To spin my previous thread a bit further, I would like to point out the important distinction between a cause and a predisposing factor.
Take lung cancer, for example. Population-wide, we can legitimately argue that smoking is a predisposing factor for lung cancer. All the relevant statistics more or less support this link.
However, what we cannot do, rationally speaking, is to posit that Mr. X's lung cancer was caused by smoking, just on the evidence that he was a smoker. In Mr. X's case it might have been a random genetic mutation, after all, that did him in, or a chance encounter with asbestos during a demolition job many years ago, or any number of things.
Likewise, I don't deny that being short, ethnic, broke, disabled, etc. may be predisposing factors to becoming incel. (Though the available statistics are often scant as well as difficult to interpret.)
However, I do have a problem with an individual man claiming that his inceldom was caused by X. (Where X is some grand monolithic cause, or a limited set of causes.) I think it's nearly always impossible to actually prove causality in such cases. Instead, it seems more helpful and more productive to accept that most individual cases of inceldom have no determinate cause or causes. Indeed, inceldom to me seems to a large extent to be unexplainable and more or less random.
Take lung cancer, for example. Population-wide, we can legitimately argue that smoking is a predisposing factor for lung cancer. All the relevant statistics more or less support this link.
However, what we cannot do, rationally speaking, is to posit that Mr. X's lung cancer was caused by smoking, just on the evidence that he was a smoker. In Mr. X's case it might have been a random genetic mutation, after all, that did him in, or a chance encounter with asbestos during a demolition job many years ago, or any number of things.
Likewise, I don't deny that being short, ethnic, broke, disabled, etc. may be predisposing factors to becoming incel. (Though the available statistics are often scant as well as difficult to interpret.)
However, I do have a problem with an individual man claiming that his inceldom was caused by X. (Where X is some grand monolithic cause, or a limited set of causes.) I think it's nearly always impossible to actually prove causality in such cases. Instead, it seems more helpful and more productive to accept that most individual cases of inceldom have no determinate cause or causes. Indeed, inceldom to me seems to a large extent to be unexplainable and more or less random.
