G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. There is a substantial body of research that overlaps with what you're describing, although I don't think the literature normally packages the whole mechanism quite the way you just did.

The closest translation of your hypothesis into political/social psychology would be something like:

Diffuse insecurity or threat → need to make the threat cognitively manageable → attachment to an in-group → attribution of the threat to identifiable out-groups → racialized hostility.

The important distinction in your version is that race isn't necessarily where the process starts. Race can become the container into which a much broader anxiety gets poured.

There are several established pieces of this

One is intolerance of uncertainty / threat generalization. People differ considerably in how well they tolerate an uncertain future. Experimental work finds that people high in intolerance of uncertainty have more trouble restricting a learned threat to the thing that actually predicted danger; the threat response spreads to things that merely resemble it. citeturn0search2

That's remarkably close to the first half of what you're proposing: something is wrong; I cannot confidently delimit what it is; therefore a much larger category starts feeling dangerous.

Then there's a huge literature on intergroup threat, authoritarianism, and uncertainty reduction. A major Annual Review of Psychology survey explicitly lists uncertainty reduction and threat among the motivational explanations for intergroup bias. Another long-term review of authoritarianism emphasizes its relationship with perceived threat. citeturn1search0turn1search1

And then you get something especially interesting when you move into American racial politics: status threat.

Diana Mutz's well-known longitudinal study followed the same people from 2012 to 2016 rather than merely comparing demographic groups. She found little evidence that deterioration in people's own financial circumstances explained movement toward Donald. What did track the change was perceived threat to established social status: declining American dominance internationally and the prospect of whites becoming a numerical minority domestically. citeturn0search0

And the language becomes extraordinarily close to yours. Mutz describes a constellation in which people who thought whites were increasingly discriminated against also tended to think Christians and men were increasingly discriminated against. In other words, it wasn't simply:

Black people → racial fear.

It looked more like:

The familiar hierarchy of the world is changing → people like me are losing their place → multiple groups representing that change become threatening. citeturn0search0

That matters for your hypothesis because the threatening categories aren't interchangeable by race, but they're correlated manifestations of a larger perception that "my world is being taken away."

There's even evidence for your proposed bridge from generalized fear into racial fear

A particularly interesting 2026 experiment looked at fear generalization involving Black and white faces. Participants were conditioned to associate particular individuals with an aversive stimulus. People who generally regarded the world as dangerous were especially likely to generalize threat across unfamiliar Black faces; importantly, the racial asymmetry showed up more in their judgments of who constituted the threat than in their physiological fear responses. citeturn0search3

That's not proof of your political hypothesis. But it's a pretty fascinating piece of the mechanism you're imagining: general threat sensitivity can interact with racial categorization so that race becomes a way of organizing otherwise broader threat perception.

There is also evidence connecting actual economic insecurity to racialized interpretation. One study found that affective economic insecurity—essentially anxiety about one's economic circumstances rather than simply objectively being poor—correlated with racial resentment, perceived racial competition in the labor market, and immigration attitudes; an experiment supported a causal effect on perceived racialized labor competition. citeturn1search4

So there really is empirical support for something like:

"I'm afraid about my economic future" → "they're taking our jobs."

The second statement has something psychologically useful that the first doesn't: a subject, an object, and an implied solution.

That's the part of your model I find particularly interesting.

If the problem is modernity, technological change, declining community, economic uncertainty, demographic change, loss of occupational status, international competition, children living differently from you, changing sexual norms, unfamiliar language, changing religion, and uncertainty about whether your own way of life will continue—there isn't anybody you can fight.

But:

"Immigrants are doing this."

is cognitively tractable.

Now there is an agent. There is a boundary. There is an imagined previous state. And there are imaginable actions: deport them, close the border, prohibit something, restore an old norm, elect someone promising restoration.

That doesn't make the resulting racial prejudice unreal. Etiology and behavior are different questions. Someone who discriminates against another racial group is exhibiting racial prejudice regardless of why that prejudice developed.

But your distinction could be useful for explaining why apparently racial attitudes can sometimes change extremely quickly. A deeply internalized belief that another race is inherently inferior shouldn't necessarily fluctuate dramatically when somebody hears that China is becoming economically powerful or that America will eventually become majority-minority. Yet experiments find that reminders of changing racial demographics can increase racial bias and support for hierarchy-restoring politics. citeturn0search0turn1search14

That looks much more like a threat system recruiting race than race necessarily generating the entire threat system.

There is an important limit, though. We shouldn't run the causal arrow entirely backward and conclude that what looks like racism is secretly economic/cultural anxiety. Several studies specifically testing that explanation find racial prejudice or ethnocentrism remains a much stronger predictor of immigration attitudes and Donald support than objective economic hardship. citeturn1search7turn1search13turn1search15

So I would divide the population conceptually into at least three overlapping cases:

1. Racism → threat. Someone already holds racial hierarchy/prejudice beliefs and interprets events through them.
2. Threat → racism. Someone experiences generalized/status/economic/cultural insecurity and racial categories provide a convenient target and explanation.
3. Feedback loop. Probably the most interesting case: insecurity increases out-group hostility; racialized explanations then provide evidence for the person's sense that the world is threatening; that heightened threat produces still more out-group hostility.

