On Monday, in Montreal's Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, 25-year-old Seth Hatfield of Lethbridge, Alta., is alleged to have carried out a shooting that resulted in the deaths of an officer and a civilian before he was fatally shot by police. Initial media reports described Hatfield as an “incel” who sought to target women. Yet his 104-page manifesto is unarguably pro-communist, anti-western and anti-Zionist. It blames what he sees as the displacement of monogamy not on women, but on capitalism and consumer culture.
Manifesto Details and Ideology
Hatfield argues that modern “hypergamy” — which he defines as the opposite of monogamy — has displaced monogamy as a direct consequence of this system. Under “high capitalism,” he argues, human relationships have been commodified, economic pressures have intensified sexual market inequalities and liberal consumer culture has eroded the conditions that once allowed average men to find mates.
The manifesto ends with his solutions, which include a list of targets and a call for acts of terror. Envisioning himself as some sort of revolutionary thinker, Hatfield encourages the publication of his manifesto in Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin, suggesting it may be “even more well-received” in these countries than in “western nations.” His goal is to “elucidate the true nature of the West to the inhabitants of those places, so that they may be disillusioned of any residual notions of western advancement or ‘superiority’ that they might still hold.”
Comparison to Previous Shooters
But this is by no means a simple case of a man who hates women and wants to murder them for being shunned or for competing with him for jobs, like Montreal's Polytechnique shooter, Marc Lépine. Hatfield certainly has complaints about what he sees as common relationship problems with women, but he actually doesn't blame them directly — he blames capitalism for what he refers to as “gloomy and pervasive male loneliness.”
Sociobiological Foundations
The “Foundations” section of the manifesto is a sociobiological exploration of sexual dimorphism: men can spread their seed widely while women cannot, driving intense male sexual competition for female attractiveness. It argues that the shift from primitive hunter-gatherer societies was beneficial, particularly because monogamous intimacy enabled male self-actualization.
But Hatfield says this isn't the case anymore, in what he refers to as the “high capitalist societies” of the “western world,” where “monogamy is no longer prevalent at all.” Hatfield suggests that the primary mode of intimacy in Canada and the United States is hypergamy.
Marxist Influence
Once again, he blames capitalism for this state of affairs, leaning heavily on Karl Marx's “Communist Manifesto” and using terms like “bourgeois,” “proletarians” and “lumpenproletariat” throughout. He complains about bankers, merchants and businessmen. He argues that monogamy simply proved to be less profitable for the bourgeois than hypergamy. In fact, he says the characteristic feature of the hypergamy state is “an intense and appallingly unequal distribution of intimacy within the human population,” which sounds like a bizarre reformulation of Marx's critique of wealth distribution under capitalism, but applied to intimacy.
