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By David Futrelle
In 1941, writer Dorothy Thompson invented what she described as “an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game” called “Who Goes Nazi?” The idea was simple: the next time you’re at a party, or some other social gathering, take a look at those around you and try to guess which ones would, “in a showdown … go Nazi.”
You don’t do this out loud, of course, unless you really want to be punched.
The game feels as relevant at this point in history as it was when Thompson wrote her classic Harper’s essay explaining the rules of the game and offering a series of descriptions of the assorted social types she thought would (or most definitely would not) turn into literal Nazis when the chips were down — from the bank vice president who “has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer” (definitely a Nazi in embryo) to the downwardly mobile editor who manages to be intellectual without being a snob about it, about whom Thompson remarks that she “will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi.”
Thompson’s portraits of these assorted social types, and her theories about who would and wouldn’t go Nazi, are a little too pat for my tastes; she basically thinks that nice people are immune to Nazism while mean and bitter types are drawn to it like moths to a lamp.
“Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote.
They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Not far from the truth, I think, just a little oversimplified.
Still, the game itself is genius.
Over the last couple of years, for obvious reasons, Thompson’s article has been resurrected and passed around on social media, and several writers have proposed modern updates of her famous game, from the “office edition” to one focused on media figures. The only trouble with playing the game now is that so many of those who would have gone gone Nazi in Thompson’s day already have, in ours.
While the original game is still worth playing, let me propose an alternate version that might be even more entertaining for readers of this blog: Who Goes Red Pill?
Think of the various people you’ve recently met — in real life or online — and try to figure out who among them is most likely to embrace the toxic misogynistic ideology that unites the otherwise disparate groups that make up the manosphere, from MRAs to MGTOWS to incels to PUAs. What personality traits do they exhibit? What behaviors are obvious (or not-so-obvious) tells?
Are they NiceGuys (TM) stewing in aggrieved entitlement? Do they like South Park maybe a little bit too much? Do they get suspiciously angry about female superheroes? Are they fans of Pewdiepie, or Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson? Do they complain that women are sexually harassing them by wearing yoga pants? Do they know more than Chris Hansen does about age-of-consent laws? Do they describe themselves as “equity feminists” or “egalitarians?”
The game is a little trickier than it might at first appear. Some of these Jordan-Peterson-loving NiceGuys have already swallowed the Red Pill (and sometimes have even embraced the even more nilhilistic Black Pill), thus disqualifying them as candidates for the game.
Others may exhibit several seemingly obvious tells — but their flirtation with the Red Pill may end up being little more than a passing phase. I’m not sure I quite understand just what makes one person a Red-Pill-swallower and another a Red-Pill-spitter-outer. But maybe you do.
Share your own thoughts below as to what personality types you think are most drawn to the Red Pill (or to Nazism, if you’d prefer to play the original version). Let the games begin!
@ naglfar
Thank you for that link. Wow, that diagram! I thought it was the car’s horoscope. I’m none the wiser. Actually now I’m having a mental block as to how cars even go forward. But that’s my incapacity to figure out maths things; you posting the info is very much appreciated.
@ dali
Is that like how if you had a really long pair of scissors that you suddenly closed the intersection point would go faster than the speed of light?
@ stacey
I hope at some stage you get to use your bullwhip to cross a chasm, Indian Jones style!
@Katamount
I don’t think enjoying porn is bad or wrong and I don’t think one has to be always critical and I think it is ok just to enjoy it but I’m just saying that one should always remember that the people you see are people. And I love my erotic play and to me it’s like making my own live-action interactive porn but I’m doing it *with* other people. I don’t think of “consuming” it but I do see that if someone just consumes and never appreciates the reality they are desensitizing themselves to people in general. I admit without shame that I get turned on partly because I can and do objectify my slave as just a hot male pet with a ripped body and a handsome face but like I said before I could never be in that mental space to be able in the first place to enjoy him and us that way without being able to know, thanks to the people in our group that set us up and that we both trust, in the back of my mind that the real person he is really likes this too and wants to do it. We do have portraits of us taken with me posing together with him and us in full gear and yeah that’s my personal porn but I enjoy it more because the feelings of all our creativity are behind it too and to everyone else those same portraits can be just edgy art.