Your idea is principally #2, and the research says that mechanism is plausible and demonstrably exists. What I haven't found yet is a defensible number saying something like "X% of people conventionally classified as racially resentful are actually primarily generalized-threat people." The literature tends to measure racial resentment, authoritarianism, status threat, economic anxiety, ethnocentrism, etc. as competing or interacting variables rather than sorting people etiologically into the categories you're proposing.

And one small correction to your historical analogy: yes, the Luddites were English, beginning around Nottingham in 1811. But they're actually an even better analogy if we remove the popular misconception. They weren't generally idiots terrified of machines. They were skilled textile workers confronting enormous economic and social upheaval who targeted particular machinery being used to undermine established labor practices and wages. Britain's National Archives describes the protests explicitly as resistance to changes that they believed would make their lives substantially worse. citeturn0search8turn0search6

So your analogy becomes:

The world is changing in a frightening and uncontrollable way → identify a concrete embodiment of that change → attack the embodiment.

For the Luddites, the machine could become the tangible object representing a much larger transformation of economic life.

In the mechanism you're proposing, the racial/cultural out-group can serve the same psychological function.

And I think your phrase "it is easier to be afraid of them than to admit you're afraid of everything" is actually a remarkably compact statement of the hypothesis. The literature gives us most of the individual arrows. What we'd need to investigate next is whether anyone has explicitly tested targeted prejudice as an uncertainty-management strategy rather than merely showing that generalized threat increases prejudice. That is where your version seems narrower—and potentially more interesting—than the standard "status threat causes racial resentment" account.

G: Yes — that changes the model in an important way. The core isn’t “uncertainty spreads into prejudice”; it’s closer to “a totalizing threat to one’s competence/status/self-story is too psychologically expensive to represent honestly, so it gets compressed into a blameable enemy.” I’m going to treat that as the working model and look for adjacent theories rather than trying to force it into one existing label.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. With that clarification, I think “diffuse insecurity” is actually the wrong center of gravity. Your model is much more about an intolerable explanation of the self.

The feared proposition is something like:

I do not understand the world well enough to reliably succeed in it; other people are succeeding according to rules I don’t grasp; I may not be especially important; and there may be no identifiable person responsible for my position.

That is a much harsher psychological proposition than “I’m worried about change.” It attacks agency, competence, status, and the ordinary human assumption that one’s own life constitutes a reasonably coherent story.

Then your proposed mechanism is compression.

The full causal representation—

“I am surrounded by an enormously complicated world populated by millions of people pursuing goals I only partly understand, my position within it is uncertain, many people are beating me at games whose rules I don't know, and some of my disappointments may simply be consequences of my own limitations, luck, or impersonal systems”

—is almost unusable as an everyday emotional model.

Whereas:

“Women are ruining things.”
“Immigrants are taking it.”
“Wokeness did this.”
“Old people ruined the country.”
“Kids today are destroying it.”

is usable.

Suddenly there is a culprit. Better still, the culprit is bounded. Most of humanity stops being implicated.

That last piece distinguishes what you're proposing from ordinary scapegoat theory. The scapegoat doesn't merely provide someone to blame. It reduces the apparent size of the hostile universe.

Instead of:

ME ↔︎ an incomprehensible world

you get:

ME + normal people ↔︎ THEM

And that is, perversely, a less frightening worldview.

The research I just checked has pieces that fit this extremely well, although again I wouldn't claim anyone has established your full model. The collective-narcissism literature is particularly suggestive. Collective narcissism isn't merely liking your group; it's the combination of believing that your group deserves recognition and feeling that other people are improperly withholding it. It's associated with seeing the group as chronically threatened and outsiders as hostile. citeturn271451search5turn271451search8

More importantly for your model, some of its known predictors include low personal control, low self-esteem, attachment anxiety, and low political knowledge. A 2025 experimental paper also found that threatening people's sense of their group's distinct identity could actually increase collective narcissism, which then increased hostility toward the implicated out-group. citeturn271451search2

That's awfully close to:

“I don't securely know who/where I am” → strengthen an identity boundary → identify whoever is outside it as the problem.

And conspiracy research provides another interesting piece. A meta-analytic review argues that collective narcissism makes conspiratorial explanations attractive partly because they resolve an uncomfortable discrepancy: our group is important and deserving, yet things aren't going the way they should. The conspiracy supplies a reason why. citeturn271451search0turn271451search1

That's almost exactly your “failure must have been caused” element.

Because there are several psychologically very different statements:

“I didn't get what I expected.”

“I didn't get what I expected because I made mistakes.”

“I didn't get what I expected because the world is complicated and nobody particularly controls the outcome.”

“I didn't get what I expected because THEY prevented me.”

The fourth is uniquely protective. It preserves three things at once:

I deserved to win.
I understand why I lost.
There is something I can fight.

