Inceldom as the apex of nihilism

As seen in ARX-Han's debut novel

This is a post about inceldom, specifically in the context of the eponymous novel by ARX-Han which you can find here. First I’ll discuss my reluctance to read and possibly review a novel about inceldom (which, to be clear, ARX-Has had not asked for this review), then my reasons for doing so anyway. Then I will cover the plot of the novel with some select quotes so you can see the quality of the writing, which is high, then review its strengths and weaknesses as I see them. I try to avoid spoilers below but there is one or two things I point out that may be construed as such.

Cool cover art

This isn’t a topic that I was very excited to revisit for a couple of reasons. First, I am not in a dating phase of my life and the struggles and lessons learned (in part) I’ve tried to impart in various posts about dating and male/female dynamics here, here and here. Why revisit the topic of dating from new perspectives when it doesn’t speak to my current experiences and when I felt pretty comfortable with the conclusions I have drawn? Second, I am increasingly doing a deep-dive into aspects of the esoteric tradition and inceldom is truly the apex of nihilism, and life is hard enough without wallowing in it. My hope is to find a worldview that works for me to re-enchant the world so the weight of material existence and globohomo control is not so heavy. My time is limited so focusing on a novel about incels is perhaps not the best use of it. Third, the topic felt outdated; not in the sense that incels don’t take up a major portion of the (mostly male) public in globohomo Hellworld 2024, but rather that they’ve semi-disappeared from the public light, walling themselves off on Reddit (r/foreveralone) or forums such as incels.is, looksmax.org, or plenty of others (it can actually be hard to join these communities; they moderate new users and screen out all but the most dedicated). The last incel terror attack I can think of was Alek Minassian in 2018 and, of course, the “Supreme Gentleman” Elliot Rogers in 2014; perhaps there have been more recent ones, but really not many and I think it signals that the copycat wave of such rage/spite induced attacks has dwindled.

Okay, so there were plenty of reasons to not read the book. But I ultimately picked it up anyway; why? Well, first ARX’s Substack writing is solid. I especially liked his posts detailing how difficult it is for an independent writer to develop reader interest; i.e. the skillset of marketing is a completely different skillset from that of writing, something that other wonderful writers like Guido Giacomo Preparata have also struggled with. And it’s not just a completely different skillset but one entirely stacked against the independent writer. You can see ARX’s two posts on this topic here where he offers two examples of indie writers who have achieved some degree of public recognition, Delicious Tacos and Mike Ma, and here where he argues that mainstream publishers spend money haphazardly without knowing what will be successful or not, and that they chase high status trends as much as profits (or more so). Writing about low status men from a neutral or empathetic perspective is declasse so such topics get no funding or support. Thus, even though my audience here is limited I wanted to read it in a show of solidarity and, if it was any good, to write a post about it and maybe it might interest a couple people to read it. Tiny little indie writers should support each other if they offer interesting and thought provoking work, should we not?

Second, I like to stagger my reading — I can’t read multiple books on the same topic or from a similar perspective, I like to go heavy-light-heavy-light on topics and style, and while most of what interests me is non-fiction, increasingly fiction has a place as well (such as Goethe’s Faust). Incel hit from a different and fictional angle versus most of the other stuff I’ve been reading, which is a plus. Third, perhaps there was still something for me to learn here — one can think they know a topic well but can still be surprised and learn new things; it’s the mark of a foolish man to think one knows everything there is to know about an issue. And lastly: I think it is important to read writers who write not for fame or fortune or attention, which is most, but because they feel compelled to write as a way of almost exorcising a Demon: the act of writing relieves the burden and the torment of carrying around the heaviness of a subjectively important idea. This is something Brett Andersen has experienced (you can see his Substack or check out his Youtube) and something that ARX has felt as well. It was philosopher Emil Cioran who stated,

“In my opinion, a book should be written without thinking of others. You shouldn’t write for anyone, only for yourself….Everything I’ve written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, suffocation.  It wasn’t from inspiration, as they say.  It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.” He also stressed the importance of writing in accordance with temperament: “A writer mustn’t know things in depth.  If he speaks of something, he shouldn’t know everything about it, only the things that go with his temperament.  He should not be objective.  One can go into depth with a subject, but in a certain direction, not trying to cover the whole thing.  For a writer the university is death.”