That’s why I was upset when my so-called friend couldn’t appreciate why I was so happy and excited pouring over photos of my slave’s beautiful body in harness and instead was all pissy and jealous. He should have been able to see why I feel that way instead of trying to guilt me into helping him deal with his disappointment I guess at me not being attracted to him.
@Alan Robertshaw
“When the wheels are each in quadrants and Saturn rises in the Pleiades, it will be able to move forward…”
I know math but not horoscopes, so that’s the best horoscope I can make up for a car.
As explained here, what happens with the scissors is that the blades cannot move faster than light but the point of contact can, as it is not a physical object. Of course, that one remains purely theoretical, as nobody has lightyear-long scissors.
@Alan
Thanks, that’s a cool thought but I haven’t learned wrapping tricks yet though I want to and besides right now anyway I have the most experience on only a 6 foot bullwhip.
Also if I were like Indiana Jones crossing a chasm in the Indy movies then I would probably be running around somewhere doing something really active where I’d be likely to come across chasm in the first place. A lot of my bodysuits that I’m always in were originally dance leotards I had altered and the gloss tights I wear all the time I love because not only do they look amazing but are really sturdy too so I’d have a superheroine look that’s also functional for Indy-style adventure with chasms to jump but I assure you most of my otherwise awesome shoes would *not* work for running around on an Indiana Jones style adventure 🙂
So I think mostly my whip is for cracking for effect to help get my point across when I’m telling a hot handsome man* I like what I want him to do. 🙂 But I do like just cracking it in general for emphasis when I’m making a point and kind of like how it intimidated former so-called friend NiceGuy
*(consenting obviously!)
@kupo
If you’re asking if I have hard data on this, I don’t. I’ll qualify that the conclusion I’ve come to is based on the arc of mainstream porn’s varying genre popularity. Gonzo didn’t come out of nowhere. The misogynistic and racist stuff didn’t come out of nowhere either and it has an impact on both performer and consumer.
@Stacey
Oh of course! The comment isn’t directed at you as much as the average “red-pilled” 4chan-dwelling CHUD who probably consumed a lot of let’s say “problematic” porn before getting that point.
@Katamount
Sure, it didn’t come out of nowhere (note to self: do NOT google gonzo), but while trends in pornography can tell us a lot about the culture and shifts in attitudes, it’s not necessarily the porn causing those shifts (I would argue it’s just as likely the other way around). We also don’t know if the majority of people consume porn (or other specific types of media, for that matter) uncritically. Someone who consumes media from one source critically might consume media from another source uncritically. I know I’m more likely to be skeptical of anything from Alex Jones than I am from Rachel Maddow. I shouldn’t just trust that Rachel has done her due diligence, but it’s taxing to be constantly critical of every piece of information. So as a species, yes, we consume a lot of things uncritically, but do the majority do so with porn? I’d need to see some studies, as I just don’t know the answer.
@ Alan Robertshaw
It’s all about relativity. Galilean relativity, that is.
If I’m walking toward the fridge, I might think, “I’m moving toward the fridge.” I’d think this because I’m using various bodily functions to move toward the fridge. I’m the cause of this situation. However, if I were to take measurements on the fridge while walking toward it, the results would be (roughly) the same as if the fridge were moving toward me. Measurements of velocity only care about the relative movement itself, not what caused it. I think people can get confused because they equate frames of reference with points of view.
It’s basically the same thing with a wheel. If I’m just spinning a wheel around, I see that all points on the edge of the wheel are travelling at the same speed. That’s still true if the wheel is moving along the ground, only we’re talking relative to the axle. The reason different parts of the wheel move at different speeds relative to the ground (and stationary observers and such) is just that the axle is moving relative to the ground. It doesn’t really matter what the original cause of the movement is, whether it’s a shopping cart manually being pushed or a car engine making the wheel spin. Assuming that the wheel isn’t slipping on the ground at all, we see that if the wheel is travelling at some velocity v “forward” relative to the ground, then (as a logical equivalence, regardless of which is physically causing which) the top of the wheel must be travelling at a velocity v “forward” relative to the axle, and the bottom must be travelling at a velocity v “backward” relative to the axle. Relative to the ground / a bystander, the top is moving at 2 x v “forward” while the bottom has 0 velocity.
