I have a pair of contrasting anecdotes for you, both taken from acquaintances of mine. I’ll call them Dexter and Chad. Both of them suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, and I watched both of them grow up from childhood to young adulthood.

Dexter was a little runt of a kid, and he grew up skinny, short, and ugly in the face. High IQ, but you wouldn’t know it because he rarely spoke and when he did, it was in short sentences. But he would always ace his math tests, which people thought was strange since all he would do was sit on his ass playing videogames all day and never study. His mother was strict, and his dad, the epitome of kulak-class American, gave him a hard time too despite his rough fatherly affection. His older brothers were more social and active, and they’d always be roughing him up, and teasing him, and dragging him out to fight with sticks and ride ATVs in the woods, and all the normal shit a rural American boy does.

What happened was that he learned to fire back when someone insulted him or tried to give him shit. And because he learned not to give a fuck, he made friends at school. When he got to college, he asked me for dating advice. I told him not to treat her like a princess, and that she didn’t want to date a chump and she’d try to get him to act like one, so don’t fall for it. Since then, he’s gotten in decent shape and never been without a girlfriend. He leveraged his sperg math IQ through grad school into a cushy, well-paying job and is dating a girl way more attractive than anyone would expect. If you talked to Dexter, you’d assume he was incel. He looks and dresses geekier than Dylan Roof did. He’s still quiet and antisocial. But his upbringing gave him a mental toughness and inner peace that allowed him to maximize his naturally low status.

Now on to Chad. Chad also grew up in a rural area, is also a sperg, but he and Dexter couldn’t be any more different. He was the only child of a loveless marriage between a cunty tankgrrl feminist and a liberal bugman. He grew up coddled and insulated. His parents never said no to anything he wanted to do, and never held him to any expectations. I don’t think he’d ever taken a punch or ever heard a mean word against him until middle school. And he imbibed leftist ideology at his mother’s tit. He grew up plagued with insecurities, and thus talked loudly and incessantly to fill the intolerable silence of his life. In high school, embittered by his low status, he embarked on a massive self-improvement program that focused around the gym. It ended up making him look like Conan the Barbarian, and he managed to make himself a bit more likable to others.

But here’s the thing. He’s still incel, and not for lack of trying. He’s a big jacked dude, over 6 feet tall, good facial phyzz too. If you saw him walking down the street with a dimebag on his arm, you probably wouldn’t look twice. He asks girls out, and gets dates, but never closes the deal. Partially because of his white knight RESPEC WAHMEN mentality, partially because he’s deeply insecure. But he is insecure because he never went through the requisite hardships that cultivate inner toughness. His leftist victim mentality meshes with this self-defeating inability to take action. Despite him looking visually high-status, he is practically unemployed and a virgin at 22. And I’ve seen this dude in action. He’s not exactly hitting on the cream of the crop.

That’s why bullying works. Life itself is low-level stress and conflict. When kids fight, they learn to fight back. Absent, of course, the supervision of catladies who punish the victim for defending himself, the bullied often become friends with the bully. I was lucky to escape the catladies because when I was bullied in elementary school, I fought back and then gave a proverbial middle finger, as far as an 8-year-old could, to the school administration, but I was too young to face any real consequences. And the reputation as someone not to be fucked with lasted years.