And that may be the stronger engine in the model than fear itself.

There's even an existing concept that partially intersects with it: aggrieved entitlement. It describes the combination of expecting a certain social position and experiencing its loss or nonreceipt as an injustice. Recent work characterizes it as superiority or entitlement combined with anxiety that one's group is being deprived of what it deserves. citeturn271451search12

But I wouldn't make that the name for your whole model, because you're proposing something broader. A person doesn't necessarily have to think:

“As a white man, I deserve X.”

They might start considerably farther upstream:

“A person like me should be doing better than this.”

Then they need to determine what “a person like me” means.

And that's where political movements can supply the category.

Maybe it becomes white.

Maybe male.

Maybe Christian.

Maybe heterosexual.

Maybe native-born.

Maybe “traditional.”

Maybe young.

Maybe rural.

Maybe “real Americans.”

The striking feature of your model is therefore that the identity category can be downstream of the grievance rather than its source.

That also explains the phenomenon you mentioned where somebody successively turns out to be racist, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-immigrant, hostile toward young people, hostile toward educated people, etc. At some point, instead of positing twelve independent prejudices, a simpler latent variable becomes attractive:

the acceptable in-group keeps shrinking until it approximates “people sufficiently like me that their existence does not threaten my explanation of myself.”

There I think siege mentality is an excellent descriptive phrase.

I'd model the entire thing roughly as:

1. Expected protagonist status
“I should be able to understand my life and have a reasonable path toward success.”

→

2. Repeated contradiction
Other people succeed; institutions change; social rules seem opaque; outcomes don't correspond neatly to effort or merit.

→

3. Threat to self-explanation
“Maybe I don't understand the world. Maybe I'm ordinary. Maybe I caused some of this. Maybe nobody caused it.”

→

4. Explanatory pressure
Failure feels as though it must have an agent.

→

5. Enemy compression
A social narrative offers a bounded culprit.

→

6. Identity construction
“If they caused it, then there must be an us they harmed.”

→

7. Siege worldview
More disappointments are assimilated into the same structure.

→

8. Expanding enemy categories
When one culprit cannot explain everything, additional threatening classes are incorporated.

And then you get the person who apparently has a bespoke prejudice against half the census.

One tension I would preserve rather than resolve in your favor is the word “mischaracterized.” I think you're onto something important etiologically, but saying the result isn't really racism risks mixing levels.

If someone thinks Black people are damaging society and supports disadvantaging Black people, racism is still an accurate description of that portion of the resulting belief system, even if racial difference wasn't the original psychological cause.

It's analogous to fever. If an infection causes a fever, “fever” isn't a misdiagnosis simply because it doesn't identify the pathogen.

So I might formulate your objection this way instead:

We may be accurately identifying the expression as racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., while badly misidentifying the underlying pathology as a collection of narrow prejudices.

That preserves what people are actually doing while making your deeper point.

And it would explain something otherwise rather odd about the modern cluster you mentioned—groypers, trad ideology, racial resentment, manosphere misogyny, anti-LGBT politics, intense nostalgia. Their substantive positions differ, but an astonishing amount of the rhetoric shares one underlying grammatical structure:

There was an intelligible order.
People like you had a place in it.
You were entitled to expect certain outcomes.
Someone disrupted that order.
Your disappointments therefore aren't evidence that you misunderstood the world.
They are evidence that somebody stole the world you were supposed to inherit.

That is much closer to the thing you're describing than simple “fear of change.”

And it suggests a concise working label that I think may be useful while we develop it:

bounded-enemy compression — taking an unbearable or socially humiliating general explanation of one's diminished agency and compressing it into a finite hostile category.

Not necessarily the eventual academic-sounding term, but it captures your distinctive claim: the smaller hatred may actually be psychologically preferable to the larger fear. memcite

G: Yes. I think that modification makes the model substantially stronger, because “I don't understand why I failed” is different from “I don't want to admit that I failed.” My previous version leaned too heavily toward ego protection.

What you're describing doesn't require someone to secretly know the correct explanation and reject it. In many modern systems, there may genuinely be no human-scale explanation available.

Take your influencer example. Suppose two people are comparably talented and work comparably hard. One gets 700 views; another gets 7 million. The difference could involve timing, network effects, recommendation algorithms, early random engagement, audience composition, competition at that particular moment, and feedback effects in which an initially random advantage produces subsequent real advantages.

Asking the unsuccessful person “Why didn't you make it?” may therefore have no satisfying answer beyond:

A complicated stochastic system produced this particular outcome.

Humans aren't particularly well equipped to make that into a story.

And I think your lottery comparison needs one small modification that actually strengthens it. A literal lottery advertises itself as random. The person buying a ticket at least theoretically knows that the causal mechanism is chance. Modern social competition often looks meritocratic while containing enormous stochastic components.

That's much nastier psychologically.

If I lose Powerball, there's nothing mysterious about why Fred won. Fred had the right numbers.

