Haha, this gives me deja vu from our conversation in the other thread I made where I was talking about my labmate with motivation issues! My reasons for participating in this thread:
- To vent
- To see if anyone else has experienced this, too
- To get some social feedback on whether I'm too passionate about this issue
- Most importantly: because talking about this kind of thing is my hobby
Just bear that in mind if you choose to read on, since I would be remiss if anyone thought I took myself or my thoughts surrounding this issue too seriously...
Yeah, I don't know what kind of change I would like to see come of this either. The famous short story "Harrison Bergeron" (might have spelled this wrong) imagines a dystopia in which beautiful people are forced to wear ugly masks, good singers are physically restrained from singing at their fullest etc. all in pursuit of a more "fair" society. The punchline is, of course, that these restrictions end up making existence dreary and oppressive. But the climax of the story, in which these two performers on a TV show take off their masks and are revealed to be exceptionally beautiful, wasn't particularly satisfying to me either: The entire story is sort of arguing against a strawman; it imagines a society that has eradicated all trace of social differentiation and then shows you that "Whew, that would suck."
It doesn't seem to me like anyone, even incels, is arguing for public intervention of the sort portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Rather, incels (for their part) have taken note of the larger habit of modern civic culture to try to identify "structural inequalities" in the social structure and try to rectify them—and the incels want to grab a seat on this bandwagon, too.
So, let me turn your argument around on you: You can argue that this kind of victim mentality that blames society for one's personal struggles is entitled and counterproductive, but (to steal one of your favorite lines) that particular mode of civic participation is here to stay: "It is what it is." And to the extent that
identify a source of social inequality and whine about it is, in the larger culture, a "thing" that we are doing, we might as well do it on behalf of ugly people too, right?
