolating themselves and trying to learn about people through movies, videogames, or god forbid, dating simulators [shudder].

We no longer live in a world where a high-status person will just straight up violently attack a low-status person for their hubris or insolence. Incels act like if the Alphas come by and see them standing up straight, they're going to attack them like an angry chimp.

Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense to conceal your high self-esteem, and brandish low self-esteem. It's a holdover from our more primitive tournament days. Back then, reconciliation was a better survival strategy for most people than overt dominance. Also, seemingly all cultures discourage boasting, and see it as something to grow out of. But what do people grow into? Just more subtle boasters.

I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain. I'm tryin' to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste. -- Aesop Rock, Dorks

But once again, we don't live in those times. This is the beauty of an individualistic society. Nobody is asking you to stare at your feet. This is the danger of the naturalistic fallacy. On one hand, they love the idea that "it's only natural" for a man to be attracted to minors, or that celibacy is a pain worse than death, or that rape may be justified if that pain gets too unbearable. But then they also have to swallow the idea that evolution is fine with them staying subordinate to everyone forever, or that we're an anthill-like superorganism that has no particular interest in them creating offspring.

Nature gave us a frontal lobe for a reason. If you got a problem, you can think your way out of it. Whether you have to make compromises, barter, collaborate, or just read a god damn book. Fate is only real if you believe in it. If you do, then amor tuum fati, and shut up.

• #2 Behave by Robert Sapolski •

I can't tell you how silly it feels to take a book this comprehensive and robust, and focus it on sexless douchebags on the internet.

But it's where I came up with what I'll call the, "Incel's Dilemma". See, incels often have an above-average understanding of the science of human behavior, genes, and environmental effects. It's just that this info is conveniently selective, and poisoned by a powerful confirmation bias.

The more you know about all this, the clearer it is that you have control over your life.

Once you know what you have control over, to not improve yourself is no longer a passive thing, it's active. Once you know better, you suddenly become responsible to do better; it gets harder and harder to say your problems are not your own god damn fault.

So incels tiptoe like Egyptians over the responsibility landmines scattered all throughout the desert of their self-imposed shitty lives. They're constantly at risk of losing their beloved victim narrative. They're participants in their own misery, whether or not they want to admit it.

They look at data to confirm their hopelessness like a lot of fat people do to get out of dieting or exercise.

"95% of diets fail" What the fuck does that have to do with you? Take that as a challenge, not a cop-out. Any rehab center will tell you, most people relapse three or four times before finally achieving sobriety. It doesn't mean don't try, it means you've got at least three failures to get out of the way before you can succeed, so hurry up and get those failures over with.

It's all a big Texas sharpshooter fallacy with the data-driven incels. A look at Incel Wiki's "Demographics of Inceldom" might fool you into thinking these cunts have a point, but that's precisely how the fallacy works. Take a bunch of scattered data, and draw your own bullseyes over whatever suits your narrative.

Believe it or not, human life is not a 2D plane with some scribbles on it. It's far more complicated than that. This is that over-systematization Simon Baron-Cohen talks about. But for the systematizers out there looking for a data-dump, how 'bout an 800 page, 26 hour long book/audiobook? If learning face-to-face ain't your jam, here's plan B.

To blatantly plagiarize the introduction: This book explores the biology of violence, aggression, and competition. The ways in which humans harm one another, but also the ways we do the opposite. The biology of cooperation, affiliation, reconciliation, empathy, and altruism. Sapolsky started from a pessimistic nature, but tried to reign it in for the sake of his kids, and as he learned more on the topic he learned much of the harm humans do is not universal; He learned to be optimistic.

You can't understand much of human behavior without biology. But you also can't understand it all with biology alone. Same with neurochemicals, childhood trauma, social environment, etc. It's multifactorial; it's a complicated pain in the dick.

There are dozens of things that influence the decisions you make. Sapolsky breaks them down from one second before, seconds to minutes before, hours to days before, days to months before, and centuries to millennia before a decision.

One thing that blew my mind was the info on testosterone. Turns out it's not true, the idea that testosterone makes you aggressive. See, if I eliminate all the testosterone from your body, your aggression will disappear. When I give it back, it returns to baseline. However, after you hit baseline again, any extra testosterone I give you will do nothing to your aggression levels.

