No Stupid Questions

They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.

Emotions are stronger then intellect, much stronger. And most of these people suffered in bad childhoods and were drilled or neglected into disempathy. (That's not the necessary reaction to such childhoods but it's a common reaction.)

I was raised in a left-leaning, progressive, atheist, LGBTQ+/minority-accepting household, but one surrounded by a white, largely conservative exurban community. I was raised to be inclusive of others, to be thoughtful, to be curious, to be polite and empathetic. I had good* parents who supported me, and taught me to treat others well.

In the middle of fifth grade, I transferred to a magnet program focusing on STEM concepts. It took me from a school that was almost entirely white, to a school which was very much multi-racial. I was really small for my age, nerdy, and the new kid. I'd always been bullied at school, but after the transfer it got a lot worse, and got pretty severely physical. A lot of the people who harassed me the worst were black. I honestly never understood the social circles enough to know what their deal was, and it certainly wasn't only a race thing, but the fact that many of my tormentors were black wasn't lost on me, to be sure.

When I was 11 or so, I used all the savings from a lifetime of cumulative birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc. to buy a laptop to play games on. Pretty quickly, gaming became all I did. It was an escape, and I enjoyed it. I played whatever F2P games I could. Diablo clones, random MMOs, shitty pay-to-win FPS games, whatever. My parents didn't supervise my activities very closely, and to be blunt, I quickly became way more savvy than them about subverting any surveillance they tried to put in place anyways.

Eventually I started looking into hacks for games. I found a really large forum (think 25k members) for sharing game hacks, and joined up. By the time I was maybe 13-14 or so, I was one of the highest-ranking moderators on the forum. I hung out in their IRC server (which definitely isn't the internet chat-rooms you're supposed to be careful about, those are different) all day, dabbled in making my own (occasionally illicit) software and hacks, and was firmly in the community. These weren't good people, but I didn't know that. When I got home from school and got online, they asked me how my day was. They cared about me, they played games with me, they were my friends. I remember I was gone for like 2 weeks when I was seriously ill, and one of them tracked me down and called my house to check in on me. I didn't think anything of it, because of course they could do that. I'd been in a Skype call with one of them who was screen sharing the array of webcams they had access to through their botnet. I didn't realize at the time that they were probably blackmailing people, or holding their data ransom. We just hacked in video games, none of that actually serious stuff. The malware I was toying with was just because I was interested in it, and of course, my friends must have been too, right? Just a learning exercise. I figured I might try to go into cybersecurity when I started high school and could actually start taking courses in computer topics. Programming was SO fucking interesting!

My parents didn't know what was going on. They should have. I was barely a teenager, I can't possibly have been hiding my tracks all that well. But then, their marriage had started to fall apart, and things were bad a home. I didn't know anything about that then, I was in my room gaming and running communities for terrible people. The headset kept their fighting far away from me. My parents didn't know who I was hanging out with. They had raised me well, but now they weren't doing what they should have been. So when my friends shared hateful content with me, "interesting" videos they'd found about how terrible women were, how violent minorities were, who was I to question it? They were speaking as those with knowledge. They taught me stuff, they knew better than me. And besides, I'd been physically harassed by black people before. I'd seen it for myself, right? My U.S. history teacher was REALLY smart, and she told us (in a MN classroom) that the civil war wasn't actually about slavery either! That was super interesting to learn! And the women they complained about weren't me. Just because a lot of the guys I hung out with had bitches for girlfriends didn't mean they hated women, it was just bad luck with shitty women. Right?

I was a good person. I mean, I was a weird socially outcast nerd, but I wasn't a bad person. My family was still caring. Still accepting. My Mom's apartment was always a refuge for any of our friends, even (and especially) the queer ones who had been kicked out by their own terrible parents. They had a place to come and be safe and be themselves with us. So I was a good person too, right? Good people, smart people, they keep their online lives separate from their personal lives. They don't talk about their online activities with others, and they don't talk about their personal information with internet strangers in chatrooms. The only people I talked with were my FRIENDS. I ran their Minecraft servers. I discussed the Jordan Peterson videos they shared. He sounds so fucking smart after all. I hardly understand what he's talking about, but I'm sure one day I will. And the parts I don't understand, other people can explain to me. I laughed at their racist memes. After all, it's just a joke. And of course, overt bigotry got stomped on. I was in charge, and I was a good person. I wouldn't tolerate that sort of thing. But a dog-whistle is just a tool for training a pet, and we'd only ever kept cats.

