Jordan Peterson’s farcical suggestion that the fact lobsters live in hierarchies makes it right for humans, need not have strayed so far across the evolutionary tree. All kinds of animals way closer to us have hierarchies. What you find is that hierarchy has to do with whether you are expected to survive or not. The more rigid the hierarchy the less there is invested in future generations.

The hunting dog of Zimbabwe allows the pups to feed first even if adults are starving and have to wait around for ages for the youngsters to catch up to the kill. The reason is that hunting dogs don’t survive too long. A life at breakneck speed taking down prey five times your size armed with a vicious assortment of horns and hooves doesn’t have more than a few seasons in it. They don’t raise many litters. So every pup has to live.

Lions live way longer. There are plenty of litters so cubs are ten a penny and get batted out of the way by the adult male who hasn’t contribution to the kill and has run no more dangers during his day than risking the odd splinter. Oh, and each other.

Hierarchies exist where the young are expendable.

Which is how the Incel movement feel, that they are expendable. Unloved and unloveable yet at the same time demanding love as a right. Living such a contradiction without feeling able to address or play any active part in it is going to tear a person apart, the only alleviation from which is to tear others apart as a prelude to suicide’s, ‘I hate you’.

A number of Incel members have committed mass murders and then killed themselves.

In 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed 6 people and injured 14 others near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara before killing himself. He left a lengthy manifesto and YouTube videos detailing his hatred for women and his involuntary celibacy.

In 2015, 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer shot and killed 9 people and injured 8 others at the Umpqua Community College campus before killing himself. He left a manifesto at the scene, outlining his interest in other mass murders including the Isla Vista killings, anger at not having a girlfriend, and animus towards the world.

On April 12rd this year Alek Minassian, killed 10 people and injured 14 others in Toronto, Canada. Minassian was arrested soon after the attack. Shortly before the attack, Minassian had posted on Facebook that “the Incel Rebellion has already begun” and applauded Elliot Rodger, the Incel attacker at Isla Vista.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jordan Peterson explained Minassian’s rampage thus..

”Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners,” Mr. Peterson says, ”society needs to work to make sure those men are married”.

In other words, had the mean women of this world only accommodated this poor undeserving psychopath and soothed his savage brow then he would have become all cute and cuddly again. Its their fault. If only he’d been given a slave everything would have been fine. Jordan’s message is ‘men can’t be men unless they’re getting laid’.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

You forced us to force you..

Anxious not to quote out of context I searched for a transcript and got luckier, Peterson’s own online addendum in which he qualified that this enforcement was not envisioned as legal, but merely social..

wot, like compelling young women into conjugal arrangements with someone they don’t want to be with let alone have sex with?

And how different is that from the last, blood-soaked, thousand years?

Whilst it is true that, ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth” (African Proverb) you would not expect the arsonist to then wander into the flames himself.

In this following video of Minnasian being arrested you can see him taunting police to shoot him, reaching for and rapidly drawing what he wants you to believe is a gun and asking the cop to shoot him in the head.

http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/16182751.toronto-attack-suspects-incel-post-hints-at-misogyny-and-sexual-frustration/

What the hell is going on?

Perhaps the following story will help. I was on the metro. Across the aisle was a mother and her angry three year old wanting one thing after another. Eventually the mother’s patience wore thin and she snapped, ‘I’m not your servant you know!” ”Well then, where are my servants?” demanded the imperious child. ”You haven’t got any, ” responded mother tartly.

The poor girl burst into tears, not the hot angry frustration of a moment ago but the heartfelt mourning of grief and loss. It was as though she’d run into a brick wall but actually she was crossing a painful threshold and being stripped of ancient rights, yet it was a crossing that would now allow her to experience others as her equals and find her buoyancy again, specialness traded in for a destiny of her own.

