@lurkerhasarisen Here is an interesting one. Are we saying that loyalty and care for those under you are beta traits?

Alcibiades had all of the alpha traits but he was very self interested. Dragging his wife out of court when she tried to divorce him amuses the school boy in me but it also suggests a lack of ability to resolve things sensibly. If he was really all that good at being alpha and making women submissive why did she take him to court in the first place to divorce him for his whoring?

If we are taking what I call the "fake alpha stance" some manosphere "teachers" are promoting, shouldn't she, in a state where women had almost no legal rights and there was no femtardation, have said "whatever makes you happy Chad, can I join a threesome, I find the idea of you doing other girls makes me so hot?" He failed in leadership there. His actions provoked mutiny. He just lived in an age where you could get away with it if you were an influential guy.

Alcibiades was essentially selfish. Being uber Chad maybe never gave him much need to think of others but he was a charming traitor in the end. And that's what got him killed. I mean seriously, who defects to Sparta and thanks them for accepting him by shagging the queen? He came up short in the end. He possessed all the gifts of manliness except self control. He just thought too much of himself and not enough of others.

I would like to suggest that what he lacked in self control and empathy was where he fell short of having the whole apha deck. I would like to suggest that empathy and self control are not beta traits unless used by a beta mind.

Low ranking men learn to control themselves better than many high raking men because they are forced to. Low ranking men often have to be thoughtful of others because they lack power but that does not actually make those characteristics weak, its just that low ranking men are in a weak position to start. Its just like saying women are not all sweet and kind. In fact plain women tend to be sweeter and kinder than hot women because they have less options.

Low ranking men often look with jealousy at high ranking men and think "I wish I could be a selfish dick too, that would be so high status (alpha)" What they are not seeing is that they are looking at failure not success when they see these things. A good leader does not unnecessarily injure his subjects. There are times when one has to act against the interests of subjects but these times are when you are forced by circumstance or by a greater opportunity for a greater number.

Being kind and self controlled are part of being a successful high status man. I wouddl argue that when done well they are Alpha traits, just as dominance needs to be done well or its only aggression. A low status dog will cower under a table and bite you from fear. That is badly used aggression. Its not alpha its gamma or delta behaviour. Similarly a low status man against whom you have the upper hand verbally and legally may punch you because that is all he has left. It may landing in jail but he is desperate. In fact come to think of it most domestic violence against women is done by low to mid ranking, whom the women are forcing or humiliating. Its not that the guy is so alpha that he is a danger to women, it because he is not alpha enough to ignore her, roll over and go to sleep.

@lurkerhasarisen My concern over the contextuality of Alphaness is that this truth has been abused by a lot of manosphere content makers for personal gain.

There is a feeling among quite a few men, perhaps younger, perhaps newer to the manosphere that they can put on "Alphaness" like a set of clothes.

They have been sold this idea by some manosphere authors and content producers. Learn the behaviours, carefully control the context and you can control the narrative and so assume alpha status and get everyone submitting to you. Its a very potent lie as it taps into the innermost wishes of someone with low status male behaviour, someone who feels he has submitted more than he would like.

You can't put on those traits like clothes. If you disguise yourself as such, you will very soon be discovered once the context gets out of your control. Think of all those young men we get bewailing letting their "frame slip" on a date and so they behaved in a "beta" way. In fact they usually just behaved true to themselves. If they hadn't given away their weakness in the way they bewail, they would have in another soon enough.

These things are contextual but you have to also make the traits that give you status in given contexts internal and therefore to a degree innate before you can really be that man in any context beyond acting.

I just wish we could get a healthier consensus on the whole subject to avoid the self improvement that we preach being confused with an "alpha delusion/ fantasy" that we are often misunderstood to be promoting as a solution to men.

@adam-l

You and I and @FirstLight are in agreement… I was just poking the bear about Sigma Males because that’s been a running joke here for a long time.

I think WE all agree on the basic nuances of the Greek Alphabet paradigm: but it’s hard to explain easily. We all know guys who tend to be naturally dominant. Men follow them and women want to have sex with them: often to everyone’s detriment, because people mistake “alphaness” for competence.