I eventually joined a different gaming group on the side. We played Jailbreak in CS:S. I got really good at it. Really into it. And I stopped hanging out as much with my older friends. I still kept in touch, but I'd found a new hobby. These people weren't good people either, but I mean, the fact that they liked my voice on mic wasn't that they were creeping on a 15 year old who they wanted to fuck, it was because I had gotten a new microphone a few weeks ago and must have sounded good on it. I had gotten lucky though. These people weren't great people, but they weren't nearly as bad. They weren't literally cybercriminals, just asshole kids on the internet. So when I became a moderator in THAT community and started running things, the community actually improved. But eventually that community collapsed, and I moved on again. And again. And again. I ended up with some Brits for a while, and "mate" settled itself into my vocabulary in a deeply unwelcome way.

I've been incredibly lucky. I'm 28 now. The last 14 years of my life, I've slowly climbed from one community to another, and mostly through random luck each of those have been better than the one I was leaving. I am surrounded now by some of my favorite people. They are TRULY good people. They care about others, and stand up for good causes. Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too. I wasn't a good person. I fell WAY down the alt-right rabbit hole. I'm sure that I've hurt people, and I've made countless decisions that sicken me now. But I've been incredibly lucky. If I hadn't been, I have no idea where I'd be now. Or what nonsense I'd still be believing, because everything around me told me it was normal.

When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don't get (or can't give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.

One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.

Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything's shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don't, change is a loss of control, and that's scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what's rightfully ours from those we've been forced to share it with.

Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.

Yes, there's horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn't take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.

As for incels - I don't think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn't get to form stable relationships, who didn't get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no 'third place' to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.

And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don't have to be painfully awkward, you just have to... not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don't try and don't get practice.

And then it's the same situation: the world doesn't work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they've heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn't.

For some of them, they feel like they're getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it's a big club and they aren't in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they're the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.

For the nazis, a big problem is the alt-right pipeline that plagues sites like Youtube, along with an unstable political climate, which generally causes radicalization (Weimer Germany is also a very good example of this phemona)

As for incels, a big problem is admittably a mental health crisis plauging many men, generally causing them to become resentful of women out of loneliness.

TLDR: Poor mental health and instability

Ok, so this is my time to admit my very shameful past. I used to be racist, homophobic, and sexist(known as the big 3). I used my religion as an excuse for the sexism and homophobia and my father(my mom isnt racist and they are divorced) and dam near everyone on his side of the family is racist so I just grew up in that culture. Once I stopped talking to him and met a lot of people from other races, i learned we are all the same. Then I stated reading the Bible, and ~~once I did that, I obviously couldn't continue believing in it.~~ now I am an atheist and I don't rely on a very very old book to come to my moral conclusions.

So basically, it's willful ignorance, and it is always easier to blame others for your own downfalls, and it makes you feel better about your own shitty life if you can hate on someone else.

Edited for clarification.

Additionally to what has already been mentioned: People are susceptible to politics that confirm their prejudices. Right-wing political thought is largely based on confirming that whatever prejudices people hold, they are morally good and justified. Thus elevating an in-group above out-groups. That is a powerful lure.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren't pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

Fascists provide easy (but often fake) answers to hard problems. Loneliness, the fear of replacement, that kind of thing.

There's a lot of information, there's also a lot of misinformation. Many people don't trust authorities, sometimes for understandable reasons, so they end up in the fringes.

Also, the Nazis, and even the Confederates, weren't all that long ago in the grand scheme. A couple generations. Many people learn these tendencies from their family.

Also incels are somewhat different from Nazis/fascists. There's obviously a lot of overlap. There's always been men who had trouble with women, but I think being a male virgin after a certain age is enormously more vilified these days than it was in, for instance, the 50s, even among more progressive, left leaning groups. Admittedly, that's anecdotal so I could be wrong.

The core of the issue is the "Just World Fallacy" sometimes also called the "Prosperity Doctrine" and a few other things. It boils down to one core idea "Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people." Basically, everyone tends to think of themselves as, more-or-less, good people. So when bad things happen, as they inevitably do, these people start going "Huh, more bad stuff is happening to me than I've done bad things. WTF?" So, they come to a reasonable if flawed conclusion that "someone ELSE is doing bad things, and I'm collateral damage." This isn't entirely wrong, although sometimes bad things do just happen. However, since at least as far back as the Civil War (and probably since time immemorial), the people whose fault it REALLY is (i.e., the people with power and privelege) have pointed at outgroups, commonly immigrants but also slaves or Catholics or trans people, and said "THOSE people are being bad. THOSE people are why you are suffering. Give me more power and I'll get rid of THOSE people."