If a child stumbles at this threshold of symbol formation and has not been given the means to weather the transition from being at-the-centre-of-things to being one-amongst-many, then he can never really leave mother …but then neither can he stay without the eternal frustration and shame of not being able to join the men’s hut.

”One cannot become independent of the mother except through her, through her playing her correct role and allowing one to graduate from it upon fulfillment.” Jean Liedloff. [The Continuum Concept. Perseus books page 71]

If mother cannot be valued or is made unavailable, then women will be difficult to relate to in later life. The experience might well be one of being on the outside looking in, raging with envy and hate at those who’ve been able to relinquish mother’s skirts and found solace in one another but compulsively repeating patterns of early deprivation.

”Rarely do we give up what we drank with our mother’s milk.” Dostoevsky

When existence is predicated upon unacceptability then it becomes your default position, the toxin by which you know yourself. And so even when the hoped for situation presents itself, the moment cannot be grasped.

”Deprivation, to the degree it has been suffered in infancy will be maintained indiscriminately as part of development (assuming) it will serve to be stabilized according to initial experience.”( ibid page 48)

In the final scene from the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’ below, Harry and Lloyd, who aren’t able to grow up because they don’t have the inner resources for it, must sabotage even their wildest eroticized encounter…

It’s not all mother’s fault. How is she to provide the emotional environment required to instill a child with confidence if her own role is demeaned and cheapened? If her divine counterpart has been chased into the sea and pelted with millstones?

The Patriarchy has pissed on its own boots. Its favorite sons are all fucked up. Crushing mother has crippled her sons. None of which means they are so stupid as not to see that the devouring of the planet, sanctioned and perpetrated by their mentors and benefactors, does not include any form of viable future for themselves. They have been betrayed by the same misogynistic fathers who colluded with and encouraged just how special they are as a substitute for actually being involved with the boy.

I once saw a boy of eight at a wedding lifting up a woman’s skirt for a look. She rounded on him and it seemed he’d learned his lesson but five minutes later he did it again. This time I caught his arm and threatened him with his father whom he immediately ran to, screaming for sweets. Papa patted his head and said, ‘you can have whatever you want…’

Archetypally, the Incel character is represented by lamed Hephaestus, God of Fire and Exploding Volcanoes from Greek mythology. As a child, he was cast out of Olympus by a rejecting Hera and had to be nursed back to health by Thetis and Eurynome who had a bit of a thing for broken gods.

Homer says that Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera. However, Hesiod claims that Hephaestus was solely Hera’s child and that she gave birth to him by herself to get back at her husband, Zeus, but was so disgusted with Hephaestus’ looks and ashamed of him that she threw him out.

Hera’s rejection of Hephaestus means he can’t separate from her properly, nor give himself to another woman. You can only separate from a bond. Without the bond you only have a perilous adhesion to save you from..

‘the terror of dissolution a baby experiences when, through lack of good enough maternal care, he cannot separate out from the mother and feel that he exists in his own right.” R Ledermann (1979), The Infantile Roots of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 24: 107–126.

After nine years Hephaestus got his revenge. He made a golden throne for Hera, so beautiful that she accepted it right away. The minute she sat on it though, she was enveloped by invisible cords. The gods tried to persuade Hephaestus to free Hera, promising him a place on Olympus in return. However, he was un-remorseful and released his mother only once Dionysus got him drunk and made a deal with him.

Hephaestus relationship with his mother is one of being either held so tight you can’t move or being flung aside with contempt. Presumably, the poetic genius has fashioned something to give mother a taste of her own medicine, and to serve as a template for his future relationships with women. He ties them down but rejects intimacy, as he has been tied down and rejected. This ambiguous dynamic in the mother/infant relationship is what analyst Masud Kahn calls, ‘symbiotic omnipotence’, characterized by the denigration of third parties,

‘as potentially valuable or nourishing.” 1974 ‘On Symbiotic Omnipotence’ Journal of Analytical Psychology vol 19.