Ernst Junger agreed with this, writing in his World War 2 journals, p. 96:

[Special insights] come from authentic intuition, which itself exists outside of time. This truck me in regards to On the Marble Cliffs, which was triggered by a dream in a single night. But after the flash of intuition, it can take me an entire year to work it out. That’s why I often jokingly say to my wife, “Pray to heaven that I don’t get an idea!” Because then you become the slave of your own idea, and that’s the worst kind of slavery. If a work has to attain a certain rank, it goes back to that initial flash of intuition; then the implementation either succeeds or fails, but in any case, it demands quite a long time.

Okay, so I picked up the book and read it. What was it actually about and how was it?

---

The novel

Incel tells the first-person story of a twenty-two year old graduate student named “anon” who has never had sex and who plans to kill himself if he doesn’t get laid by his twenty-third birthday. His values are rooted deeply in the nihilism of the modern West, as Han explained here:

And so—the modern incel—“the quintessential subject of modernity,” is a young man who has searched for meaning but found it absent. If he is alive right now, he has lived through a late-USSR style collapse in nearly every possible dimension of meaning: religion (killed by science), state (killed by oligarchical financialization), community (killed by industrial capitalism), art (killed by homogenization), family (killed by the preceding three) and lastly, love (killed by inceldom).

Wealth does not count as a sufficient source of meaning.

In modernity, the only ritual of masculinity that remains for the young man is to have sex. In effect, it is the main remaining prerequisite for a successful transition into adulthood (reproduction is no longer required). If he is unable to achieve this, there is essentially nothing left that is socially prescribed for him apart from wealth accumulation. This dynamic exists against a background of intense atomization and loneliness that is already a feature of our urban societies.

Because the story is told through the first-person, there are elements introduced where anon’s narrative is unreliable and it later comes to haunt him on a number of occasions. His graduate studies are in evolutionary psychology and he autistically approaches every interaction with women like he’s playing a video game and not like he’s dealing with a human being. Input the right combination of statements and expressions, achieve the desired output of sex. He iterates and evolves his approaches, hitting on women everywhere he goes while still striking out and experiencing a lot of anger and frustration:

While studying her face over the course of this conversation, I also note the flash of discomfort that periodically darts across her eyes, mapping these movements onto a preset understanding. Even with the comparative disadvantage of my minimal intergender experience, it’s plainly evidence that the girl probably senses something wrong contained within the central parameters of my psyche. She is, of course, entirely correct in her analysis: not only is loneliness a profoundly aversive stimulus to members of the female race, it’s a defect that seems to produce a sort of audiovisual field that continuously dissipates from the pores of your skin. The paradox is that this acts like a positive feedback cycle - the repulsion exerted by this field of force is omnipresent and omnidirectional, further entrenching your own automization by amplifying the strength of your isolation. I try my best to mask this but do not always succeed. In order to connect with human beings, you must bury your pain so deeply that it becomes imperceptible to others. To face the world, you must show only strength.

And another:

I decide that Jason’s philosophy is indeed an accurate depiction of reality; if ever you find yourself deeply wanting someone, it means that you’ll never be desired in return. After thinking over his advice from the previous night, I’ve concluded that the cause of this dynamic is an extremely simple one. The strength of your desire is proportionate to your discrepancy in mate value: the higher her value relative to yours, the less likely the girl is to reciprocate your interest. A couple of hours after meeting Zoe I’m still crushing on her big time, and her silence contains the message of negation. It’s the amorphous, distributed intelligence of the universe and its hidden streams of causation, which, sensing your weakness, cohere into a singular negative intentionality that astrally projects a Big Black Cock into the domain of your daydreams, stalking you through the corridors of non-Euclidean space until it finds and slaps you across the cheek with a relentless, turgid velocity that terminates in your absolute submission to the void.