Incels love to believe high-testosterone = antisocial (dark triad/asshole chad stereotypes). But in fact it has plenty of prosocial effects. When subjects in a cooperation-based game are secretly given testosterone, they're more likely to cooperate and prioritize generosity and good sportsmanship. It makes you more likely to value social norms, and try to do "the right thing".

But here's the kicker, if you give someone a placebo and tell them it's testosterone, they become more antisocial, and less charitable. Suggesting that "toxic masculinity" is a cultural defect, and not a byproduct of too much testosterone. It's not only incels that think "asshole" = "manly". But biology and neuroscience beg to differ. Incels are just as confused as the average fatherless gangbanger.

What testosterone is best for is responding to challenges. It's that Teddy Roosevelt, "Walk softly and carry a big stick" type'a shit, or that Robert Deniro, "You talkin to me?" style. Testosterone doesn't make you start fights, or bully the weak and helpless, it's about minding your own business, and deflecting intruders. An immovable object > an unstoppable force.

Just like with serotonin, behavior mostly comes first; testosterone doesn't stimulate aggression, aggression stimulates testosterone. Prisoners tend to have higher testosterone than the general population. Not because testosterone makes you act more like a criminal, but because prison exposes you to daily challenges from aggressive people, forcing your body to produce more in defense.

The other mind-blower has to do with the vaunted and beloved neuropeptide, oxytocin. Long story short, it doesn't make one as lovely as people commonly believe. It makes you lovely to people within your ingroup, and pretty gross to everyone on the out. Like what you get in small rural towns; people are sweet as pie towards their neighbors, and venomous like snakes to the other 99.99% of the world they find foreign and confusing.

This book is just full of surprises. From the variety of roles your frontal lobe can play, and the effects of damaging it; to the counterintuitive influences of estrogen and progesterone, and what they do at different ratios; to scared hyena boners; to the reality of adolescence; to the devastating effects of "hospitalism"; to the psychology of bullies, the bullied, and the bullied who like to bully; to the effects of permissive vs authoritarian parenting styles, and their outcomes in different socioeconomic environments; to how much of our genetic code is completely unused, waiting for our environment to activate it; to the difference between "inherited" and "heritability"; to whether the "warrior gene" would be more accurately labeled the "pull your pants down in public" gene?; and much much much more!

After reading (and then re-reading) this book, one should never feel the need to return to a stupid fuckdump like the Incel Wiki. If it isn't clear yet that places like that are a textbook example of the Dunning Kreuger effect, and not a dose of clarity, then you obviously haven't consumed this book yet. Which I understand, it's as dense as a curling stone 🥌. But meanwhile, here I am, free of sympathy, arms akimbo, foot tapping, waiting for these incel pigs to catch up to reality.

As I've said dozens of times, I tried gently feeding all this info to Humpty, as a friend, trying to coax him into a more optimistic state of mind, and it wasn't too complicated, he wasn't too stupid, he just didn't want to hear it. He loves his despair. How the fuck else would this rotten bitch find pity?

I could go on, but this entry would wind up more than twice as long as it already is. I only covered nine of seventeen major chapters so far and suffice it to say it doesn't start leaning in Humpty Dumpty's favor. This book is absolutely nuclear; Sapolsky's magnum opus. I got halfway through this and it dawned on me that I'd need a second month to pull this edition of the Humpty Dumpty Elegy off. This is a monumentally large topic for a sweaty, brain-damaged fry cook to tackle all on his own.

If ya don't know, now ya know.

• #3 The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker •

Lets all just take a moment to fart in B.F. Skinner's general direction 🍑💨

I've spent nearly all my time in this series writing about the ways in which you can change yourself. And I stand by all of them. I'm not the same person I was before I read these books, and I don't believe it was all just a matter of time before this stuff sunk in; I had to work for it all.

Humpty Dumpty came to Wednesday, having seen all the progress Wednesday made since highschool, and wanted a piece, allegedly at least. For every one step I made to repair my state of mind, Wens made ten, simply by virtue of starting from a deeper pit of despair.