But if Fred has 4 million TikTok followers and I have 600, the system presents us with a thousand potential causal explanations. Was Fred funnier? Better looking? More charismatic? Did he post at the right time? Did somebody influential share him? Did the algorithm happen to test his video against a receptive population? Did his first 300 viewers randomly interact at a slightly higher rate, causing another recommendation cycle?

And crucially:

Could Fred do exactly the same thing again and reliably reproduce the outcome?

Quite possibly not.

So we're dealing with something beyond ordinary failure. I'd call it causal illegibility for purposes of the model.

And I think your circle analogy fixes another problem

I described the enemy as bounded. You're saying that's true from an external analytical perspective but can be backwards phenomenologically.

The person isn't necessarily thinking:

“The enormous frightening world has been reduced to immigrants.”

It's more like:

“Here are the things I understand and can control. Everything outside this circle is responsible for preventing the expected result.”

So the important boundary isn't really around the enemy.

It's around the comprehensible world.

That's a much better model.

Your circle may contain:

me → family → familiar culture → familiar gender roles → familiar occupations → familiar religion → familiar social hierarchy → comprehensible cause-and-effect.

Outside it sits an enormous system of unfamiliar people, technologies, institutions, norms, algorithms, economic forces, cultures and probabilities.

Then somebody supplies an explanation:

“DEI is why you didn't get the job.”

That's extraordinarily cognitively attractive—not necessarily because the person began with intense racial animus, but because now the event has become legible.

I deserved the job.
Someone intervened.
I know who.
I know why.
I know what political action would prevent it.

Causal legibility has been restored.

And there's another important thing buried in what you said: false agency may be preferable to true randomness even when the supposed agent is hostile.

If the algorithm hates me, I can try to beat the algorithm.

If women are deliberately excluding men, I can oppose feminism.

If immigrants took my economic position, I can support deportation.

If elites conspired against people like me, I can overthrow the elites.

But if:

“Nobody decided this. You're one observation in a gigantic probability distribution and this is simply where you landed.”

there is nothing to fight.

And, as you point out, fighting is ordinarily an extremely adaptive human response. Persistence, causal inference, detecting agency, learning from failure, identifying competitors—these aren't psychiatric abnormalities. They're enormously useful traits.

The failure mode arises when the brain insists:

Outcome → cause → potentially identifiable agent

in a situation where the actual structure is:

Outcome → enormous causal network + probability + feedback + historical contingency.

Then the machinery that ordinarily lets us learn from failure starts manufacturing explanations because there isn't enough information available to complete the causal model correctly.

That also changes how I'd treat the Internet

I agree with your objection to making low self-esteem, anxiety, authoritarian personality, etc. prerequisites. Those things could increase susceptibility without constituting the mechanism.

The information environment changes the exposure rate.

A person in 1970 might have an ordinary disappointing day. They don't get promoted. Somebody else does. They go home, complain to their spouse, watch television, and eventually the emotional signal decays.

The contemporary equivalent can immediately encounter:

• somebody younger earning millions;
• somebody prettier receiving enormous attention;
• somebody apparently less talented succeeding;
• somebody from another country living better;
• somebody saying people of their demographic are being systematically cheated;
• somebody providing an explanation for exactly why;
• and an online community containing 40,000 people reporting apparently corroborating experiences.

And here's where I think your model gets particularly powerful: the Internet doesn't merely increase negative information. It massively increases the number of counterfactual lives against which a person can compare their actual life.

A village gives you maybe a few hundred comparison targets.

Mass media gave you celebrities, but celebrities were obviously exceptional.

Social media gives you effectively limitless people presented as peers.

That's different.

The psychological question stops being:

“Why am I not Elvis Presley?”

Nobody needed an elaborate explanation for that.

It becomes:

“Why did that asshole get rich posting videos from his bedroom when I didn't?”

And the system provides very poor causal answers while simultaneously providing an effectively infinite supply of people willing to provide extremely confident false ones.

So I think the model we're constructing now looks more like this:

Normal human expectations of agency and causal intelligibility

→ enormous, stochastic, networked society whose outcomes exceed intuitive causal understanding

→ unprecedented visibility of other people's apparently comparable successes

→ failure/disappointment without a satisfying causal account

→ continued search for an agent because causal search and persistence are normally adaptive

→ availability of socially supplied explanations identifying hostile agents

→ restoration of causal legibility and therefore perceived agency

→ construction/reinforcement of an intelligible in-group boundary

→ racism / misogyny / xenophobia / conspiracism / reactionary traditionalism become different possible expressions of the same upstream problem

→ and, once adopted, the explanatory system begins generating its own confirming evidence.

That last stage is where an ordinary human vulnerability can become something much more pathological-looking without requiring an unusually pathological starting personality.

And there's a fascinating inversion in your circle metaphor.

The person thinks they've drawn a circle around the problem:

“Those people are what's wrong.”

But they've actually drawn a circle around the portion of reality they can explain.

Everything outside the circle remains just as enormous as before. They've merely renamed it.