His tone reminded me to an extent of the bitterly truthful Red Pill Comics such as this one (others can be seen here):

Anon’s outlets including a few close friends, boxing, endless amounts of pornography and browsing depressive Reddit sites to hear other people wallow in their misery. Here’s an excerpt on this last part after a woman anon really likes ghosts him:

What I most like about the internet - well, what everyone likes about the internet, I suppose - is knowing that you are not alone in your suffering. Insofar as the anonymity of a forum displays the hidden qualia of otherwise atomized individuals in a centralized pool, its value lies in its honest ability to capture the media primate's daily existence on this orbiting hellscape. Only when you peel away the flesh of a man's face can you directly examine the contents of his consciousness, opening an unobstructed channel past the myriad filters of social calibration that constrain the public exhibition of his existential distress. Mental states are like resonant frequencies: they seek coherence and amplification from like-minded peers. Thus, the cure for loneliness is to plug into the lives of others; through the reciprocal interface of voyeurism and exhibitionism, you can relegate yourself to a single node among a collection of otherwise isolated individuals. This amounts to a networked vampirism - a sucking of energy from the lost, disaffected souls who spend days immortalizing their grievances onto the marks of a digital ledger. Perhaps the enlightened primate understands that transcendence emerges from the descent into the void, not the ascent into Valhalla.

If you stare at the screen long enough, you can hear the sound of their screaming.

In aggregate, they coagulate into a very particular feeling: the feeling of being in a place called hell. Yes, the internet is hell, and the reason it is hell is because we are in hell. On the internet you are always in the center of the pentagram, the focal point in a vast perimeter of interconnected souls screaming in unremitting torment, the primary conductor of a grand chorus reifying the subjective centrality of your own misery over and above the world's. There is no part of you that does not enjoy being among the suffering of others. The best thing about hell is that it contains other people.

This is strong writing.

---

Strengths and weaknesses

As mentioned, the writing in the book is superb throughout. The words grabbed me and I felt compelled to read it through. With many books I read as long as I am deriving value from it; even if the writing is poor and is a slog to get through I will power through it so long as the benefits of the accruing knowledge outweigh the pain of getting through it (The Gulag Archipelago was one such painful exercise). Samuel Chapman makes a similar point here. Incel was a pleasure to read and I could tell that a lot of thought and effort went into it.

One of the strengths of the novel is that it combines accurate, grim facts about the nature of dating and of reality itself with the subjectivity of an unreliable first person narrative, kind of like Fight Club which is referenced once or twice (indeed, it seemed at one point that his best friend and opposite in many ways might have been a similar Tyler Durden-esque figure). The mark of a strong narrative is that is can be and is multiple things at once, like a prism refracting light depending on the angle of the viewer watching it. The fact that a loser who can’t get laid uses those facts as a shield to protect his fragile ego so he doesn’t kill himself doesn’t mean that those facts or studies are useless or that he necessarily interpreted them wrongly; rather, it highlights one of Han’s core points (correctly) that ultimately intellectualism should not detract from having a lived experience of connection with other humans organically, a point also stressed heavily by Goethe in Faust.

ARX set the novel in 2012 which is probably appropriate because that was when the incel community was really having an underground impact - but this also means perhaps that the timing of the release of the novel is off. For example, Neil Strauss released a couple books on game when the game movement was at the edge of mainstream society; he parlayed that into success. If he had released those books today they would not have done nearly as well because that “moment” is over.

Regardless of timing, ARX gets many of the details of the difficulties in dating in the modern era correctly if one isn’t Chad. To share a piece of my own story, I had a lot of trouble dating in a similar fashion as anon due to a combination of autism, being an outsider to the mainstream zeitgeist, having a pessimist outlook and possessing high levels of disagreeability. I ultimately had success in dating when I decided to treat it like a second job and arranged for 3-5 dates a week, striking out way more than I succeeded but over time iterated a process that increasingly worked for me. I only found a long-term partner when I had that success and was starting to enjoy it; the relationship just kind of crept up on me naturally. Strange how that works. But that didn’t solve all my problems; the residue from not being successful with women during my formative years will always be there, lurking as a danger toward misogyny, much as anon will never have average or normal feelings on this topic.