But it's crucially important that I take a moment and separate myself from the social constructionists out there. The people who think every mind is a blank slate, and infinitely malleable. They're the people who don't believe in a human nature at all. While I accuse Humpty and other incels of having a pathologically external locus of control, it's important to recognize that a 100% internal locus is just as insane.

Now, before we assassinate this crock of shit, lets give the social constructionists some credit, their hearts were in a very good place.

The "blank slate" hypothesis, right off the bat, completely undermines old justifications for things like slavery or aristocracy. It's extremely difficult to justify the idea that anyone was born to serve or be served if we're all made from the same starting materials.

Blank-slaters carry with them a perfectly healthy anxiety towards the idea of human nature:

If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination could easily be justified

If people are innately immoral, there's no hope to improve oneself

If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth, thus moral responsibility would vanish

If we're mere biology, then life no longer has meaning

All blank = all equal.

Though this idea of a blank slate is as old as Aristotle, it picked up most of its academic oomph during the 19th and 20th centuries. First in an effort to poop on colonialism, then in response to racist genocidal atrocities.

But there's a serious catch: If we're all infinitely malleable, there's no basis to say slavery is a miserable existence. A slave merely has to be conditioned properly so that they learn to love their role, like an animal in a Skinner box. A person only hates being raped because society told them to hate it. You're only fond of your individualism because we live in a greedy capitalist society that requires you to desire that lifestyle, so that you work/consume more. Etc. A soul? That's cute, go fuck yourself.

E.O. Wilson wasn't labelled a fascist because he promoted fascism in any way. He was labelled so because the "science" he questioned was, for a very long time, fascism's most prominent antagonist. But while social constructionists deserve points for picking the right enemy, they lose most of them for having little basis in observable science, and even more for having committed plenty atrocities of their own.

B.F. Skinner and Chairman Mao saw the world through a disturbingly similar lens. While Hitler and Mussolini got millions killed for some warped idea of human nature, Marx got even more killed based on the idea that humans have no nature at all.

Thankfully, social constructionism is dying. Even according to Wednesday, while he was in school training to be a therapist, they had a whole module dedicated to debunking the idea, which is beautiful news. But though it's on its way out, it's taking its sweet ass time, and all the while creating creepy little permutations that slip past people's better judgement.

Concepts like "The Lean Genome", "Connectionism", and "Extreme Plasticity", which I'll just let Pinker handle on his own, for the sake of brevity.

This doesn't have a whole lot to do with the incels' particular philosophy. They're way more likely to make a naturalistic fallacy, than a constructionist argument. However it's true to say that the culture we live in is still greatly influenced by these ideas. And this is the culture that spawned incels to begin with.

In school there's no sense that a student is the way they are for some natural or evolutionarily adaptive reason. There's one, maybe two ideal student types, and everything beyond that range gets slapped with a disorder label.

Teachers are mostly lazy shitbags. There's no filter for assholes or narcissists. They don't need to be entertaining, compassionate, or even have a solid theory of mind. If a kid is a little unusual, there's no impetus on the teacher to get inside that kid's head, and connect them with all the beautiful knowledge within their reach. Kids are just pigeons you need to convince to peck the right buttons and work for the same reward pellets.

These disorders fuck with people's identities, long past their time in school. To some it's a simple nadir that helps them find their zenith. It's useful to understand your own shortcomings, of course. But for many it becomes a mental prison.

A doctor told me I was sick. Why? I was doodling? Playing with and entertaining my friends? I found something more challenging to do than listen to the teacher repeat themself for the third time? Oh, no I know why, because I insulted the institution, and they wanted to insult me back. Ah, gg then.

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This isn't just the authoritarianism Pink Floyd rapped about. We've traded fiery religious rhetoric for clammy psychobabble, and most parents are absolutely snowed by it.

It seems blatantly insane when you see it in that Uncle Buck clip. But we're not too far off from that in real life. We have still pathologized "twiddlers", "dreamers", "silly-hearts", "jabberboxes", etc. It's just that we've gussied it up with Latin or Greek polysyllabic words, all tucked into acronyms and initializations.

