Every time I hear this phrase my hackles rise.
This Guy--who is he? Some ill-informed, jobless jerk who spends his time trolling good, valuable, employed people, who spreads lies and seeds dissent, who wastes our time. Apparently.
What is this? Why have we as a pack decided to blame our ills on Russian spies and young men who we have decided are too afraid or too stupid to join the world as we have in a responsible way? It is such a familiar story. Russian spies aside--these are very real indeed, if we can believe our ears and eyes--time after time as a society we find a scapegoat for all our bad behaviours and blame them. Generally someone who cannot possibly defend themselves. Faggots. Jews. Fallen women. Guys in their mother's basements.
I don't know a lot of mothers who have basements, but I know a lot of young men who are consigned or consign themselves (where the line lies, I don't know) to withdrawal into the relative safety of their parent's home, away from a world that has battered and at times defeated them, who participate in that world mostly through their interactions with their families and the internet.
They are not trolls, funnily enough. Some I don't know well enough to fathom, but some I do. These are deeply intelligent, deeply perceptive, and deeply wounded survivors of a world that grinds people who fall outside the norm into a bloody paste. They are my beloved friends, whose futures I fear for, and when callous and thoughtless pundits and otherwise fair-minded people allow themselves to lazily blame people who are in many ways victims of the same system they themselves decry instead of looking carefully into why we normal every day people do terrible things to each other at the drop of a hat, I fume inside.
Not everyone who lives in his mother's basement is even wounded. Some of them simply live in a society that makes it impossible for everyone to make a good enough living to have their own home. Some of them are taking care of their mother, who is ill or old or lonely. Some of them are just young, and haven't figured out what move they want to make next.
Sure, some guys in their mother's basements are treacherous goofs. Lots of guys in high towers are, too. Why? What makes us this way? This is the question we need to ask ourselves, honestly and with vigour. And leave the wounded isolates alone.
Image: "Are online gamers really unpopular, overweight, and socially inept? Science weighs in." By Seriously Science | January 7, 2014 7:00 am
