Social Matter

Elliot Rodgers. The Story of Elliot Rodger. Or: Don’t Tell Me Details About What I Can’t Have. Or: How Not To Be Antifragile.

The interesting part of the Elliot Rodger story is that it’s not quite so simple to dismiss him as some dimwitted, basement-dwelling lunatic—and his manifesto/autobiography/memoir doesn’t read that way. It’s erudite, albeit entirely narcissistic and self-indulgent. My Shoot Up Is Worth Not Just A Manifesto But A Memoir For I Have Accomplished Much Worth Writing About, And You Should All Pay Attention To the Injustices I Have Suffered.

In the meantime, most outlets have seized onto the manifesto in order to shore up support for their own communities. Gun control for the gun controllers. Misoygny for the feminists. Sex realism for the sex realists. Their analysis tends to perversion because instead of doing proper work, it’s work done in light of thede preservation. That’s where the term ‘hack’ comes in. It’s what happens when you try a little too hard to spin everything to fit in a framework endorsed by your thede. Most opinion coverage has been in the forming of seeing how Rodgers’ work can be used as a weapon in the culture wars.

Onto Rodger:

Wealth unbalanced by proper stewardship leads to a host of pathologies—all indulged by the proper psychiatrists and ‘life coaches,’ of course. Excuse? No. If anything, Rodger is more comparable to Hitler-as-young-but-romantically-troubled-plus-something-more than to the psychological profiles of any other mass shooters—mostly because he makes some good points, but also because his IQ is probably two standard deviations over the average. Classic signs of affluence, early self-awareness (assuming his childhood recollections aren’t just complete fabrications), and verbal fluency are indicative of high intelligence. Smart as a whip, vindictively-minded, but helpless at the feet of women.

Aside from minor upsets in the early years—Kindergarten, and so on, the picture Rodger wants to paint is a vicious descent from childhood bliss to the madness and injustice forced upon him by puberty. As he writes, “The first friend I made in the United States was a girl! She was the first female friend I’ve ever had and she would be the last” (p. 5). This was Rodger at five. And at five, Rodger was an international jet-setter, being dragged across the globe by his parents.

He continues: “We all start out innocent, and we all start out together. Only through the experiences and circumstances of growing up do we drift apart, form allegiances, and face each other as enemies” (p. 6). Or in other words, when puberty strikes. His young female friend Maddy signalled how things were supposed to be. How things should’ve continued to have been. “Sometimes when I went to [Maddy’s] house, she would have other female friends there, and I played with them too. I had no trouble interacting with girls at that age, surprisingly. My six-year-old self was playing with girls, unbeknownst to the horror and misery the female gender would inflict upon me later in my life. In the present day, these girls would treat me like the scum of the earth; but at that time, we were all equals. Such bitter irony” (p. 7).

As his father was away focusing on his career in directing films, little Rodger was raised primarily by his mother and nanny. Arguments his parents had didn’t upset him—his life was idyllic, but his past reflections are unmistakably colored. The few things went wrong were signals for future grief. The few things he took comfort in then—video games, for instance, would shelter him in the future. In his words, “I still had a few more years to enjoy life in carefree bliss before I would eventually discover how twisted and cruel this “fascinating world” really is” (p. 9). What’s cruel and unusual is how often he uses the word cruel.

Divorce was part of his life. This happened just after his seventh birthday—months before, his mother had assured him a separation was impossible. The realization of the lie never left. Shocked, outraged, upset. But he still understood the idea of marriage, which is why his seven-year-old mind couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of his father’s girlfriend as a permanent staple in his life. But in addition came a lengthy realization:  “Because of my father’s acquisition of a new girlfriend, my little mind got the impression that my father was a man that women found attractive, as he was able to find a new girlfriend in such a short period of time from divorcing my mother. I subconsciously held him in higher regard because of this. It is very interesting how this phenomenon works…that males who can easily find female mates garner more respect from their fellow men, even children. How ironic is it that my father, one of those men who could easily find a girlfriend, has a son who would struggle all his life to find a girlfriend” (p. 11).