Parents have been taking a beating for so long with all this shit, too. Cultural determinism puts ALL the blame for someone's behavior on their parents. This is where the "concerted cultivation" style comes from, which Jonathan Haidt does an excellent job of exploring in The Coddling Of The American Mind.

All this is to say the millennial/zoomer generations are an anxious and uncertain bunch. We all seem to hate ourselves, and everything that comes most naturally from our hearts. We're ironically detached from our ironic detachment from our authentic detachment from our authentic selves. We're optimized for life in an institution, be it a school, corporation, gov't job, or prison. If you don't jibe with Skinner boxes, it's easy to get the impression that there's no place for you in this world.

The worst thing you could do, would be to take that negative impression, and romanticize it. Humpty was the king of getting beaten with a stick, and thinking the best payback he could give his punisher was taking the stick and beating himself, only harder.

"Oh yeah, you think I'm a muddy pig? Watch this, I'm gonna roll in some shit! Then I'll be a shitty pig! Take THAT!"

When behaviorism fails us, we often believe we're the ones that failed behaviorism. Forgetting, or perhaps never knowing at all, that it's an inhumane, dehumanizing, industrial process of extracting compliance. Many of us are defined by our troubled days in Skinner boxes, and it never occurs to us that we didn't belong in one in the first place, or that maybe we did the right thing by putting up a fight.

When I read incel forums, I see people who have been tragically disconnected from their own natures. Grasping at more and more data, more and more graphs, still convinced that they and their lives are mere algorithms or games.

It's not simply Asperger's; Autists can (slowly but surely) cognitively wrap their head around human nature, in a way that still preserves beauty and meaning, even if they don't feel the typical emotional response to those things. What we have here is an active corruption of people's concept of human nature, which I believe is responsible for an incalculable amount of suffering. Mental and physical.

"It's just my Monkey Brain again" is Humpty's version of fighting the power. It's one step further towards reclaiming his nature from a world that told him he didn't have one. But his understanding of human nature is so poor and underdeveloped, that it's almost as pathological as the allegorical cave he started out in.

• #4 Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari •

Wheat be whispering to yeast like, "psst, hey cmon lets go catch some monkeys"

Robert Wright did an excellent job of sticking up for evolutionary psychology in The Moral Animal, and spelled out how we managed to evolve a moral compass. Yuval Noah Harari skips the debate and puts all this scrumptious information to good use, telling the story of our species from the days when we were neighbors with Neanderthals, all the way to the present moment with its head-spinning exponential rate of change.

This book is a an antidepressant. I've found psychology, philosophy, and spirituality to be priceless assets in getting my head straight. But sometimes there's nothing better than than putting yourself in some ancient shoes. History, if you don't exclusively confine your focus to the last 200 years of dystopian jibber jabber, can be up there with psychedelics in it's mind expanding, perspective enhancing capabilities. I recollect some historical lessons the same way I do with epiphanies I've had on shrooms. With the same oceanic significance Sigmund Freud talked about.

We've been over genes, we've been over environments, we've been over the importance of finding the balance between the two. Now lets add to that complicated slurry of factors: MEMES!

More than just evanescent shitposts on a sandcastle of digital noise, whether spicy or dank, memes are the motherfucking glue that holds our silly species together. When we group up, we meme. Scoff all you like, memes are one of the defining characteristics of human beings.

Like Ernest Becker points out in Denial Of Death, humans are unique in their ability to believe in things they've never seen or experienced, like death and the afterlife. Beyond mere survival or reciprocation instincts, humans bond over shared myths, faiths, and fictions. We didn't just evolve to tell stories, we evolved to believe the ever-loving shit out of them. In fact, storytelling may be the key difference that helped humans overcome Neanderthals, despite being weaker, and having smaller brains.

Now before we move forward, I've discussed a lot of things that "influence" our choices. So what about free will? If my choice to buy Rice Krispies over Corn Flakes is one part genes, one part environment, and one part memes, where does "choice" come into play at all?

Well, it's tricky. As I discussed with Sam Harris', Free Will, it seems pretty clear that free will is just an illusion. Or rather, a fiction. But as Harris also pointed out, that fact doesn't really make a single damn difference in anyone's life.