External locus of control.

Bad things in someone's life is not their fault, but the fault of whatever scapegoat.

Can't get a girlfriend? It's women's fault.

Can't get a job? It's illegal immigrants.

Can't afford to do the things you like? It's the government taking too many taxes.

Whatever problem someone has, they are looking to blame someone rather than make any changes in their own life.

Social media algorithms present different things to different people. So if you fall for a grift, the algorithm will just show you things that support the grift and never show anything that debunks it.

Someone going down a weird rabbit hole will stay on that for a long time, watching many ads along the way. Someone that starts to think "hey maybe there's something to this thing" then immediately sees something debunking it may conclude "well that last video was a waste of time" and may decide to go do something else that's a more worthwhile use of their time. End result, they watch fewer ads. Less revenue for the social media companies.

Weird internet rabbit holes are more profitable than seeing contradicting opinions. So the algorithms are tuned to send people down rabbit holes and not offer information contradicting them.

As someone who used to visit incel communities (though I never supported the misogynist views), I think a lot of the appeal comes from the fact that they seem to be the only support groups for lonely men. Why aren’t there any non-toxic ones?

In case it wasn’t a typo, and just to help OP for the future…

It’s “this day and age,” not “this day in age.”

I know I’ll probably get downvoted for the pedantry here especially since everyone understands what was meant, but hopefully OP will appreciate the information about the common phrase.

Also to answer the OP’s question: inferiority complex. It runs rampant in society, especially among men.

What they get is blaming others for their problems.

Nazis and incels need to be dealt with, yes, but the important thing to keep in mind is they are symptomatic of suffering swaths of the population. People don't just do hate because it's fun.

We let big businesses and the rich steamroll entire communities and industries, pay lip service to helping people who've been damaged by capitalism, and then after the election cycles are over leave their communities to rot. They are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren't any others.

We allow entertainment and advertising to blast our society with a particular view of what relationship "success" is, and accept mockery of those who cannot thrive in that narrow definition due to social anxiety or other mental issues as fair game. Those men are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren't any others.

Yes, Nazis and incels are absolutely awful, hateful problems that must be dealt with. And by the time they reach that point, I'd argue they probably can't be saved. But they don't fall out of the sky. They come from normal people whose cries for help went unheard, sometimes for decades, or generations. They're the product of systemic injustices that we can mitigate with outreach programs and getting serious about mitigating the social problems that create the soil they spring from. Stopping them is a necessary band-aid, but the real solution is to address the situations that allow them to thrive in the first place.

during gamergate i started going down the alt right rabbithole (at some point i stopped when i realized this was associated with out right nazi shit and re-evaluated my beliefs)

I was one of those "i am very smart" people as a teenager but I'm actually an idiot I was also a pick me (I am a woman). I found those video clips of feminists everyone was sharing at that time and became convinced that feminist = man hater it can be easy for people to twist fringe beliefs from a group and present that as common among that group. Due to this and me being a lazy idiot who didn't fact check because I thought I was to smart to be mislead I went further down the rabbithole

I also blame poor us education on civil rights issues my state (new mexico) is on the bottom of the list for education i think it was around 49th at the time I was in school they presented civil rights issues as if they were solved so i thought "these sjws don't want equality they want women/minority superiority" I thought they wanted to oppress the previously oppressive groups as revenge not realizing that civil rights issues have not been solved that we haven't attained equality even though the law was supposedly equal.

I believed in equality but it got twisted by fascist lies into opposing actual progress and equality.

I can see how people went further down the rabbit hole one of the things these videos talked about was how the crime rate was higher for black people and that's why there is more police brutality against black people. I can see how someone could take this information out of context and start thinking that black people were more crime prone inherently and that's where some of these people took it.

ignorance is one of the biggest causes of prejudice.

Racism and bigotry aren't logical positions, but emotional ones. People have an emotional need to be part of a group and feel included. If the group a person joins is antagonistic towards other groups then the person will internalize that and become bigoted. The dislike of other groups becomes a part of their identity and belonging.

The documentary Behind The Curve illustrates this pretty effectively. They follow some flat eathers around and interview them and they all say the same thing. They love being a part of the group. They didn't have a group before and now they do. Their beliefs keep the group together and they're not going to get rid of them just because the beliefs can be proven to be wrong.