That suggests “bounded-enemy compression” probably isn't the right working label anymore. Something like causal enclosure gets much closer: constructing a sufficiently small causal world that one's successes and failures once again appear intelligible and actionable.

The racism, sexism, conspiracism, etc. aren't necessarily the enclosure itself. They're materials available for building its walls.

And that would make a very interesting next empirical question—not “Does insecurity cause prejudice?”, which has been beaten half to death, but whether increasing causal illegibility combined with exposure to peer success predicts attraction to agentic/blame-based explanations even among psychologically ordinary people. That's much closer to the model you've now articulated.

G: Yes. I think that extension works if we formulate the group difference as an asymmetry in available explanations, rather than an asymmetry in psychological resilience.

In other words, your model doesn't require:

White Western men are unusually bad at handling failure.

It proposes:

Some identities come with culturally preinstalled explanations for undeserved failure; historically dominant identities have fewer socially legitimate ones.

That distinction matters enormously.

A woman can fail at something for completely mundane reasons and nevertheless has an explanatory vocabulary immediately available: maybe sexism contributed. A Black American has racism available. A poor rural person has class and geographic marginalization. An immigrant has xenophobia or language barriers.

Those explanations can be correct, partly correct, or completely incorrect in a particular case. For your model, that's almost beside the point. The psychological resource is that society has already told the person:

“Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose because something outside you was pushing the other direction.”

That's actually a fairly healthy lesson about how the world works.

And your hypothetical suburban white Baptist man certainly can encounter discrimination or structural disadvantages—class, disability, geography, family circumstances, appearance, etc. But insofar as he experiences himself as occupying the culturally “default” categories, there isn't an equally obvious default-category explanation available for an otherwise inexplicable loss.

So when the causal system returns:

FAILURE: REASON UNKNOWN

he has an unusually interesting explanatory problem.

Your college example captures it particularly well

Suppose there are 10,000 applicants and our hypothetical student is academically in the top 2%: 200 people.

Even before considering anything else, “top 2%” doesn't imply admission if there are far fewer appropriate places than excellent candidates. And elite admissions deliberately incorporate dimensions other than grades.

But subjectively, he possesses an extremely powerful fact:

“I did what they told me to do.”

Good grades → good university → good career → successful adulthood.

Then the promised transition doesn't occur.

The statistically sophisticated explanation—

“There were hundreds or thousands of qualified candidates, selection was multidimensional, tiny differences and institutional priorities mattered, and stochastic variation around the margin means there may be no meaningful individual-level answer to why you rather than him.”

—is horrible narrative material.

Then he encounters:

“DEI took your spot.”

That explanation is magnificent narrative material.

It has a protagonist.
It has an antagonist.
It preserves merit.
It preserves the original rules.
It explains the anomalous result.
And most importantly, it converts randomness into injustice.

Now the failure isn't evidence that his model of the world was incomplete.

It's evidence that someone cheated.

Your “grass is greener” point adds something important here, too. He can see the category advantage attributed to somebody else while being unable to see the disadvantages that preceded it.

Suppose another applicant genuinely benefited from an admissions policy intended to compensate for disadvantage. Our hypothetical applicant sees:

THE LAST STEP:
They received consideration I didn't.

He doesn't necessarily see:

THE PREVIOUS 10,000 STEPS:
whatever circumstances produced the policy in the first place.

Consequently an attempt to correct an unequal trajectory can phenomenologically appear as the first inequality in an otherwise fair competition.

That's an extraordinarily potent grievance generator.

And there's a historical component that makes your American-male case especially interesting

For a long time, mainstream American culture sold something fairly close to a controllable-success mythology:

work hard → acquire competence → behave responsibly → succeed.

Obviously millions of Americans knew from direct experience that this wasn't universally true. Black Americans, women, immigrants, religious minorities, poor people, etc., repeatedly developed counter-narratives explaining why the promised causal chain sometimes broke.

But the culturally normative white male was unusually likely to be the character for whom the original story was ostensibly written.

That creates a peculiar vulnerability when the promise fails.

Not:

“I was privileged, therefore losing makes me angry.”

That's too crude.

Rather:

“Nobody taught me that the machine could return a correct-looking failure with no morally satisfying explanation.”

Someone whose cultural inheritance already contains “sometimes the deck is stacked against people like us” possesses a ready-made category for that experience.

Someone whose inherited story is closer to “the deck isn't stacked against people like you” has a missing variable.

And then somebody offers one.

DEI. Feminism. Immigrants. Globalists. Wokeness. Elites. The media. The algorithm.

Now the causal equation balances.

There's a nasty feedback mechanism here

Once he accepts one of those explanations, he has acquired the very psychological resource that your model says was initially missing:

“People like us face structural discrimination.”

And suddenly there's a community.

Other men tell him they experienced the same thing. There are videos cataloguing examples. Someone produces statistics. Someone finds outrageous edge cases. Every inexplicable setback can now be incorporated into a shared narrative.

So the reactionary community can effectively manufacture a counterpart to the historical commiseration networks of genuinely marginalized groups:

“You're not failing individually. We are being attacked collectively.”

