Modern culture offers everyone a role to play, a mask to wear, a game to stumble through. But the incel is a reaction to an alienating culture; his role is one that has been imposed on him by his so called limited biological capabilities. He finds himself torn—alienated from the network of humanity, an option that could have allowed him to blend in—yet also torn from the pathways of his own imaginative network. He is a spiritless entity, consumed by his own contempt for his indoctrination as a insufficient living being.

His existence repulses the social world, and his psyche constantly grapples with his own ineptitude, fated to inhabit what he sees as an inferior subspecies. Meanwhile, his dreams of intimacy are what keep him alive. He is a fraudulent poet and voyeur of life, a spectating thief of his own humanity. He watches the world shiver, and he immerses himself in the chaotic theatre of his fantasies, shaped by endless prayers of love and intoxicated by the ridicule of the public.

Cast out from the world, like the beggar or the thief, he operates in the shadows. Though he may lead a decent and humane life, his voyeurism drives him to become a predator—by instinct and hatred—toward common people, whether man or woman, homosexual or straight. In his imagination, he preys on his own strength, a strength that, if conjured by the rites of his nature, could transform him into a warrior with an unbounded prejudice against life.

These dreams and fantasies enslave him, marking him as a subspecies, abandoned by his own kind.

We should consider the incel a major concern; he is the lens through which we can register modernity. He is the epitome of its gutters, revealing modernity’s harrowing ability to destroy and stain lives permanently.

How did the incel become the incel?

Mankind has always been a competitive animal.
In the West, we operate on Hobbesian instincts—bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all). We live in an environment anchored in dualities: good or bad, victory or defeat, yes or no. The middle ground has been eliminated, and we prefer to view the world in terms of success versus failure.

The incel captures a hidden, quiet version of ourselves—the part buried under personas and fantasies we’ve extended over long periods and ultimately lost. It is only when we face situations that cripple us with shyness and vulnerability that we touch on the fragility of our secret inner incel. The incel represents the lurking fear that we all recognize as a possibility for ourselves, but spend our lives trying to avoid to take to the dance.

For the incel, however, avoiding this fate is not an option. Society has set psychosocial rules, integrating them into our biological observations, leading us to classify things as beautiful or ugly. Modern life has placed immense pressure on people, causing many to hide their true nature under ideologies that are inherently false. If someone holding these views were confronted with a situation requiring altruism and genuineness, those concepts would quickly disintegrate.

The incel within us is not merely a social label or category—it represents a deep, subconscious reaction to the conditions imposed by modernity. Modern culture forces us to respond to the world in terms that are aggressively egotistical, reducing our capacity for genuine human connection. It distracts us from our innate desire for love, authenticity, and vulnerable connection with others, instead pushing us toward competition, self-interest, and the validation of our worth through external measures.

As we engage with modern life, this distortion of values creates a fracture within us. Buried beneath our personas—constructed to navigate the expectations of success, image, and power—is a smaller, quieter version of ourselves. This version is fragile, fearful, and disoriented by the enormity and strangeness of life. It is here that the "incel" exists within all of us: a part of the self that feels rejected, alienated, and crushed by the weight of cultural propaganda that tells us we must be more, achieve more, and fit a rigid mould to be accepted.

In this way, the incel is the product of the violence modern culture enacts upon the individual. The pressures of modernity alienate us from our true nature, creating a void where compassion, connection, and self-acceptance should be. The incel, then, is not merely an external figure we observe in certain corners of society—it is a part of us that emerges in response to the impossible expectations, constant comparisons, and the underlying fear that we are not enough.

This "inner incel" is our quiet fear of being small in an overwhelming universe, the part of us that feels abandoned by a world that values surface-level success over deeper human meaning. It is the consequence of a world that often prioritizes competition, perfection, and performance over vulnerability and intimacy. When we encounter failure, rejection, or disillusionment, this part of us comes to the surface, reminding us that in this strange and often hostile modern environment, we too are vulnerable to feelings of worthlessness, alienation, and powerlessness.

The incel’s voyeuristic spirit is one of both distance and desire. He exists on the periphery of human interaction, observing life with a detached intensity, like a scally shaman—an outsider casting himself as a silent witness to the rituals of human connection that he so desperately craves but cannot access. He is both a dreamer and a spectator, chasing fantasies of intimacy, love, and belonging. His imagination becomes his refuge, but also his prison. In this endless dream, he comes close to his fellow humans only in thought, while the harsh realities of modern society keep him at an unreachable distance.

He understands the barriers he faces, yet feels they are insurmountable. These barriers—modern society’s laws of human beauty, status, and worth—are accepted by him as gospel. He internalizes them, knowing they define the terms of who is deserving of affection and who is relegated to the shadows. His self-awareness deepens his torment. He knows his flaws, recognizes his perceived ugliness, and feels keenly the weight of his own insufficiency. But instead of devising a way to overcome these obstacles, he becomes consumed by anger—a rage directed not only at the world but at himself.

The incel is dysregulated, caught between an external world that tells him he is unworthy and an internal world that spins in chaos, unable to reconcile his desires with his reality. He feels vile, but not entirely responsible for his vileness. The modern world has defined beauty and worth in terms so rigid and exclusive that they feel impossible to achieve. He is trapped in a system that values surface over substance, appearances over humanity, and this drives his imagination further into the realm of fantasy. There, in the shadows of his mind, he creates a version of himself who is powerful, admired, and loved—a dream he knows he can never fully manifest.

Yet, instead of rebelling against the system that has created these impossible standards, he accepts it as an unchangeable law of existence. He doesn’t try to break free from the mold; instead, he lets the weight of this law crush him further into isolation. His anger festers, fueled by the belief that society’s rules are unbreakable, and his weakness, ugliness, and inadequacy are permanent states. The incel watches the world pass by, a voyeur to the very life he yearns for, chasing fantasies that only deepen his alienation.

In his mind, every rejection, every failure to live up to these standards, becomes proof that he is undeserving of human closeness. The voyeuristic chase—his endless dream of being near others—becomes a self-inflicted torment. He convinces himself that he is inherently unworthy, not just by society’s standards but by some intrinsic fault of his own being.