I think maybe another point of confusion is that we’re talking about exact points on a wheel at exact times. It can be hard to imagine the concept of one exact point on something not moving at some exact time while the rest of the thing is. I think Zeno’s paradox presents a similar confusion. How can anything be moving at any exact point in time if every exact point A has a closer exact point B you have to get to in order to reach point A? Essentially, you’re trying to divide 0 by 0. Of course, we have calculus techniques to get around this problem and be able to talk about things having a particular velocity at a particular time. It’s just that this isn’t as helpful when talking philosophically about how things move overall.
@kupo, Katamount
I’m not sure about whether people are doing uncritical vs critical consumption, but I do know that many people don’t have the knowledge to do critical consumption. A number of studies have been published showing that teens get most of their sex education from porn since many districts don’t teach anything other than abstinence (mine didn’t even require the course for graduation, so nobody I knew took any health classes past elementary school). If you don’t have any frame of reference critical consumption becomes impossible.
@stacey
Oddly enough, 12 footers are easier to handle, certainly if your primary aim is to crack it for effect.
Used to use one for shifting sheep – a whipcrack alongside them will turn the stubbornest one back onto the path. Obvious note – we never used them ON the sheep. Tough animals, but they don’t take to rough handling at all. They’ll literally lay down and die of fright if they’re hurt.
(My uncle were violently allergic to dogs, so he couldn’t have them to help but there were plenty of kids around to do the herding.)
@Shadowplay
Yes, I learned about that being true. I pushed myself to practice with a shorter whip because I’m usually wanting to crack it in places where I’m likely to have less physical space to work with in terms of people and physical stuff around.
Plus I also have to think how it looks with style and so on when I’m wearing it holstered (I’m petite). The longer ones can look cool anyway though as well as being easier. I remember being inspired by Isabella Sinclair and that famous pistachio nut commercial when I was younger and still am. That takes more room though.
But maybe it’ll work out because lately with my guy friends I’ve been setting more boundaries in terms of them respecting my personal space and rather than just hanging out casually for example I am starting to really prefer a little more structure. Like ideally, rather than “hey Stacey want to meet in XXX [our favorite coffeeshop]” and we just both sit down beside each other to chat casually, with the guy friends I’d ideally wish I could be posed on my little stage like I stand on at work sometimes and there’s like a set distance that they have to stand back behind if they want to see me and talk or whatever. If I had that I could set it so I could crack a longer bullwhip (which would look cool). The practicalities of that are tough because like where am I going to do that regularly? And also my little mini stage that I like although it isn’t big it isn’t too easy to just carry around. I do like the idea though as it’ll separate the real guy friends from the NiceGuys (TM) or at least it could so I’m trying to figure out the logistics or it and my boss the owner of the place where I work or her friend the owner of our favorite coffee shop nearby who likes me and always supports me might be able to help me.
@rv97
Must everything be about your hatred for religious folks?
Actually, that’s one for the Who Goes Redpill test: derailing every conversation to be about how much you hate [group] because [extreme overgeneralization]
The majority of commentators on this blog are women, specifically feminist women. We know about the root causes of misogyny. We know that society contains toxic messages that affect us all. We know that even allies of ours have been affected by the baseline misogyny of our society. We know how common it is for men to fall into these pitfalls, because we often deal with men like this every single day. Saying “oh hey I had some bad attitudes as a kid that could have gotten worse” isn’t telling us anything new, it’s just a reminder of the constant, exhausting, grinding reality we live within.
Is the discussion of how people descend down these paths important? Yes. Is it important to realize your own capacity for being bigoted and challenge the toxic assumptions that we learn as children? Absolutely.
Is this the place to have that discussion? No.