That said, how can I tell incels anything they do is voluntary? They would also agree that their life is a series of factors beyond their control or premeditation. But that's the thing about free will, you either claim it, or you deny it. And the choice to do one or the other determines how society treats you.

When you act up, and someone says, "hey stop, that's bad." You can do one of two things, you can say you don't have free will, or you can own your decision. If you disown your free will, then you get placed in the uncomfortable, "defective object" category. OR, you can elect to stay in the far more dignified, "subject with agency" category. Defective objects get either fixed, abandoned, or destroyed, without any say in the matter, as dehumanized and hopeless as one can be. While the options for subjects with agency are greatly expanded, with all the benefits of a human who takes moral responsibility.

Free will may just be a legal fiction, but so are corporations. Our lives are dictated by dozens of imagined orders that leave nearly no trace on the physical universe. However that doesn't make them irrelevant or unreal as phenomena.

Imagined orders are fragile though, as you might expect. Which is why we evolved to be so gentle with them. Wanna escape an imagined order? There's not much actually stopping you, save for maybe isolation. The only catch is that you either need to convince others to come along and join, or you need to join an established alternative. Just don't join the incels.

99.999% of the time, there's no need for violence. That's truly something we don't share in common with other primates; big swole brutes don't really have much actual power. We oughta be grateful about that.

Our ability to tell stories marked what anthropologists call the Cognitive Revolution, which helped us outwit Neanderthals. That eventually led to the Agricultural Revolution, where we got domesticated by wheat, and misery as we know it began. But man, the smell of a bread aisle... Mmmm!

Don't let the second bit bum you out too much, it comes with great news! These two revolutions did something neat: They opened up niches for weaklings and dimwits! Wahoo! Pre-agricultural humans knew basic botany, astrology, zoology, bushcrafting, toolmaking, etc. Their general knowledgebase, let alone strength, would make most average modern people look useless. Nowadays, you can live a comfortable life specializing in asinine busywork. You don't have to know anything about your own food, shelter, clothes, geography, local flora or fauna, how to swim, hunt, or climb trees, etc. We "specialize and collaborate" as The Knowledge Illusion puts it. Or we, "work a bunch of bullshit jobs" as David Graeber would.

Incels feel left out because they're not Dwayne Johnson. Meanwhile it's mediocre nerds who are the powerhouse gigachads of civilization, and have been for millennia.

Some imagined orders are global, and frankly you shouldn't waste much time trying to oppose them, unless you're a real cocky coolkid who thinks you're going to be the next axis of global change that comes once only every few centuries. These would be the global monetary, imperial, and religious orders. And not to be a dick, but lets just go ahead and put modern science in the religious category, because it's really blowing up god's spot. Fighting these things is a losing battle. I say the only way out, is through.

So much of our pain is man-made, not natural. The upside to that is if we made it, we can unmake it. To you and me, there's no "natural way of life". There hasn't been for as long as we've been recording history. Which is why history is so useful to us. Everywhere you look in the past, you find people struggling with the cognitive and agricultural revolution. Some truths evolve, while others haven't changed one bit.

If we live by memes like they're microbes or viruses living inside our heads, then it's fair to say nihilism is a deadly pathogen. I disagree with memetists who say the success of a meme is determined by the effectiveness of its host. Like with genes, they don't give two shits about their host, only about replicating. When an incel goes on a killing spree, it's like a zombie virus, killing a host, and infecting multiple people after the fact.

Fundamentally this is all a question about happiness, this business with incels. They're searching for contentment just like everyone else. Problem is, they seem to only use science in their pursuit. But science is incapable of setting its own priorities. Its funding is based on whether it empowers the already powerful. Stephen Hawking can fuck off when he says there's no longer any need for philosophy. He was a dick.

What is happiness? Pleasurable brain chemicals? Meaningful self-delusions? Or some sort of Buddhist/Stoic mental judo? As always, I'm a real simp for the idea of trying to balance all of these things together.

But no matter how you chose to blend those into your life, you can always fuck it all up by forgetting two major caveats: Be very careful who you choose to compare yourself to, and disappointment is all about expectations.

