What You’re Really Arguing About When You Argue About Politics
Are our motives and beliefs just convenient lies we tell ourselves? A new book by the controversial economist Robin Hanson argues they are.
On April 23, a 25-year-old man named Alek Minassian killed ten people with a van in downtown Toronto. Although his tactics resembled those used in recent, high-profile jihadist attacks, Minassian dedicated his terrorism not to the black flag of ISIS but to the message board 4chan and the “Incel Rebellion,” an imaginary uprising of involuntary celibates, or “incels” — members of an online subculture based around a shared inability to find willing sexual partners. The incels see this as a form of persecution: They are denied access to something, sex, that most people take for granted. Since most of them are straight men, their abstract rage at society for this persecution tends to boil down to rage at women, who are doing the alleged persecuting.
It’s hard to find a less sympathetic villain than the incel. He is, in the public imagination at least, a sexless Morlock combining the most frightening aspects of “toxic” masculinity with the sort of whiny impotence that would drive a saint to contempt. So when Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and noted eccentric, offered…