The flawed personality of the child is flung down from Olympus whilst the idealised Self is held captive, a royal prisoner, a vessel for all mother’s unfulfilled ambitions.

”The self of the child functions as a transitional object between the child’s ego and the mother. It is treated as special, idealized and at one (place) removed. Mother does not give support to the whole complexity of the child ..which leads to dissociation (and) a corresponding failure to integrate aggression. Masud Kahn ibid



The deal that Hephaestus and Dionysus make is crucial, not least of all because there are two versions of the story. A fork in the archetypal road. A dilemma for Incel. One way is that Hera will be released once Aphrodite, goddess of love and passion, is promised to Hephaestus in marriage. This is the regressed alternative. Instant gratification, sex laid on with a trowel, pining Aphrodite down as he had pinned and been pinned by mother before her.

It doesn’t work out.

For some strange reason Aphrodite doesn’t like being wedded off to an ugly, lame, exploding troll and has an affair with Ares. One day Hephaestus catches the lovers. He pins them down too, trapped in a fine-woven chain-net, calling upon the other gods to laugh at their shame forgetting that as cuckold the humiliation is his. Poseidon persuades him to free the adulterers, but Hephaestus wasn’t done. When Ares and Aphrodite’s daughter Harmonia married Cadmus, he gave her a magical necklace which would bring misfortune to her and everyone who wore it thereafter..

So Hephaestus is not above hate crime. His relationships with women are sado-masochistic and depersonalising. He splits off his misery and destructively calls it down on Aphrodite. Having ruined things with her, he uses his skills in craftsmanship to fashion handmaids made of gold to fulfill his every whim and, it is said, the first human, Pandora, held responsible for the ills of the world.

Robotic interaction is one of the defenses used by the narcissist to prevent himself from being swallowed up by a dangerous mother without having to feel anything about it all.

”He replaces bad feelings towards (specific) people in his environment by hatred and envy of the whole world.” R Ledermann, The Robot Personality in Narcissistic Disorder.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 1981 vol 26 pp329-344

Fortunately there is a second fork in the road, another version of the deal made with Dionysus. In this story, Hephaestus marries Athena goddess of Wisdom, not a natural choice for him and so you can assume it’s because Dionysus has persuaded him to it with the thought that some good may be done over and above gaining the freedom of Hera.

Dionysus has a record of striking hard yet compassionate deals. When king Midas begs him to release him from the death dealing golden touch, Dionysus agrees, but only if he bathes in the source of the river Pactolus, knowing that the humble pilgrimage alone and unaided is what’s really required, so the suggestion of Athena is not without purpose. She is goddess of Wisdom after all..

What happens is that in their first passionate embrace, Athena twists free of him in the moment of his climax so that his semen is spilled on the ground where it impregnates Gaia who gives birth to Erichthonius or Erectheus, the Earth Shaker.

How clever. Athena gets Hephaestus to unite with the Great Mother.

”If you don’t get what you need from your own mother you may need to go and get it from the Great Mother.” S Brinton Perrera

One way of crossing the threshold of symbol formation is by developing a relationship with the Unconscious, having the realization that you are not master of your own house, that your dreams mean something personal, that you have an obligation to bring something forth from yourself even if you don’t know what it is.

Hephaestus learns to wonder. He peers down into his own earthy depths and makes the transition from the fascination of narcissistic self absorption to a fascination with the Unconscious, the Great Mother. He learns about Otherness via the earth shaking encounter with the inner Other, who is both strange and yet familiar like a transitional object that is both me and not-me.

And so, repulsive as he is, there is hope for Hephaestus. He might face his early wounds and stop letting mother off the hook by assuming all women are like her. He might recognize that the Patriarchy views him as so much cannon fodder. He might then be able to place his undifferentiated and murderous hate into some context so that it need not run his life.

And he might develop some kind of inner dialogue between I and me, the capacity for reflection that would put some ground beneath his feet and enough feeling of worth into the world to draw back from burning it down.