From Billy Liar to Jimmy Porter to modern incels and middle-aged Morrissey, the vengeful nerd or the insensitive outsider has become one of the defining figures of our age. As our cultural spaces become more diverse and we become more attuned to the existence of hipster misogyny, nerd entitlement and the fact that being famous, no matter how alternative that fame is, doesn’t make someone good, it becomes clearer that being bullied or feeling like you didn’t fit in doesn’t automatically make someone a saint. The story was once simple. Poor ambitious young white men suffer fists and humiliation growing up, only to turn the tables in later life; escaping the limited horizons of their working class peers, giving two fingers to the beige and the doilies of their parents and launching themselves into the stratosphere of notability. They would get the girl, show the bullies, and no one would ever ignore them again. The question is: how did so many people who knew what it was like to be humiliated or to feel threatened end up so ready to humiliate or belittle others?

The vengeful outsider’s nonconformism is overwhelmingly straight and masculine. It wasn’t, and isn’t, the same as queer nonconformism, although many queer kids would pass through a period of hiding in plain sight within various subcultures. Nor was it the same as growing up as part of a minority in an overwhelmingly white country. The story of the sensitive outsider positions the town and city centres of the UK as dark arenas of militant conformism, where the blokes in shirts and shiny shoes give you a kicking for choosing to be different. Normal people, working class people, people just getting on with life are presented as violent and resentful antagonists. To be yourself means removing yourself from those around you, and more than that, being yourself is the way of beating those who threatened you and made you feel like you were the weird one.

I recently overheard a discussion on my estate between two friends, both dressed in bright colours and with conceptual haircuts. One told a story of being stared at while riding their bike. “That’s the judgemental white working class,” the other answered. This sense of superiority under constant attack leads to a kind of eternal aggressive righteousness, a shield of often illusory underdog status that provides a means of ducking responsibility for one’s own problematic actions. The wounded outsider carries with them the sense of being a better class of person. Superiority and inferiority are sides of the same coin.

Too often, fear of being punched as a youth turns into an adulthood of punching down. New Labour’s social mobility was the mobility of being able to escape through merit, through desiring more and being more special than your lumpen neighbours. A generation came of age learned that telling stories of their working class peers, and their own escape from such uncouth circumstances, was a quick way of gaining admiring column inches. Just as The Smiths in the 1980s had suggested an escape into being more sensitive than your neighbours, Pulp in the 1990s suggest that the escape was into being fabulous, peeping in through chintzy net curtains with a cocked eyebrow at the depressing, unsatisfying and stolid romantic lives of those you left behind while outwitting the local hard lads and laughing at their shoes. Whether responses to working class people are based on pity, on mockery or upon fear, all say ‘these people are not like me and I am not like them.’ These people who just ‘dance and drink and screw because there is nothing else to do’ in the words of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ become the ‘we-don’t have anything in Common with People’.

In the age of irony and edginess, it has always been easier to be the wry commentator producing palatable criticisms of working class life than it has been to be a working class person in public life refusing to be separated from the community in which you grew up. There is a fine line between a statement of outsider solidarity like Pulp’s Mis-shapes; “We’d like to go to town but we can’t risk it, ’cause they just wanna keep us out. You could end up with a smack in the mouth Just for standing out… We want the things you won’t allow us. We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of: that’s our minds”; and 2000s websites like Chavscum and Chavtowns or more recent sites like People of Walmart. Both are based on a hurt, sneering superiority, on a witty insult against an implied clunking working class fist. While middle class people may have said ‘Look at those chavs’; working class people said ‘look at how I haven’t turned out like one of those chavs.’ This was the opposite of solidarity. It was differentiation.

Of course, not all outsiders are working class, and not all revenge on the haters is enacted by making acclaimed artworks as an act of revenge. Now the techniques of escape and rising above the plebs are far more numerous. Adulthood no longer means having to leave behind the oppositional self-definitions baked in adolescence. The arrival of the web has meant an intensification of cultural persistence and the ability to keep alive, and even profit, from the activities and allegiances of our youth. Increasingly the line between creator, fan and industry dissolves. Politics is not immune from such events, where a gaming youtube channel and a nazi-saluting dog can turn into a political career. Corners of the internet are filled with communities where the dominant narrative is one of pre-emptive strikes against imagined enemies, sometimes murderously so.

When outsiders come together they can create their own insides, building new hierarchies to their own design. The archetype of the vengeful geek looms large, the grown man who achieves his dream of doing what he has loved since childhood and gaining status for it, shaking his fist at the bullies and the haters while acting in reprehensible ways himself. Still inside he is the adolescent, preserved in the amber of his own sense of being wronged, refusing to recognise his own responsibility to others because such calls are part of his persecution for being different and better. Suggestions that he should not be racist, should not abuse his position, should not be sexually violent, should not act like the lord of his own feudal court are met with cries of ‘stop picking on me’ before the almost inevitable shift to being a talking head declaring that cancel culture has gone too far.

It’s not the 1990s anymore. Difference can be inclusive, and doesn’t need to punch down and come with a sneer. Just because you feel bullied doesn’t make you right. Define yourself by who you are, not who was once against you. Piecing together your personal politics based on who didn’t like you at school does not make for an emancipatory project for anyone apart from yourself. It’s time for vengeful outsiders to grow up.