Even at this stage, all was well with Rodger. He never really brought up the divorce as a causative factor for his shortcomings, although later on in his writing, he resented his father for not giving guidance, and he sloughed off attempts by other males to help give him guidance on women:

“A few men who are successful with women have offered me help and advice about this in the past, but nothing ever came of it. I suppose they want to help because it would be a boost to their already big egos, and also because they feel sorry for me. People should feel sorry for me. My life is so pathetic, and I hate the world for forcing me to suffer it. I feel sorry for myself. In truth, there is nothing men like Dale can really do to help me attract girls and lose my virginity. They can’t mind-control girls to be attracted to me. It’s all girls’ fault for not having any sexual attraction towards me” (p. 127).

Contrast this with his earlier reflections as a child:

“It was as if the girls in elementary school were part of a separate reality. Despite not having much interaction with them, they treated me cordially, as they treated all other boys of my age. This was fair, and I was content with this. I hadn’t gone through puberty yet, and so I had no desire for female validation. My eight-year-old self had no inkling of the pain and misery girls would cause me once puberty would inevitably arrive and my sexual desires for girls would develop. Sexual desires that would be mercilessly spurned…But at that moment in time, we were just innocent children growing up together. All innocence is destined to be shattered and replaced with bitter brutality. I was living in ignorance, innocent bliss. And I was happy with it” (p. 13).

A millennial wrote this memoir. It’s filled with self-ascribed irony, notions of fairness and social desert. You see him repeating sentiments like “It’s funny how the world works” again and again and again. At around 9 he sheds some bliss. He’s short and notices it. He is physically weak and ‘vexed’. Mother is good and wholesome, father’s girlfriend: bad, wicked, and horrible. Puberty magnifies it all—that is, “Only after the advent of puberty does the true brutality of human nature show its face” (p. 25). His life is purposely partitioned into two stages: pre-and-post puberty.

Interspersed in the text are long monologues on social observances: There are hierarchies, and I am not at the top. I am shy, mixed race, my clothes are not popular, and my jealousy is raging. I am acted upon, rather than an actor. I am the effect, not the cause. I am a cog in the machine. Life is a competition. Some people are better than others. Some people are cooler than others. Life is struggle.

He wasn’t cool because his parents never made an effort to style him–so he says. What are the cool kids doing? I have do it. In the beginning, although he lagged in coolness, he was able to keep decent pace because he could buy the skateboard. He could learn the lessons, but that didn’t translate into success with females. And even then, he never set the trends. He was never in the ‘right’ peer group. He lagged in coolness: always reaching, never there.

There’s a certain sympathy one can have for Rodgers in the beginning that is dropped  fairly quickly. The madness doesn’t really come across without some long-form quotes:

Exhibit A: “Those girls deserved to be dumped in boiling water for the crime of not giving me the attention and adoration I so rightfully deserve!” (p. 100)

At some point, it becomes so over-the-top comical that there’s a tendency to think it’s all just a big ruse.

Exhibit B: “That night, I threw a wild tantrum, screaming and crying for hours on end. I had the whole apartment to myself, so there was no one there to hear me. I raged at the entire world, thrashing at my bed with my wooden practice sword and slashing at the air with my pocketknife” (p. 108).

Exhibit C: “Why do women behave like vicious, stupid, cruel animals who take delight in my suffering and starvation? Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence? I concluded that women are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves. Beasts should not be able to have any rights in a civilized society. If their wickedness is not contained, the whole of humanity will be held back from advancement to a more civilized state. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence. If women had the freedom to choose which men to mate with, like they do today, they would breed with stupid, degenerate men, which would only produce stupid, degenerate offspring. This in turn would hinder the advancement of humanity. Not only hinder it, but devolve humanity completely. Women are like a plague that must be quarantined. When I came to this brilliant, perfect, revelations, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way. I am one of the few people on this world who has the intelligence to see this. I am like a god, and my purpose is to exact ultimate Retribution on all of the impurities I see in the world” (p. 117).

