Introduction
It's possible to simultaneously believe that a genre of self-help rightly deserves extensive critique while at the same time acknowledging that the present state of debate on the subject is mired in things that are irrelevant to the very real things that could and should be criticized about it. The debate over alphadom on twitter at the moment is a prime example of this, focusing on an obscure factoid as if it somehow debunked the whole notion of human social dominance when it doesn't, while ignoring the fact that the "Alpha Male" subgenre of self-help really does have a tendency to deliver potentially toxic advice.
So, as the author of a number of alpha hypnosis files that are framed quite explicitly in those terms, it falls to me to come up with a defense of the concept of seeking to be an alpha that addresses those objections while showing that the underlying drives and desires can and should be redirected to healthier and more consensual forms of social dominance.
The Infamous Wolf Experiment
There's a factoid floating around twitter at the moment which I have not been able to determine the source of (it seems to come via Saladin Ahmed at Business insider) , but which appears to be verifiably true: in the late 19th century scientists studying wolf behavior did an experiment where wolves were put in a common enclosure and they were observed to sort out a dominance hierarchy through violence.
The scientists of the time posited that some wolves were intrinsically more dominant than others and created the labels "Alpha" and "Beta" to describe these types. Later studies showed that wolf behavior in the wild is markedly more complex and less human like than the prior study implied, so scientific theory changed to suit the evidence. If true, this anecdote is a lovely example of the self-correcting nature of science and a good reminder of the importance of keeping an open mind about things being more complex than you initially assumed; but the discourse around the factoid seems to come out of a description of it that falsely implies that this necessarily debunks the whole idea of Alphas/Betas/Sigmas/etc.
This is simply a non-sequitur since the self-improvement movement which has adopted the terminology from the old study clearly is not mired in the sort of essentialism that made the study invalid in the first place as it would make zero sense to attempt to self-improve towards a goal that you believed was fixed. Therefore it's pretty clear we're dealing with a case of a movement appropriating old labels for new uses and it's sensible to engage with those labels on their own terms.
So, stepping back from the wolf factoid, we're forced to concede that the modern alpha male movement is clearly not referring to the wolf study when using these terms as they use them in ways that make no sense in the context of that study and it's (bunk) original explanation; we need to deduce if they're referring to a real phenomenon in the world and whether or not their usefulness in describing that phenomenon is sufficient to counterbalance the original origin.
Is Social Dominance Real?
It's honestly surprising to me that people in a culture where 30% of the population belongs to a cult of personality around a former leader would deny the obvious reality that some people are highly responsive to symbols of status and prestige. Humans are highly adaptable and human cultures have many and varied ways of expressing and conditioning these desires; but it's undeniable that many human organizations across a wide variety of cultures show a remarkable propensity for top-down command and control that relies on the deference of less powerful members.
Though the extreme adaptability of humankind makes it hard to make valid generalized statements about the subject, there appears to be a psychologically real phenomenon wherein a fairly large subset of humanity is predisposed to show deference to signs of social status causing a smaller subset to be driven to seek power and status in order to receive this deference. This is routinely measured by psychologists and used in studies about prejudice, political opinions, and many other topics and reliably appears in study participants from a wide variety of cultures across long spans of time such that the social heirarchy in Han China looks remarkably like that of imperial Rome.
Since this reliably occurs in cultures that have not yet contacted each other, that implies that a profound tendency towards cultural evolution exists in this direction that is, in turn, probably being driven by basic factors in human evolutionary psychology under the hood. This is supported by the fact that other primates have very nonhuman deference behaviors that seem to respond to similar social pressures; making evolution by natural selection at both the cultural and biological levels likely candidates.
This lets us come to a more rigorous understanding about what the terms are supposed to refer to.
What do we MEAN by Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Sigma?
The underlying network of genes, biochemistry, and cultural factors is undoubtedly highly complex and not as well studied as I'd like it to be. However, conceptually, this can be understood two unrelated factors both of which vary on a scale that has relatively little flexibility on the ends and relatively much in the middle. Those two scales being what psychologists call "social dominance orientation" and "power seeking."
If we imagine that SDO has a vaguely bell-curve like distribution we'll see that there's a sizeable minority that are very responsive to power and status in others, a sizeable minority that is very non-responsive to such things; and a large majority that has the ability to show deference where its due, yet also be able to deny it when advantageous to them. Like sexual orientation, this is a scale where some people naturally have more flexibility than others. Just as a great many obligate homosexuals exist, but that doesn't exclude the possibility of a bisexual falling in love with a person of the same sex and choosing to be monogamous a great many obligate alphas might exist while some people with flexibility choose pursue that status. The one simply doesn't logically preclude the other.