Look, I’m white. I’m painfully white, and I know that I picked up some racist attitudes as a result of being raised in a racist society. I work hard to try to excise those pieces of me, and I’m aware that if I don’t make this effort, then I will become someone who contributes to the problem of racism.
But if I went into a board filled with people of color discussing racist actions and attitudes against them and went “hey, I’m white, and I could have become a white supremacist if conditions had been different for me! We should discuss about how white people have that capability and how much of a problem it is.”, then I’m not only saying nothing they don’t already know, I’d be implying that that community, full of people of color who experience racism, should be the one addressing the racism problem, since that is where I’m choosing to try to indulge in that discussion.
Do you see why this kind of thing might be tiresome and uncomfortable for them?
@Alan, Naglfar:
One of my high school physics teachers said that you could pass the course just by knowing and applying two facts: ‘F=ma’ and ‘you can’t push on a rope’. True to form for her, one of the questions on the final exam actually did involve a situation where the simple solution would end up with a negative tension on a rope just to see who missed the ‘you can’t push on a rope’ part.
Also, the scissors bit… whether or not the crossing point of the scissors can travel faster than light actually depends on the situation. Basically, you can’t send any information at all faster than light… so when you start to close the scissors, the fastest the crossing point can move is the speed of sound in the metal. The metal isn’t perfectly rigid, and when you start moving one end, the other end can’t move until the force propagates down its length. If you had a single blade a light year long, it would take much more than a year between you wiggling one end before the other end moved.
The only way to get the crossing point to go faster than light would be to have two already-moving blades slide past each other, at which point there isn’t any information moving either.
At great enough scales, even supposedly rigid objects might as well be ropes.
(Hmm, posts have moved down, must be a few unlocked posts on the first page…)
@kupo, Naglfar
Excellent points. I certainly had decent sex ed in school (at least, for the time period). Ideally proper sex ed curriculum would intervene before porn becomes the way young people learn about sex.
@kupo
I’ve found an accepting church, but it makes me angry and disappointed that they would have little influence. I live in a university town, and despite universities’ leftist reputation, some of its students and societies are not.
One religious student society in one of these universities (the better known one) is far less accepting of groups such as feminists and the LGBT community. Sadly, such societies are often the first port of call for students who consider themselves Christian.
I find it difficult to not be angry with mainstream religious groups, especially since I’m going to be expected to be with family this Christmas because it’s “family”. Those churches are not liberating for me because I can’t enjoy being my “decadent” self for wanting to not conform to gender and sexuality norms, even though I don’t want to have sex with anyone for the foreseeable future.
Online, I see almost no one who’s religious and liberal – indeed, they may be the ones pushing for the very things this website stands for, such as restrooms on Reddit or even one person on Tumblr I encountered who wanted gays dead in more countries than just a couple of Muslim-majority ones “for the glory of God”. I feel like we’re fighting a losing battle every day.
On the porn thing: I actually ended up making some of my own dubious quality smutty fiction specifically because porn gave no context to who the people in it really were and I didn’t like that. Like any story, being able to relate to the characters or at least know why they’re doing what they’re doing makes a considerable difference.
To be more on topic, these traits seem to be quite common in potentially redpilled folks:
*Refusal to take responsibility for one’s failures
*Entitlement (sexual or otherwise)
*Indoctrination into traditionalist views, especially if they refuse to expose themselves to anything contradicting said views
*Frustration, usually with circumstances nobody could control
*Desire to control others
*(For women) Fear of making own decisions, desire to let someone else tell them what they should do instead of doing it themselves and possibly making a mistake
There are probably more than this but this is a start.
@Anonymous
TMI warning: I did the same thing, mostly because 1) I didn’t like the lack of context, like you said, and 2) it allowed me to cater to all of my own fetishes and explore them when a lot of more mainstream content didn’t. It also allowed me to write myself and whoever I was dating/had a crush on/had dated at the time into it, which added context. It was all horrible quality and didn’t make much sense, but it was good enough for me to use by myself. Never showed it to anyone else.