Don't believe the pre-modern hype. A deadly toothache sucked dick. Be grateful and don't romanticize the past. Modern life has comfort, safety, culture, knowledge, etc. like early sapiens couldn't have begun to dream of. We're almost god-like, even the lowliest of us. There's still plenty of wilderness you could go run off into if you'd like. Shit, in North America, there's a wild boar infestation, you could be a well-fed nomad. But you don't want to do that, admit it.

The only problem with these improvements is that as things get better, expectations balloon, and disappointment follows at the exact same pace. It's a treadmill that spins as fast as we can run. One major fact about our evolution is that we as a species only used to compare ourselves to a few dozen people at most. A young human looking for a partner only had a small sliver of the tribe in the same league as them to make them feel insecure. Now we have a slideshow of perfect specimens in front of us every day, till we've seen more 10s than our Dunbar number can track.

Lets add, "connecting with our past" to the list of things that truly make humans happy.

His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. -- Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus

• #5 An Anthropologist On Mars by Oliver Sacks •

Alright lets end this bitch on a positive note!

Humpty started out as a friend. Someone who said off-the-wall crazy shit almost competitively, like he was always trying to out-weirdo you. We had a lot of fun. Wednesday said he alienated most other people, and had a lot to learn about socializing, but he was funny and interesting underneath it all. Which was true, for a couple months.

Our group's unofficial theme is "freaks with potential". Bring all your misfits and maniacs. We say, "Who are we to judge?" We've got plenty of autists, and you're damn right they get on our nerves, but in an endearing, forgivable, manageable way. Shit, we annoy them back, and nobody has ever thought of banning someone for being too autistic.

Humpty however was a whole different dimension of fucked up. To call him autistic is an insult to autistic people. He's not the type of cutie Amy Schumer tells heartwarming jokes about. He's hate on the spectrum.

The point is, I approached him from the best angle anyone can. Unlike scientists, we didn't treat him like he was a gigantic insect, under a dry dehumanizing light. We cracked jokes about pooping, and dicks, and stuff guys talk about when they really like each other. He wasn't a patient he was "my friend Humpty."

I'm always railing against the way psychologists, especially school psychologists, tend to just objectify everyone they're trying to help. Like the further the distance between you and a patient, the more "scientific" the process is.

She said, "When you start getting all expressive and symbolic it's impossible to actualize an honest diagnostic." I said, "When you start getting all exact and algebraic I'm reminded it's a racket not a rehabilitation" -- Aesop Rock, Shrunk

You don't go to a shrink to big yourself up and hear about how well you're doing. You go there to discuss how unwell you are. A good psychologist's #1 goal is to never have to speak to you again. But it's still a business, and endless treatment is always more profitable than a cure.

Scientists tend to get so distant and impartial that perfectly familiar things begin to sound strange and aberrant. Sacks says, "It's like saying a man has a proboscis in between his eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every 24 hours."

Oliver is marvelous in that his aim was to take off the lab coat and join his patients in their daily activities. Understanding them not by getting outside of their lives, but by getting inside.

What he learned by doing this was extravagant. As he examined his patients' disabilities he found in them unique adaptations, in some instances almost superpowers. Not deficits, but tradeoffs; alternative states of being. "Other forms of life, no less human for being so different."

A painter that loses all sense of color, even in his imagination; A hippie who can't remember anything post-1960s; A surgeon/amateur pilot with dramatic Tourettic tics; A man who was blind for the first 45 years of his life that regained his vision, and had to learn to reinterpret the world through his eyes; A man obsessed with his home town in Tuscany, with an exquisitely detailed 3D model of it in his head, down to the shape of the bricks in each wall; An autistic savant who can draw a whole cityscape from memory after glancing at it for seconds; and the famous Temple Grandin, an autistic woman whose deep understanding of animals helped her radically reform livestock facilities to be more humane.

As Sacks puts it, there's an assumption that all sickness is a "contraction" of life. But in the case of his patients, these illnesses focused their lives, defined their callings, and gave them a unique purpose or specialty. His findings make one wonder if some diseases are products of evolution, that actually contribute to humanity as a whole.