If we assume that power seeking has a similar, but unrelated distribution, then we're left with a range of possible outcomes to which we might empirically apply these labels:
- Alphas have high SDO paired with high power seeking drives,
- Betas have high SDO paired with low power seeking drives,
- Gammas have very low SDO with low power seeking,
- Sigmas have high power seeking but very low SDO
Since there's no guarantee that a person is born into a level of privilege that matches their SDO, a mutual feedback cycle between the individual and the people around them plays on these natural proclivities when they exist, causing power seeking individuals to rise through their own efforts, adaptable people to adapt to their social circumstances, and highly-deferent people to do as they're told.
Objectively speaking, it's not really all that unreasonable that a person might choose to learn skills and/or modify their behavior generally in order to better their position in a society that already has a strong tendency to aspirational thinking. The question becomes whether these desires are being channeled in healthy or unhealthy ways.
What's REALLY Wrong with the Alpha Movement?
Now that we have dispensed with the pandora's box of mildly sketchy alternate interpretations that come from viewing the question through the lens of the critique of the movement driven by the criticism of the wolf study; we can get down to considering the much more important question of whether these things are desirable, attainable, and healthy for society in the form being sold.
I'm amenable to the argument that the alpha male movement is mired in the sickness of American culture generally. The encouragement of power seeking among the already privileged might foreseeably lead to a worsening of the incredibly toxic privilege structures in the society and I see the point of those criticizing the movement on those grounds. Yet there's a sensible counter-argument that a fairly large number of less privileged people ALSO participate in this movement, paired with the more cynical perspective that the low-flexibility subset of power-seekers are simply too driven to desist and going to do it whether or not a movement exists to support them.
Examining the literature of the Alpha Male movement reveals it to be diverse and of highly variable quality. A large majority of the material can be described as "aspirational clothing/grooming/lifestyle marketing" that serves basically the same social purpose for men that magazines like Cosmopolitan do for women. It's shallow, fluffy, and about as socially influential as a Cosmo article. Removing that, the single largest category of what remains is recycled ancient wisdom that has the dubious virtue of being the same old shit society has been pushing for thousands of years which means that the counter-arguments are common and well known. The next most common subgroup is retreaded self-help techniques from other movements that work / fail about as often as they do in other movements.
Now we get to the small minority of material that truly is socially toxic and rightly should be criticized on its own lack of merit: a subset of the works (typified by Jordan Peterson) is caught up in conflating right wing ideology with masculinity/dominance, and these works have been used as recruiting tools for the political right. A different subset of the works (typified by Pick Up Artist culture) push a creepy and non-consensual form of sexual seduction as a primary theme. A small number of works also encourage outright sociopathy by confusing it with dominance, though these seem to be focused on Sigma-identifying individuals as the high SDO of "alphas" tends to tamp that down.
I will gladly agree that these small toxic subsets of the Alpha movement really do deserve to be criticized out of existence. However, they are not representative of the movement as a whole and I regard it as markedly more socially productive to discuss how to guide these people to fulfill their desires in ways that are less toxic to society than it is to futilely tilt windmills against individuals who are driven by strong cultural forces that might have powerful biological underpinnings for wanting the things they want.
How Do We Fix It?
A productive response to this social phenomenon requires acknowledging the fact that it really is possible for individuals to grow and change through their own efforts and that it is typically intended to be a positive change when the individual decides to do so. It's unproductive and alienating in the extreme that these folks face sanction merely for desiring a thing their culture says is desirable.
These individuals are engaged in an objectively reasonable behavior towards a culturally sanctioned goal; so it isn't healthy for society to repress the tendency outright. If that's the case, the culturally sensible thing to do is to attempt to guide others towards the subset of the works that contains relatively good advice like "being mindful in the moment allows you to project a sense of calm" and away from the socially toxic bad advice like "women can be forced to love and admire you".
It's deeply unfortunate that the kind of person drawn to the alpha male movement tends to be highly invested in both their gender expression and social position. This fact of life means that such people tend to fall into unintentional radicalization cycles with the people criticizing them. However, the fact that they strongly respond to and value social dominance does render them somewhat openminded to pursuing healthier ways of being dominant and can often be brought around by understanding and mutual exploration.
It's fundamentally unfair that minority populations should have to convince the privileged to share their privileges, and I totally understand the frustration in the gay/trans/BDSM world that cisgendered heterosexuals are making a mess of concepts we handle with much more maturity; but supporting them in their explorations (even when silly) provides the opportunity to nudge healthier ways of achieving the goal like learning healthy leadership patterns while at the same time building social credit for tolerance of our own minority status. It's not easy and not everyone is suited to it; but it can be done and there's a big social benefit for everyone if we do.
