Like ISIL, Incel promotes blind hatred, carnage.
LIKE ISIL, INCEL PROMOTES A BLIND HATRED OF HEALTHY, WELL-ADJUSTED PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY WOMEN
As we all strive and struggle to sort out what rational sense might be divined from Monday’s mass murder in the vicinity of Yonge and Finch in Toronto, the likely motive that has emerged, while still necessarily a matter of speculation, involves a dark and horrible thing that the overwhelming majority of us, it seems safe to say, have never even heard of before.
What is the proper word for this thing? Is it a psychopathology? Some sort of sociopathology? Is it even possible to reduce this phenomenon, or condition, or whatever it is, to the lexicons of clinical, medical terminology? Is there something from the discipline of anthropology that might help?
As a way of describing the thing, if not defining it, “misogyny” seems to approach a high degree of precision. The term “toxic masculinity,” while routinely applied too liberally, unhelpfully and often disingenuously, might be as close to the mark as it’s possible to get. “Patriarchy,” even, which is also a very real thing, can be said to be at least tangentially related. But these terms merely describe the thing that 25-yearold Alek Minassian alluded to in what Toronto police Det.-Sgt. Graham Gibson called a “cryptic message” Minassian posted on Facebook mere minutes before a rented white Ryder van began smashing into pedestrians along Yonge Street, shortly after which Toronto police constable Ken Lam apprehended Minassian in an encounter of the kind known as an attempted “suicide by cop.”
Minassian pointed an object at the Lam and was heard to say “kill me,” and “I have a gun in my pocket,” but he was arrested without a shot being fired, and he now faces 10 counts of firstdegree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder. As to the speculated motive, this is what police say Minassian posted on Facebook:
“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”
The long and short of it: A reference to Minassian’s briefly held rank in the Canadian Forces, perhaps a month, before he asked to be discharged, and to the message-board website 4chan, notorious for its repository of extremely unsavory shared-interest groups. One such discussion group is a gathering place for dangerously disturbed men — and only men — who identify as “Incel,” which abbreviates the state of being an “involuntary celibate.”
Elliot Rodger is the man who murdered six people in a shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif., four years ago before killing himself. “Chads and Stacys” is a reference to men and women who are not celibate, and show up in “Incel” discussions as objects of bitter contempt and seething rage. The “Incel” phenomenon is what you might call a bizarre cult of hatred — a hatred of perfectly ordinary, healthy and welladjusted people, especially women — and the glorification of rape and suicide.
This is not something with which most of us are even remotely familiar, but it will be immediately familiar in the context of the most ubiquitous, mass-organized contemporary form of “terrorism,” another term that is routinely applied too liberally, unhelpfully and often disingenuously.
It should leap straight out at you. A blind hatred of healthy, well adjusted people, especially women, organized around deeply disfiguring resentments into mass cults of death and the glorification of rape and suicide. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and the Islamic State all share these attributes to varying degrees, and configure their ideal states of social organization as women-enslaving patriarchies.
Getting this straight is not easy, and the Criminal Code provisions on terrorism will not help you to comprehend what occurred in Toronto on Monday. Section 83.01 of the Criminal Code defines terrorism as acts committed “in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause,” the point being to intimidate society with regard to its security, including economic security, or to compel a person, a government or an organization to do something or refrain from doing it.
It should be obvious, from what we know about the atrocity that was committed in Toronto on Monday, that the Criminal Code provisions on terrorism are of no help to us — not if the suspect proves to be guilty and the speculated motive is anywhere close to being accurate. What is less obvious, as more than 17 years of multilateral, UN-authorized engagement in Afghanistan shows, is that the way we understand “terrorism” hasn’t been of much use in making sense of the Taliban, either.
The Criminal Code, as is common in international jurisprudence, comprehends terrorism as a means to an end, an act of violence or intimidation carried out for a particular “political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause.” And here’s the thing about terrorism of the Taliban, or Incel, or Islamic State variety. It is not a means to an end. It is an end in itself. It is not about making a point. It is the whole point.
Being rational people, we recoil from this. We look for “root causes.” We imagine power-sharing arrangements. We entertain the conceit that “peace talks” should do the trick, as if the demands of Incel or Hezbollah or Hamas can be negotiated rationally at some kind of bargaining table. Give and take. Compromise. Jaw-jaw, better than war-war. That sort of thing.
There is certainly enough madness to go around.
Lucky for us, there is also usually enough kindness. We each have our own peculiar traditions and ideas about how to discharge the fundamental human duty of care for one another in such circumstances. My own hope is that we will not fail to ensure to comfort and console the crushed family of 25-yearold Alek Minassian, in common with all the other grieving families from Monday’s atrocity.
We are all ridiculously and perfectly irrational about all of it. We put up little shrines. We write little letters to the dead and pile them on street corners. We have moments of silence. We offer up prayers. We hold hands with perfect strangers.
We carry on.
THE TERM ‘TOXIC MASCULINITY’ ... MIGHT BE AS CLOSE TO THE MARK AS IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET.