So New York magazine’s Jesse Singal — GamerGate bete noire and one of the central figures in Candace Owens‘ crackpot conspiracy theories — has written a really quite fascinating piece on the history of the alpha male. Or at least on the history of the idea of the alpha male, from its humble origins in primatology to its current obsessional ubiquity amongst pickup artists and Red Pillers and cuck-calling Anime Nazi Trump fans.
So how did Singal’s internet, er, critics attempt to rebut his claim that Americans have become “infatuated with a cartoonish idea of ‘Alpha Males?'”
And then there was this, Tweeted out shortly before New York put up Signal’s piece this morning by someone mad about a different Singal article:
Booplesnoot, I will take that bet.
@guest:
I’ve noticed the same thing about authoritarians. My guess is that they are working from an assumption that society as a whole is on the side of the authoritarian, and therefore anyone who opposes them must be an individual dissident. If they start seeing those opposition members as part of a unified group (or even as part of the mainstream) then it undercuts the conformist beliefs at the heart of authoritarianism.
Taken to an extreme, this leads to the absurd Davis Aurini-esque position that western civilisation is great, but every individual within that civilisation is weak and contemptible.
Similar to some of the motivations behind stalking maybe, where they project their own insecurities, self-loathing, and feelings of rejection onto someone who gradually comes to symbolize those things.
@EJTOO That’s an interesting take; I’m going to have to think about that. Though it’s hard for me to imagine five of the most significant figures in Western physics and astronomy as individual rogue dissidents to the mainstream consensus.
Apropos of this, from the other direction, I’m going to throw this out here because I was SO THRILLED that someone on this blog was able to identify a book I’d read more than a decade ago from the description, and had been unable to identify despite some work on trying to (thank you again! have bought and read the first in the series and have ordered the second! and, weirdly enough, was so disappointed by the gender roles in the first book that I emailed the author, and we’re now in somewhat haphazard correspondence!). There’s a G. K. Chesterton essay (I’m 90% sure it was him, but given that I’ve looked pretty hard and haven’t found it, it may be someone similar) about the idea that progressive/ modernist/ whathaveyou philosophers identify figures that support their ideals as a movement, and as representatives on the march of progress (in the same way we’d consider Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Einstein points on a vector), but identify certain other historical figures as random individuals, when they can actually be considered a vector of their own; Samuel Johnson was one of these (and one would think searching Chesterton’s essays for mention of Samuel Johnson should turn it up, but to date it hasn’t)–does this concept ring any bells with anyone?
@ chiomara
You’re amazing going back in there and sorting everything out so soon. I hope all carries on on an upward trajectory for you; you certainly deserve it.
@WWTH
That page is in some serious need of some [citation needed], or was that function permanently removed from Conservapedia to prevent it from imploding?
Also, found there’s a link to this in the footer:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_lies
I’m gonna go die of laughter now.
@Chiomara
That’s a very scary scenario. It sounds like everyone got out okay — I hope they did. Hang in there!
@ Chiomara
So glad to hear you’re OK. All the best to you and your family for recovery.
@Chiomara
Glad to hear you are all alright. Hoping for s steady recovery for all of you.
Reading all of these think pieces abour social interactions between heterosexual men and women, and dating -It doesn’t even matter if it is a manosphere or conservative piece or not- makes me gratefull for not being straight. I am bisexual, but I can’t deal with heterosexual courtship rituals. Also in my experience even the pieces that consider feminist ideas or more liberal are often rife with unexamined heteronormativity.
So-called “alpha” males once again demonstrating how strong and tough they are by crying like little babies because their precious widdle feelings were hurt by an article.