Like how Malcolm Gladwell talks about the memory benefits of dyslexia in David And Goliath. Would a dyslexic parent wish dyslexia on their kids? Hell no. Would they trade their powerful memories in for the ability to read fluently? Quite often, also no.

As any incel will tell you, narcissism has its benefits. They get laid more, make more friends, quickly advance in careers, etc. Granted, there's two big caveats: They often don't keep partners, friends, or careers for very long. And they don't get very far if they're the covert, sensitive type of narcissist; The type of narcissist that doesn't leave their basement.

But as Simon Baron-Cohen points out, autism has plenty of its own upsides as well. Arguably more. The systematizing nature of autists makes them fit to do tons of things "normies" often can't. The world is more and more in the hands of the systematizers, which makes them fitter than ever, in an evolutionary sense.

Many of the most famous and successful people you've ever heard about are/were either cold-blooded shitty narcissists, or equally cold-blooded annoying autists. Not successful in spite of their mental makeup, but because of it.

Ask not what disease the person has. But rather, what person the disease has -- William Osler

Wednesday once again comes in as a role-model in this series. His PTSD, while being an incredible source of pain in his life, also gives him an uncanny ability to communicate straight to the hearts of other traumatized people. He makes them feel respected, understood, and at-ease. So he started a career in therapy, and is currently working in a rehab facility. He's literally every client's favorite person. And frankly, everyone that knows Wednesday knew he would be.

It's not about what weaknesses you have, it's about how you compensate for them. Wednesday's PTSD makes plenty of other vocations difficult, if not impossible. But you don't need to be good at everything. As I keep repeating, humanity flourishes based on our ability to specialize and collaborate. Intensity is more powerful than extensity.

I believe my ADD has always been a powerful bullshit/relevance filter; My head injuries give me a creative edge, and the sort of recklessness that adventures are made of; Moving around so much may have made keeping friends in my life more difficult, but it's also made me a social chameleon who can always quickly make more; Fighting with my step dad strengthened my backbone to stand up against corrupt authority and narcissists; Introversion isn't a bad thing, I'm one of those rare people who actually enjoys being alone with my thoughts. I'm always studying something or journaling. These "issues" in my life may have sent me off course, but not backwards, not retrograde. They define who I am and what I'm great at. It's all about how you frame things. Feces is fertilizer.

The colorblind painter found a new style, after he eventually forgot about color altogether and his depression over the matter subsided. The change also massively improved his distance and low-light vision, making the world beautiful to him in a way you or I will never perceive; The hippie may have needed to be institutionalized to keep him safe, but he had the kind of demeanor his former Hare Krishna peers found to be saintly. Before they discovered his "enlightenment" was a pituitary tumor, he was seen as a spiritual exemplar; The surgeon's tics may have caused him to convulse and vocalize continuously, and beyond his control, but it also contributed to his precise and fastidious way of life, paradoxically making him an outstanding surgeon and pilot. You knew he'd never miss a step. And somehow when he was at work, his Tourette's would disappear; Even though the blind man regained his vision, it wasn't automatically good news for him. His eyes may have been back in perfect condition, but his brain still struggled to use them. He came to see the loss of his disability as a sort of curse; The Tuscan artist's perfect memory of his home town was part miracle, part black hole of nostalgia. He couldn't seem to talk or think about anything else, all day every day, making him mostly friendless. But in the end his home town lauded him as a hero, never to be forgotten in return; Steven Wiltshire, though he scores low on most other markers of intelligence, had a skill people payed millions of dollars to own a piece of; and Temple Grandin, despite having no intuitions about the thoughts or feelings of others, could empathize with animals, sharing in common their strictly visual way of thinking. She's done more to improve the quality of life for livestock than anyone you know of. Her findings also extend to the way we treat prisoners. And she's a powerful advocate for finding meaningful ways for other autists to contribute to humanity.

Humpty and other incels LOVE to hold up their disadvantages like, "Look, there it is, game over." Now, not all colorblind people have superpowered vision, not all autists are savants, just because the Hare Krishnas think you're cool doesn't always mean you're cool, etc. I'm not saying there's no such thing as a disability. But your calling is based on what you can do best. There's no such thing as heroism without adversity, and there's no way to demonstrate your fitness as an animal if you don't apply yourself to anything.