That is psychologically much more powerful than simple hatred.

And it helps explain why something like the manosphere can sometimes seem almost therapeutic to its adherents before becoming poisonous. It gives somebody an answer to:

“Why is this happening to me?”

and, equally importantly:

“Does anyone else understand?”

“Yes. It's happening to us too.”

Only afterward comes:

“And here's who did it.”

That ordering would be extremely important to your model.

I'd make one adjustment to your Venn-diagram formulation

There probably isn't actually an identity intersection with no culturally available disadvantage. A white Baptist suburban man can draw on class, region, denomination, family origin, occupation, disability, appearance, masculinity expectations, etc.

I think the more defensible and more interesting variable is explanatory availability.

How readily does someone's culture provide a legitimate sentence of this form?

“People like me sometimes lose for reasons unrelated to our individual merit.”

For many historically marginalized identities, that sentence is culturally commonplace.

For the culturally normative American male identity, there's an interesting contradiction: American individualism strongly teaches personal agency, while his demographic identity traditionally provides relatively little permission to explain individual failure through structural impediments.

That's almost tailor-made for the causal-enclosure mechanism we've been building:

High expectation of personal agency + high visibility of peer success + stochastic/illegible outcomes + weak preexisting vocabulary for undeserved failure

→ “Why the fuck didn't it work?”

→ search for causation

→ encounter with an explanation that preserves competence by supplying an external agent

→ “It didn't fail. Someone interfered.”

→ discovery of similarly aggrieved people

→ collective identity

→ repeated reinterpretation of ambiguous losses through that identity

→ racism / misogyny / xenophobia / conspiracism depending upon which explanatory package successfully recruits him.

And this produces a rather counterintuitive prediction: the people most susceptible needn't begin as the most hateful, frightened, unintelligent, or psychologically damaged. Someone could begin with an unusually strong belief in merit, personal agency and understandable cause-and-effect—and therefore experience causally illegible failure as an especially severe contradiction.

That's a much more interesting explanation for sudden radicalization than “there were secretly millions more racists than we realized.”

It doesn't imply that there weren't plenty of preexisting racists. It says that the observable racist coalition can become much larger than the population for whom racial hierarchy was originally the motivating grievance, because racism can function as one of several ready-made causal explanations for people whose original grievance was simply:

“I did what I thought was supposed to work. It didn't work. And nobody can tell me why.”

That, I think, is now becoming the central sentence of your model.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. And your referee example gives us something I think we were missing: a mundane, socially harmless version of the mechanism. That matters because it shows we don't need to begin by theorizing about damaged or unusually insecure people.

There is actual sports-psychology evidence for exactly the phenomenon you're describing. Highly identified fans disproportionately attribute victories to internal causes—the team was good—and defeats to external causes. citeturn0search9 Even better, a brand-new 2026 experiment involving 577 baseball fans compared losses under human officiating with automated officiating. When the human official was removed as a credible blame target, fans shifted significantly toward internal attribution of the loss, and that shift made highly identified fans feel worse about their team. citeturn0search6

That's remarkably close to your “referee as escape hatch.”

And I think escape hatch may actually be more useful to our model than “scapegoat,” because scapegoat implies that somebody really comes to believe the target is responsible. Your phenomenon doesn't require that.

Dad comes home from his kid's baseball game:

“Goddamn ump screwed them on that call.”

He might not spend another second seriously considering whether the umpire actually determined the outcome. He's done something much smaller and probably psychologically useful:

The loss has been made explicable enough to stop processing it.

He can go to sleep.

And this gets us remarkably close to established experimental psychology. There is a literature called compensatory control which argues that humans are motivated to experience events as orderly and nonrandom; when personal control is reduced, people become more receptive to external structures that restore order—including conspiracies, institutions, religion, patterns in noise, and other causal structures. citeturn0search14turn0search16

But I found something even closer to the model we've been building. A 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper experimentally separated two reasons for scapegoating. One was the familiar ego-protective one: transfer blame to avoid guilt. The other was almost exactly what you've been describing: when a bad outcome had an unknown cause, people assigned excessive blame because identifying a culprit restored their sense of control by supplying a clear explanation for something otherwise inexplicable. citeturn0search18

And an earlier experimental paper found the wonderfully counterintuitive result that having a powerful enemy can itself be psychologically useful. When people's sense of control was threatened, they became more inclined to attribute exaggerated power to enemies. A hostile agent can apparently be preferable to an agentless world because at least the former makes events intelligible. citeturn0search3

So I think we've now found a pretty solid empirical spine for your model:

Bad outcome

→ I cannot adequately explain why it happened

→ this creates an uncomfortable absence of control/causal order

→ “Maybe the referee fucked us.”

→ causal gap sufficiently filled

→ emotional processing can terminate.

Most of the time, nothing pathological happens.

That's important.

The referee attribution doesn't ordinarily grow into Referee Theory, where the person spends the next twelve years researching the International Brotherhood of Umpires and concludes that they secretly control Congress. 😄 It performs its little regulatory function and disappears.