On this note, I think ARX does a good job in writing anon from at least a partially sympathetic perspective. We all change and evolve over time; are you the same person you were five or ten or twenty years ago? To what extent would you have things in common with that person? And also what does our changes in personality say about the nature of the soul? It is important to have empathy for who we once were even if one has evolved past it: Ernst Junger makes this point in his later interviews, basically how he didn’t identify with his gung-ho nationalist self from the 1920s anymore but he understood and empathized with where he was coming from. He never apologized for who he used to be.

Han made the main character anon twenty-two years old and white, but his intellectual knowledge both seemed greater than a twenty-two year old and he seemed very Asian to me, or at least half-Asian (ARX has stated that he himself is a Chinese-American). Perhaps ARX intended the novel to be aimed at deradicalizing white incels specifically but from that perspective I don’t think he nailed the tone of that ethnic group. Rather, anon seemed to at least be a hapa (half Asian half white) — and it seems that hapa males with white fathers and Asian mothers mentally struggle a great deal in Western society compared to other groups (this dynamic does not really apply to hapa males with white mothers and Asian fathers, but those are much rarer). Furthermore, I don’t think anon’s parents were mentioned at all - his sister features prominently, but it’s interesting why the parents would have been left out along with other family members (unless there was something I missed). It was also curious the lack of anon having or trying to find male role models; usually desperate young men flailing around in a choking sea of nihilism reach out and try to find someone, usually an older male, to guide them where possible…this is where the silly Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson phenomenons came from (but after the time set in the novel). Clean your room!

Lastly, with respect to Han’s stated intent of deradicalization¹: it’s a tricky subject, isn’t it? Nietzsche believed that truth required a synthesis of opposites and I think that’s accurate: while political radicalization combined with inceldom is a difficult path for a man to follow, it doesn’t mean that their criticisms about the nature of society are illegitimate - with respect to female entitlement and obesity, divorce laws favoring women, the difficulty of financially supporting a family or buying a home, etc. (and women, please don’t think that I believe men are innocents in this process; there’s a large amount of obesity, entitlement, and laziness with men as well). See this video which Elon Musk agreed with highlighting this point. I think on this basis that the book’s afterward is a bit too on-the-nose explaining its themes, perhaps ultimately detracting from the power of the novel - it should stand on its own terms - although I personally found it interesting to see ARX’s motivations regardless.

---

Conclusion

Writing talent, even high writing talent, is no guarantee of success in this world. Talent in anything, actually, is no guarantee of success. I was listening to the wonderful song Hallelujah recently and I looked up its history. Leonard Cohen released a terrible version that no one listened to, then years later John Cale released a wonderful/my favorite version which also got no attention. You can hear it here:

Then years later Jeff Buckley released a new version and that too received no attention until Buckley died in a freak drowning accident. After that Buckley’s version and then Cale’s version became popular and then it spawned a huge number of covers as well as the song being featured prominently in a huge number of stupid globohomo television shows and films. Why did it take so long for the song to become popular? Would it have ever achieved popularity and fame without this very specific series of events? How many other wonderful songs are out there that didn’t have a lucky break like this?

This also brings to mind famous musicians playing on a street corner as an experiment and getting routinely ignored. Can the public recognize talent unless certified “experts” tell them that something received official approval?

Such is the nature of everything. One counter is that the harder one works the luckier one becomes. So ARX, congratulations on writing an interesting and very readable novel which raises a lot of interesting issues. Congratulations on ending the novel on a true, authentic beat instead of something artificial and saccharine. I hope you have luck with marketing and promotion even if the road to getting more people to read it is a circuitous one, and even if marketing efforts such as on Twitter is an uphill battle.

This era of ubiquitous nihilism is really a choking one, and any efforts to push past it will certainly not be coming from within the mainstream. It’s guys who have no connections writing from pure passion that will have to be the change if it ever comes; they are the only ones who can really speak truth to power, and it is that dangerous act where true art is made. So ARX-Han, thank you for following your passion.

If this review piqued your interest, you can find the novel here.

Thank you for reading.

1. Although ARX stated in a podcast that the deradicalization framing is ultimately wrong and it’s more about identifying an aspect of society’s spiritual malaise in order to grapple with it directly.