The desire to be a part of a group is strong enough that people will believe anything as long as it gets them some friends. There isn't anything wrong with that unless the beliefs of the group are harmful and hateful.

This video is actually shockingly relevant right now, and does go through (some of) the 'hows' and 'whys'.

Remember that tradwife/incel/etc shit is all just fascism boiled down into specifics. The Nazi's sent women who wouldn't marry to camps just as easily as Jewish people, gypsies, etc. We think of the Fascist movement as specifically anti-Jewish people, maybe throw in some gay people/etc, but Unionists, Communists, Socialists, and Women were targeted as well.

The reason it works is because it offers easy answers, and the average person has been made to be so lazy they'll accept what they're told, especially if they're told everyone else is doing it. They aren't a Nazi, they're part of the Nazi's.

We also have a huge backlog of emotional baggage for men post the 1980's. At some point we all accepted that men wouldn't show any emotions except anger, rage, frustration, etc, and then kept doubling down on it. Now you have groups of young men fed directly into a pipeline of Facebook/Youtube/whatever platform that spoon feeds them fascist garbage. Why? Because it makes them tame and easier to control. You notice fascists aren't out there killing rich people, they're killing minorities? That's by design, because the wealthy know they're fucked if young men turn that rage against them, the real perpetrators of said poor people's suffering.

The wealthy love fascism, it gives them everything they want. They don't see the poor people below them as human, so it's all just a giant menagerie to them so they can have their Line Go Up Faster than the other rich people.

"When dealing with people, remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity."

-- Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Don't Be a Sucker

https://youtu.be/vGAqYNFQdZ4

This is an anti-fascism film made by the U.S. in the 1940s. It pretty much focuses on answering your exact question. It's a decent film too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Be_a_Sucker

People become lonely, disaffected, and negative towards the world they live in. They then reach out to other communities, and due to one thing, or another, primarily their personality, they don't get accepted. However, communities based around hate will gladly take them in, as long as they fit a profile they are looking for.

"Are you a young, white, male, that is dissatisfied with their life, and the world? Well, we accept you here. These things are not your fault, it is the fault of others. You aren't the reason you cannot get a relationship with a women, it is the women who are fault for this. The reason it is so hard to get a good paying job? Immigrants. Why is housing so expensive, and hard to get, at least anywhere with a large enough job market to really advance somewhere? The Jews. Why can't you rise on the corporate ladder where you work? Progressive policies... also jews, and immigrants. You are a white man, you should be rightfully at the top of the hierarchy. Women should be given, by their fathers, to men, on a mutually beneficial, transactional, basis. Women should submit to your authority. "

Or, in the case of incels "Are you depressed? Have no friends? No social life? No relationship with a woman? Are you an adult virgin, loser? Well that is because women are evil. We will accept you, unlike the evil female species."

Because they provided simple answers to complex problems. Doesn't matter if the answers are wrong. If a government is providing the simple answers, it's because they don't want to solve the problems for whatever reason.

Feels > reals.

I think the basis of this is that it's not about knowledge. It's about emotion, and anger and hate are easy emotions.

Naziism and fascism are broadly a response to the same material conditions as communism and anarchism (to an extent).

Liberalism does not put forth a response to those conditions because it created them and has no internal process to relieve them (instead it externalizes them) or stop perpetuating them.

When faced with a choice between communism or fascism people generally don’t perform an in-depth analysis of what’s best for them or their cohort but instead attach to the group that provides some relief or aid.

That’s why it’s important to always help people around you when you can.

One of my closer friends is on a weird path atm. He's full into Russian propaganda, anti-western stuff, flat earth, anti vaxx and whatnot.

I tried to reason with him. Turns out he doesn't even know how to verify something he's read online. Check sources? Nope. Google something you've seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.

I came to accept that he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation, propaganda and lies.

That knowledge needs active reaching out, otherwise you'll just be in the "bigotry is when irrational hatred of group for the sake of doing evil" camp, which can be easily converted with "experiences", "statistics", etc.

I grew up in a very prejudiced family, and my family liked to scream off their lungs at me when I called them racists, because racism was supposed to be done for the sake of evil like in a cartoon, and them having "extensive experiences" of Roma wrongdoings against them makes it okay for them to throw everyone of them under the bus, for the illusion of safety.

It’s a temper tantrum turned into a personality.