As far as who would go Red-Pill, I think it is somewhat inherently flawed, because in the end the biggest denominator is the interest and choice to pursue such a narrative in the first place.
It’s not necessarily people who are, for lack of a better word, “bitter” who end up joining hate groups. I have often found that when people go through abuse they can also end up with an overdeveloped sense of empathy, which makes them less likely to join such groups.
Then again, there are people who go through abuse only to end up becoming abusers themselves, and I’m sad to say the ratio I’ve seen of such people in my life has been abount 50/50.
And I wish I could say it’s all about the mindset, whether or not you are one of the type of people who suffers and says to themselves “I don’t want anyone the have to go through what I went”, instead of the ones who say “why should anyone have it better than me?”, but it’s not that either.
I have met abuse survivors who started with that mindset, of making life better for their offspring, and yet they ended up becoming an even more monstruous abuser than their own, and in a short amount of time too.
Is it belief in authority? Entitlement? Self-destruction? I’d be lying if I claimed I had the answer to it.
From the looks of it, men need a safe space to talk about male-driven issues which mostly affect women, but feminist spaces are the only semi-safe space most have to talk about it. Maybe someone should get on that? Unfortunately the few places I’ve heard of eventually became overrun by the misogynosphere, so that’d be a challenge.
On the original subject, the only person who I associate with who I’d say maybe go red-piller is, sadly, my brother. (Though I’d expect MRA would be more likely than redpill, if we’re being specific.) I haven’t associated with him that much for a long time, so there’s even a chance he’s secretly gone down that road already. But for all his faults, I doubt he’d ever go Nazi; he’s never shown any sign of being racist or antisemitic, and has expressed that Nazis are weak losers who have to rely on a moronic conspiracy theory to feel powerful; and also that they’re “wannabe orcs”. The latter is more disdainful than it might come across, “orcs” are hero fodder, or something like that.
Sorry I haven’t had time to come back and reply. But thanks, Leum and Definitely not Steve for being understanding. FWIW, I’m not angry at anyone here, just…exhausted may be the word I’m looking for?
Snowberry,
There’s definitely a need, and it’s a damn shame that social justice oriented men’s spaces always fall to misogyny sooner or later. Looking at you, Good Men Project. I hope someday there’s one that sticks, but given the great peril women’s rights are in at the moment, I just don’t see women having the capacity to take the burden on right now. Not that you’re suggesting that women do it, just adding to your comment.
@Snowberry
Any discussion of men’s issues seems to turn into a MRA circlejerk very quickly, and I do think many could be helped by a safe place for men to talk about men’s issues. I’m not sure how one would go about this, but I’m not a man so I’m probably not the person to do this anyway. I’ve seen a few attempts to start men against rape societies, but I’m not sure how those went in the long term.
A few years ago Ozymandias tried something of the sort, but that was discontinued. Anyone here interested in picking up the torch?
@Catalpa,
For what it’s worth, I saw my post as directly relevant to the question posed in the OP.
I think we can agree that going Nazi is not a genetically predetermined trait. Whether someone would go Nazi depends on the life experiences, teachings, and messages a person has received and when.
I saw my post as providing a data point: “here’s a set of experiences I had and messages I internalized, and I didn’t go Nazi.”
Pondering what it would have taken to push me over the edge is a highly uncomfortable line of questioning, and one which I subject myself to sometimes because I’m a psychological masochist I guess. But if going Nazi isn’t genetically predetermined, then that set of hypothetical circumstances exists for literally everyone – and that’s terrifying!
It’s not supposed to be fun to talk about, but I guess I did not appreciate the degree of visceral revulsion it would invoke. Probably because I’m used to psychologically torturing myself.
But this is the line of thinking that the OP leads me down, no matter how I parse it. Who would go Nazi? It’s a complicated question, and I don’t think that any honest answer won’t also be uncomfortable.
@Definitely not Steve
“Which people would go nazi based on what Iknow of them?” is a completely different question from “what set of circumstances would it take for me to become a nazi?”
@kupo,
But knowing the answer to the second question helps you answer the first one, yes?