There was no cause for this, no environmental cause, at least. Sometimes you get bad stock. Elliot Rodgers was bad stock. Bad stock follows a trajectory of its own, and there’s no preventing it. This isn’t about marriage, this isn’t about divorce. Some people are fated, born with sick souls. Stupidity is believing that education could have cured him and eliminated his misogyny. Learning how to attract women wouldn’t have done it. To say he could’ve learned it is to say that if Elliot had not been Elliot, then there would’ve been no shooting. Not terribly illuminating. In his words, despite whining about lack of instruction from his father: “It’s all girls’ fault for not having any sexual attraction towards me” (p. 127).

It’s no insult to say that some are just incapable of understanding and implementing sex realism. That doesn’t invalidate sex realism or make it useless or pointless. It just means that some men are too damaged to absorb the treatment. Some folks shouldn’t be in higher education, some folks will never and can never be entrepreneurs. Why should we make an exception for Rodgers? Just to have something to write about? If the red pill is salvific, then some men are not part of the Elect.

Of course, in the absence of sex realism, the libertarians are first to crow about how legalized prostitution would’ve prevented the whole damn thing, but that angle betrays a complete misunderstanding of Rodgers’ complex. It’s not just about a warm, wet hole. It’s about status, prestige, and honor. “It has the same effect as hiring a prostitute, I imagine. It temporarily feels good for the moment, but afterwards it makes on feel like a pathetic loser for having to hire a girl when other men could get the experience for free” (p. 120).

Moreover, if he were naturally successful with women from the start, he would’ve simply paralleled an extended version of the Fox in Aesop’s Fables, switching from the grapes of women to the grapes of whatever else imparts status. He would’ve just been beset with a different complex. The Fox and the Grapes is extended in the case because Rodgers not only loved yet detested women, but if he wasn’t able to have the grapes, no one would else would, either.

It got progressively worse as I was reading it. I almost wonder if he purposefully made it more comically tragic as the story went on just to juxtapose the pre-from-the-post stages of puberty, just to show how much suffering women brought upon him. Then again, he is fucking crazy, so who knows? God complex, non-ironic narcissism, extreme social delusion, extreme prissiness. It’s as if he never grew up from being 4-years-old. His political philosophy, of himself as God-King forever forbidding the undeserving from having sex, was nothing more than his pathologies worked out on paper. Instead of a political philosophy, it was more akin to: if my essence was fully projected onto the world in all its power, this is what it would look like.

There were some racial elements included, too, phrased in the question: How could the descendants of slaves do better with women than the descendant of British aristocracy? They shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be. Was his analysis informed by careful, astute observation? Not at all. He simply grasped on whatever was available as a crutch, as he did with his father: “Everything my father taught me was proven wrong. He raised me to be a polite, kind gentleman. In a decent world, that would be ideal. But the polite, kind gentleman doesn’t win in the real world. The girls don’t flock to the gentlemen. They flock to the alpha male. They flock to the boys who appear to have the most power and status” (p. 28).

Elliot Rodger was ruined from the beginning. Misogyny? Sure, but sola misogyny is boring and wrong as an analysis. His case is a perverse magnification of the lives of countless K-selected men trying to live in an R-selected world, which is why some autistic types feel some measure of empathy and sympathy.

Like I said in the beginning, there’s a Schopenhauerian element. And I say element because it’d be an insult to the name to compare Rodger to Schopenhauer. Some core analysis about the female essence is correct. Absolutely correct. But that’s all there is to the Rodger story. There’s nothing redemptive about it at all. For others who empathize with some part of his struggles, the first step is to understand, but the second step is more important: realize that no one owes you anything, and fix your deficiencies. No, little Johnny, if females aren’t giving you attention, the solution is not to put them all in concentration camps and starve them to death.

In other words, stop being a little bitch. If it’s even possible. But you won’t know if it’s possible until you’re out of the pit,  just in the same way you don’t truly know that you’ve been preserved in the faith, preserved from apostasy, until you die. It’s a temporally interesting logic: you persevere unto death in order to have been saved.