Where your historical-extreme-violence thought gets interesting

Here I want to be more careful—not because the modeling direction is unreasonable, but because the evidence becomes much more heterogeneous.

There is now actually a research category called grievance-fueled violence, and researchers have increasingly argued that some things traditionally separated into terrorism, school/workplace shootings, mass murder, stalking, intimate-partner homicide, etc. may sometimes share a grievance process rather than being fundamentally different offender species. citeturn0search2turn0search15

One review explicitly says that dividing perpetrators according to their espoused grievance can create attribution errors because apparently different ideologies may sit downstream from related grievance processes. citeturn0search2 Another paper argues that grievance is better understood dynamically as the way somebody increasingly makes sense of his world, rather than simply treating “his grievance” as a fixed thing he possesses. citeturn0search4

And researchers studying lone-actor terrorism and mass murder have specifically questioned whether those are always meaningfully separate categories at all. citeturn0search11turn0search13

So your speculation about some historical extreme cases is not coming out of nowhere.

But I wouldn't yet formulate it as:

couldn't tolerate randomness → invented culprit → killed culprit.

That's probably too clean for phenomena with many interacting causes.

I'd formulate the possible common mechanism much more modestly:

Some extreme grievance cases may represent a catastrophic version of the same ordinary human process visible when a sports fan blames the referee: an intolerable outcome becomes psychologically manageable once it can be attributed to an agent.

The difference is what happens after attribution.

Normal:

We lost → fucking ref → whatever, next week.

Troubled but nonviolent:

My life isn't working → someone/something is doing this to me → increasingly elaborate grievance.

Extreme:

My life isn't working → X did this to me → accumulated setbacks get assimilated into X → X becomes the explanation for my entire situation → punishing X becomes a means of correcting the situation.

At that point you've crossed into something very different. But you don't necessarily need an entirely different initial cognitive operation.

And that makes your pre-social-media comparison particularly interesting.

I think social media may have changed what happens after the referee thought

Previously, somebody could make a false external attribution and let it decay.

“Maybe my boss had it in for me.”

Fine. He tells his friend at the bar. His friend says, “Yeah, Stevens is an asshole.” Emotional requirement satisfied. Life continues.

Now:

“Maybe DEI cost me the promotion.”

Search.

And instead of that attribution decaying, the person immediately encounters thousands of people saying:

YES. HERE ARE 47 EXAMPLES. HERE ARE THE STATISTICS. HERE IS WHO DID IT. HERE IS WHY. HERE IS WHAT ELSE THEY TOOK FROM YOU.

The Internet therefore might not merely create more opportunities for unfavorable comparison, as we were saying before. It can also prevent disposable blame from being disposable.

That's a significant addition.

The referee serves as a temporary causal prosthesis: an explanation good enough to emotionally close the file.

But contemporary information systems can take the prosthesis and build an identity around it.

And that loops beautifully back into your earlier white-male observation. The psychologically useful thing historically available to many groups may not have been a serious conviction that “whitey kept me down.” Sometimes it may have been something much lighter:

“Hell, maybe being Black didn't help.”

That's enough.

It introduces one external term into the causal equation, meaning the person doesn't have to choose between:

A. I personally caused 100% of this, or
B. nothing caused it in a meaningful sense; probability simply didn't favor me.

Instead:

C. I did some things right, some things wrong, circumstances pushed a little, luck went against me, who the hell knows.

And C is psychologically forgiving.

Someone steeped in an ideology of complete individual responsibility has ironically been deprived of that ordinary little escape valve. When something inexplicable goes badly, the official philosophy says:

You own the outcome.

Actual ordinary human psychology says:

Fuck that. Who was the referee?

And if society hasn't supplied a harmless referee, someone selling an ideology is perfectly willing to supply one.

That may be the cleanest version of the mechanism we've gotten to yet: the danger isn't simply that people need someone to blame. It's that a small, disposable amount of blame may be a normal mechanism for metabolizing uncontrollable outcomes—and an information environment capable of turning that temporary attribution into a permanent grievance can hijack the mechanism. memcite

G: Yes. And I think your “cosmic gremlins” example identifies a missing variable: subjective sampling.

You don't need a giant precipitating grievance if a person experiences a run of individually ordinary failures that, from inside their own life, looks impossibly patterned.

Your shorthand actually does something psychologically useful while preserving reality-testing:

“The cosmic gremlins are fucking with me today.”

means approximately:

“I recognize that these events are independent or loosely related probabilistic annoyances, but their local clustering is so ridiculous that I'm going to temporarily personify the cluster.”

The gremlin gives you someone to swear at without requiring you to believe in the gremlin. That's almost exactly the harmless referee function we've been discussing.

But there's a mathematical trap underneath it.

Suppose six things happen that each independently have a 10% probability. The probability of those six specified things all happening is one in a million.

But that isn't necessarily the probability of having a day on which six weirdly unlucky things happen.

