The Matthew Effect

The other day I read about Thomas Eagleton, a US senator who suffered depression and underwent electroconvulsive therapy for it. Later on when he ran as vice presidential candidate, the newspapers reported on this fact and he was dropped from the ticket, replaced by Sargent Shriver. He lost because he was depressed and he was depressed because he lost.

This is basically an example of the Matthew Effect in action. Whatever advantages of disadvantages you have in life have the effect of cascading down the mountain like a snowball. The disadvantaged tend to accumulate more disadvantages, whereas advantages result in more advantages.

A typical example of the Matthew effect can be seen with sexual abuse. Girls who are abused in childhood are more likely to end up abused again when they’re adults. Your personality and behavior are just altered, you come off in a way that makes people think they can get away with victimizing you again. You also tend to fail to develop stable relationships, so this sets you up for abuse too.

It works like this with everything else too. Successful people aren’t just richer, they’re taller, healthier, more intelligent, have more friends, live longer and pass their success on to their children. This also means when people cause you to fail in your youth, for example, by abusing you, they essentially set you up to fail for the rest of your life. Failure in one area, sets you up for failure in other areas as well.

Over time, failure in every sense of the word tends to congregate together, just as success tends to congregate together. Successful athletes end up living in the same neighborhoods as successful businessmen, while those with various traumas, mental illnesses and addictions end up living in neighborhoods where the unsuccessful congregate.

People generally don’t like to think of themselves as losers, nor do they like to think about how success and failure both cascade. We wish to think of ourselves as in control over our own destiny. Society encourages this too, it tries to get you “back up your feet again” and tells you that “the best revenge is living well”.

But in the era of the Internet, people can break free and enter into contact with others. This leads to phenomena like “incels”, “blackpills” and “doomers”. These are people who don’t try to get back up on their feet again. Instead they interpret society itself as fundamentally flawed in some sense, or they go a step further and interpret biological reality itself as such.

Mainstream society tries to discourage this of course, but it generally lacks the tools to do so. People who hate society now find each other regardless. A common example you’ll see among the incels is that they just view themselves as objectively ugly. They’re fixated on the idea of there being objective beauty standards that they’ll never fit into.

It’s dangerous for society when the losers start self-identifying as losers, because society only functions when everyone is willing to participate. People only participate, as long as they don’t recognize they got the short end of the stick. You see for example in America, that people think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. If they didn’t, the system wouldn’t function.

The way communism was defeated was by countering this idea that you’re part of a particular social stratum you’ll never escape. Maybe you’re a garment maker, but studying hard allows your son to become an apothecary. This dream of upward social mobility is how capitalism made life tolerable for the underclass.

But today there’s a newly emerging proletariat. We now have young men who realize they can spend their whole lives climbing the social ladder, but it’s never going to get them teenage love. More dangerous than a man with nothing left to lose, is a man who sees nothing left to win.