Incels want to give up. They want to hear their dreams are impossible so they can quit ASAP, and save themselves the energy. Comfortably numb; Fortuna's redheaded stepson.

The Freaks With Potential are all about highlighting each other's specialties. Humpty's only specialty was his bottomless well of self-pity. And that is the only opposite of potential we've ever found.

• End bit •

This was a fucking doozey to write. I don't double check the playtime when I pick audiobooks each month. So when I decided to focus on evolution and behavior, I unwittingly bit off a 92 hour reading project, not including the incel literature.

I realized as well that this month I'd be punching down on not just one guy, but thousands of them, so I wanted to be a bit more thoughtful, and careful with the points I'm making. Humpty truly is the pinnacle of piece-of-shittiness, with few others to compare him to. It's an exaggeration to call 94.99% of incels Humpty Dumpties. But that still doesn't get them off the hook. They're still counterproductive nihilists with nothing to offer but deeper despair.

When this is all over, and I start looking for things to write about in much shorter form, I'll definitely have to work on picking incel philosophy apart, piece by piece. Like, "hunter eyes", which I swear to god made me shout at the top of my lungs at my screen, "IT'S CALLED 'SQUINCHING' YOU FUCKING MORONS!"

I'd like to give a big shoutout to all the regular-shmegular celibate people out there, who aren't pointing the finger at anyone else. The ones taking responsibility for their lifestyle, and owning the consequences of their decisions, without bitterness.

Before the sexual revolution, celibacy was considered in many circles to be an impressive display of self-control. Now I'm not promoting the idea of going back to those days, but it really fucks up the idea that a sexless youth is naturally an excruciating one.

Soldiers, laborers, servants, various types of courtiers, etc. didn't get to date and hookup recreationally. They had shit to do, and weren't going around pissing and moaning about how horny they were. People kept this stuff personal, it was rare in entertainment, and FOMO was at a relative fraction of what it is today.

And what is a priest if not a celibate alpha male? While that may not be natural, remember humans haven't lived "natural" lives for as long as we've recorded history.

Plus, these fucks aren't just talking about 35 year old virgins, they're also talking about dudes who have fucked multiple times already but just not in the past six months, and married men in sexless marriages. The "official scientific definition" of "incel" is uselessly broad, with men that have very little in common, other than a desire to wallow in pity and shake their fist at the world.

Maybe celibate men are just being cautious, recognizing that they have time to wait a bit longer than women; maybe they're trying to work on themselves before involving another person in their insanity; maybe they're justifiably afraid of the corrupt family court system, or their own attraction to abusive partners; maybe they don't want to risk adding another human to a miserable dying planet; maybe casual hookups are an option, but they don't want to waste a woman's precious time; maybe they're afraid of humiliating themselves, etc, etc.

Who knows? But the point is none of those "maybe"s justify misogyny or rage. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and it's everyone's choice where they come down on these questions. You can be cautious, or you can be brave; patient or impatient; proud or willing to beg. Either way, nobody's making that decision for you. What you get out of life is based on what you're willing to put in.

I know a man with cerebral palsy, on disability payments, in an electric wheelchair and his head fixed in place, and he's got a girlfriend. I knew a drunk old cab driver with three teeth and not a skill to his name, and every month he had a new woman. There's someone out there for everyone. Unless the only thing that can get your dick hard is hentai catgirls. Incels are hypergamous too.

So boo hoo hoo. Fuck their tears. You're only an incel if you call yourself one, and give up.

NOW TO CLEANSE MY SOUL!

Next month (September, not August. Sorry, summer's a nightmare for me. I get 0-1 days off a week, and my brain is fried like a chicken parm) We're gonna talk about the soul! Or whatever the fuck that means to an atheist like me.

These last two months have been psychically exhausting. I had to stare right into the incel abyss, and all I had to comfort myself with was science. Shit got cold, right here in my heart. So we're gonna fix the bejesus out of that.

This August, I'll be doing shrooms with Wednesday and our mutual friend (pseudonym to be coined), then after we read about our souls, we're gonna read about psychedelics. I can't fucking wait.

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