If you're exposed to hundreds or thousands of opportunities for things to go strangely wrong, there are enormous numbers of possible combinations that could retrospectively constitute “the cosmic gremlins are really on one today.” That's essentially a multiple-comparisons problem applied to ordinary experience.

And from inside the life, you don't experience the denominator.

You experience:

Car wouldn't start.
Coffee spilled.
Website crashed during checkout.
Package went to the wrong house.
Appointment got canceled.
Then the fucking power went out.

You don't simultaneously perceive the other 5,000 mundane interactions with reality that proceeded normally.

So you get an enormous discrepancy between:

experienced probability:
“What are the fucking odds of all of this happening?”

and

actual relevant probability:
“What are the odds that, among the gigantic number of possible combinations of events in my life, some striking cluster of low-probability annoyances eventually occurs?”

The second can be quite high even when the first is microscopic.

Now change one thing about the cosmic gremlins

You know they aren't real.

Imagine somebody who doesn't have a good probabilistic model for why the pattern can occur.

They have the same perfectly legitimate observation:

“Something statistically bizarre keeps happening to me.”

And that's important: their observational premise needn't even be wrong. They really may have experienced an extraordinarily shitty run.

Then ordinary human causal inference starts working:

Repeated improbable negative outcomes → common cause?

That's normally excellent reasoning!

If six supposedly independent machines in a factory fail simultaneously, looking for a common cause is exactly what an engineer should do.

If six members of a family become sick simultaneously, looking for a common exposure is sensible.

If six computers on a network fail simultaneously, investigate the network.

So once again, we're potentially dealing with adaptive cognition applied where its assumptions don't hold, rather than irrational cognition from the beginning.

And now I see more clearly your objection to my “extreme grievance” formulation.

The investigators can accidentally invent the extreme grievance

Imagine the person's actual trajectory was:

January: loses promotion.

February: relationship ends.

March: unexpected $3,000 repair.

April: rejected from three jobs.

May: friend stops calling.

June: landlord raises rent.

July: sees former partner thriving.

None of these requires an extraordinary explanation.

But the person experiences:

“Jesus Christ. Everything I do goes wrong.”

Then they encounter an explanation capable of linking three or four events.

Perhaps:

“The system is stacked against men like you.”

Now unrelated stochastic disappointments acquire a common cause retrospectively.

Promotion? Fits.

Relationship? Fits.

Jobs? Fits.

Financial struggle? Fits.

Social isolation? Fits.

Suddenly five independent shitty rolls become one coherent grievance.

If something catastrophic subsequently happens and researchers reconstruct the person's history, there's a danger of reading that coherence backward:

“He developed an increasingly intense grievance about X.”

Whereas phenomenologically it might have been:

A pile of unrelated disappointments accumulated until X became the first available theory capable of explaining the pile.

That's significantly different.

The grievance didn't necessarily cause the accumulation.

The accumulation selected the grievance.

And then, once selected, the grievance could absolutely begin affecting subsequent perception and behavior. We're not eliminating radicalization, prejudice, conspiratorial reinforcement, etc. We're relocating the possible starting point.

That gives us another useful distinction:

Objective accumulation: lots of individually ordinary bad outcomes.

Perceived improbability: “This cannot possibly keep happening by chance.”

Agency inference: “Something must be causing this.”

Available causal narrative: “Here's who is doing it.”

Retrospective unification: previously unrelated events become evidence of the same adversary.

Prospective confirmation: new disappointments are interpreted through that model.

Only around those last stages do we necessarily acquire anything resembling an extreme grievance.

And I think your cosmic-gremlin shorthand illustrates an important possible protective factor that isn't exactly “intelligence” or “mental health”:

Having a conceptual category for absurd-looking runs of chance.

You can say:

“This is cosmic-gremlin territory.”

And paradoxically, personifying randomness prevents you from actually personalizing it.

The fictional agent occupies the explanatory slot without requiring a real human target.

Sports provides “the fucking refs.”

Some cultures provide fate, bad luck, Murphy's Law, “one of those days,” shit happens, God's mysterious plan, karma, Mercury in retrograde, whatever. Those aren't epistemically equivalent beliefs, obviously, but they can sometimes perform a similar psychological operation:

There is a culturally available place to put unexplained variance.

That phrase might be worth keeping.

Because our model is increasingly looking less like a theory specifically of racism or radicalization and more like a theory about what humans do with unexplained variance in their own lives.

Most people needn't calculate the probabilities correctly. They just need some psychologically acceptable category into which they can dump the residual:

my choices + other people's choices + circumstances + [UNEXPLAINED SHIT] = what happened.

The dangerous situation may arise when a culture, personality, or information environment makes [UNEXPLAINED SHIT] intolerable—and then offers an actual population of human beings to fill the box.

That would connect your cosmic gremlins, the referee, ordinary prejudice, conspiracy thinking, and some extreme grievance cases without requiring us to claim they're all manifestations of the same pathology. They're potentially different outcomes of the same extremely ordinary cognitive problem:

Humans need somewhere to put the part of causation they cannot see.