Alphas, Betas and GAY SCIENCE

Let me start by saying this: I'm not fan of "evolutionary psychology" in general because I consider that if people were to take seriously, in any way, the blueprint it gives for normative human behaviour, then we would do better to commit mass suicide than proceed along that path. After all, who wants to be treated like among one's hidden motivations were a drive towards pink and compulsive shopping? The patterns of one's individual behaviour should tell enough about what sort of person one is. Positing hidden motivations, based on gender, makes a mockery of actual human lives.

Sometimes, however, one simply runs into some useful terminology as I did recently. Then there's nothing for it but to let it rip.
I refer to the term "alpha behaviour". Immediately, I will clarify that in my experience alpha behaviour -- especially as it is defined in the link, is not limited to males alone. Indeed, in Rhodesian civil society women very often maintained that kind of power. But let me proceed by way of a tangent.

In Nietzsche's GAY SCIENCE, he speaks of the nature of power and how it can be mishandled. His example is that of Luther and the Church. Luther, according to Nietzsche, wanted to save the Church from the impending secularism of its evolution towards the Enlightenment. That religious power should find the maturity of its ultimate expression in secular enlightenment was beyond Luther's power to see. He rushed to "save" the Church, by "reforming" it, and thus undermined its authority in the broader scope of life. After Luther's intervention, the influence of the Church became narrower; its authority diminished. Nietzche effectively chastises Protestant reformer Martin Luther for being of the lower classes and hence not understanding how power actually worked. By virtue of his lack of knowledge and experience of power, he achieved the opposite to that which he had set out to achieve.

One way of looking at Luther and his intervention is that Luther was a "Beta" male. He didn't understand that power, in order to maintain itself as genuine authority, has to exert itself with in subtle ways. Luther's efforts therefore made the Church's influence appear cruder and more harshly defined. This was the means by which he stripped the Church of power -- by defining power too narrowly, and by not understanding that authority can only develop as a feature of power over a long time. Instead, Luther only understood power much as a "Beta" male understands it according to my link above. That is, as something to be grabbed at, and imposed by force, rather than as something that gradually develops, along with the relationships that allow it to justify itself.

Which brings me back to my main point: Beta males, to the extent that I have encountered them, appear to lack any but the crudest conceptions of power. For this reason, they undo themselves. They do not seem to understand, either, that almost anyone can be an Alpha, so long as they adopt the attitudes and behaviour of one. They tend to believe that power must be something necessarily obvious and in your face and not something as intangible as "authority". When those who think this way reveal their lack of knowledge about the role of authority in establishing power, they represent themselves most patently as "Betas". (The fact that they don't ever recognise that they are doing this, but in fact believe themselves to be establishing their Alpha credibility, is a significant and defining part of their problem in terms of working out why power so easily slips through their fingers even when they have it in their grasp.)

Another observation about Beta males: They think that women do not like them, and that it is imperative to remedy this by controlling women by sheer force. (One of the most common ways of doing this is by trying to assure, by means of law, that women will have no choice but to accept one of them as a mate -- not only that, but to stick with him, whether she wants to or not.)

Betas, it would seem from my experience, are not quite heterosexual -- or if they are, they do not believe in natural powers of attraction. (To accept that such a force like genuine attraction even exists would be like accepting the existence of "authority" -- being the hidden means by which power legitimates itself. Betas however, act as if their rights are assured to them only be means of overt force.)

A Beta male, when asked for assistance by a female, will often turn on her, revealing huges waves of pent up aggression, intending to cover for that fact that he feels himself genuinely powerless to act within the world at large. By means of such an disproportionate reaction, he reveals that his relationship to power was merely a bluff.