(Read up on Alcibiades… dude was “ALPHA AF,” and he single-handedly nearly destroyed Athens early in the Peloponnesian War because everyone blindly followed him.)

@Typo-MAGAshiv and I are both former military officers, and we’re used to inhabiting a rigid hierarchy that simply doesn’t exist to the same degree in any civilian occupation. The question of “Who gives orders and who obeys them” (the alpha/beta dynamic) is not determined by anything other than rank/position. As I’ve said before here: nobody here who saw me IRL would immediately think that I’m a “Chad” or an “Alpha,” yet I have 1) done reasonably well with women and 2) been the HMFIC on many occasions. My list of past minions includes guys who were in the Battle of Mogadishu (the incident from “Black Hawk Down”), more than a few senior NCOs who could crush my skull with one hand, rangers, SpecOps guys, military cops, civilian cops, etc. In those situations those men followed my orders. If that’s not “alpha” then the word has no meaning. So am I an “Alpha Male?”

I would insist that I’m not, because my “Alpha” status was situational. Some of those guys WERE stereotypically “Alpha” - the kind of guys with natural presence - but they still said, “Yes, Sir” when I gave them orders. I follow the maxim: when in charge; take charge. Some guys can’t, and those guys will always default to “Beta” mode.

In other contexts, I’m just another guy, and if someone has expertise and is willing to lead, I’m happy to stay in my lane (although I reserve the right to speak up if something strikes me as being wrong).

@adam-l Yes. These guys are monetising ideas that should be for the wider benefit of society and some of them are doing it simply by creating content that pushes frustrated men's buttons. This is not where the manosphere started. It was a sort of bro science and bro philosophy. It is the truth behind our ideas that has pushed us out into the mainstream.

Louis comes out on top in that video. He came to make content out of them that would push people's buttons and he did. Where I always thought he excelled was in gently getting to know people who were on the fringes of the acceptable and finding out what mad them tick. He showed you the crazies but the crazies had a chance to show you what they were about. Sometimes they came out of it well and his friendly style came them a chance to do this, sometimes they made fools of themselves or showed the holes up in their world view.

Louis went out there and found some guys who were so easy to let make fools of themselves that it was too easy -make the fools perform to push the buttons of the liberal elite folk at the BBC, collect the money, get the exposure, next!

I wish he had talked to the right people but I fear those who commission his stuff want polarising button pushing stuff these days not stuff that stretches the viewer and may lead to disconcerting conclusions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe3xEbF2iDs This is the sort of thing I am reacting to here. Louis Theroux made a video that made the manosphere look like a joke to outsiders. He attacked a "male centred Darwinian view of alpha supremacy" propagated by some men who had enough fame and wealth to behave onesidedly around women in order to make content and get away with it.

Anyone who by who did not realise that he interviewed a load of cock heads would think we were all a load of cockheads. The guys he found were huge targets selling their "alphaness" to men. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for Louis. I don't want to be put in the same barrel as these guys.

I recommend watching the whole video if you can find it. The red pill comes out of it a lot worse than MGTOW came out of the one he did earlier and yet the red pill is a much more society centred approach.

@adam-l I too don't think we are in disagreement. Its just a very woolly area where it will be hard to get a consensus definition. Yet the lack of one is causing a degree of misunderstanding.

One reason why the archetype of Chad usually being a well off man (or at least not poor) is because like you say wealth itself gives opportunity, confidence and a degree of power. You don't see this in the lower classes unless it comes with an excess of cockiness. It almost never has the smooth confidence of those born to feel confident. I have seen this from two sides having been privately educated and then working for over two decades in a blue collar job around a lot of young men whom state education has failed. I just assume things are possible that they don't. I feel enfranchised when they don't.

I can therefore -in certain ways- act more "alpha" than them, particularly when it comes to talking to clients (who tend to be wealthy and privately educated themselves). I have spent years (with some success) getting these men to see they have more opportunity in the world than they grew up realising. I think I have succeeded in transforming a few of them, when the education system left them on the scrap heap.

One can be as analytical and as cocky as one likes but it is only when success has been manifest in one's life that one can be simply confident and it is important to help men to achieve some success or they will never know who they could have been.