@Cerberus Also, “Satan vonHitlerStalin” is the funniest thin I’ve read all week. Thanks for sharing ^^
I think another reason that authoritarian types fixate on an individual is that a lot of their thinking is based in fear. It feels a lot safer to imagine that their enemy’s movement is based on one person. Anita Sarkeesian is the leader of contemporary feminism. Therefore, we take her out by discrediting her or scaring her away from feminism and that would mean feminism as a whole would be finished. And they cling to this for dear life. You explain to them that Sarkeesian is just one feminist who make videos that some feminists watch and explain that we are aren’t all slavish followers, and they just won’t hear it.
Moscow,
That is definitely a favorite Republican talking point. It completely ignores history and pretends that the southern strategy wasn’t put into place in response to the Civil Rights Act. It pretends that racists didn’t leave the Democratic party in droves to join the Republicans after it was signed.
Damn, @Chiomara – I’m glad that everyone made it out. Here’s to swift and thorough recoveries to all involved.
And good on you for facing the scene.
My sister and her family also narrowly escaped a house fire and it had a lasting impact on her.
re: A-holes targeting Patton (I saw a comment referencing that, navigated away, can’t remeber if it was in or the prior articles comments, on my phone saw scrolling through’s a pain):
This actually showed up on my Google news feed from someecards of all places:
http://www.someecards.com/entertainment/movies/ghostbusters-patton-oswalt-angry-video-game-nerd/
Sign #1: You are Googling “How to be an Alpha Male”.
@David – The ads don’t bother me (none of them, actually – whenever I see exceptionally awful ones I just think, “Ha! Someone’s spending money on this!”), but you’d expressed that you’ve been in an ongoing battle to exclude dating ads.
Here’s a screenshot from this morning:
http://i.imgur.com/xRvUGVE.jpg
(Text blurred because they did get my location right.)
Though, hey, I’ll give them this – they managed to feed one that ties into the interests expressed in this site’s comment section (in that the guy’s holding a small, cute animal).
One of the gyms that some of the current batch of UFC fighters are associated with is Team Alpha Male. The name always makes me roll my eyes when I hear it. Hmmm, I wonder if Joe Rogan has ever gone on a rant about beta males.
@Chio, I’m so glad that your mom and dad are pulling through. I hope the damage wasn’t as bad as you feared, and that getting things back together again is a quick and painless process. <3
I think there’s a lot of factors at work with that behavior.
I think places like 4chan have a sort of feedback loop effect going on. Once they target someone that topic gets bandied about and passed through so many iterations it becomes unrecognizable to anyone outside that little group but to them, its importance just keeps being amplified by the process.
I think Brony is also right that they see things to a great degree in terms of conflict between opposing entities so having a single person be a symbol of their opposition facilitates that.
There’s also a lot of black and white thinking and intolerance of ambiguity. Everything is either 100% bad or 100% good so if they can find a single way X is bad, it’s irredeemable. This is also why they think people who criticize video games want to ban them. They actually just can’t brain that people can like certain aspects of a thing and dislike certain other aspects. Or that a thing can be appropriate under some circumstances but not others.
Well, the first thing you need to understand is that IQ tests measure only one thing–namely, how good you are at taking IQ tests. They map to a specific approach to categorization and relation between objects, and this approach tends to be something we teach boys more than girls (in that teachers tend to overlook girls when teaching STEM subjects, which is where the IQ-test mode of thinking is most used).
Secondly, the data is… spotty at best, even within that field. There’s some suggestion that men tend to be outliers in both directions. But that isn’t even exceptionally solid.
nnnnhhhhh
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/482/475/3bc.gif
IQ as a metric bothers me so much. We had a discussion at work about this just last Tuesday night. One half of the team is working on a thing which basically runs IQ-like testing on all student activity behind-the-scenes – they don’t see the tests and aren’t aware of them, it’s just looking at how the interact with the learning environment and their assignments and whatnot. They get lovely little categories of numbers and percentages, and they can make very pretty looking graphs and interpolations with all sorts of fascinating statistics.
But it’s a gorgeous temple of lies. It drives me bonkers. Intelligence does not look like this:
http://www.bradracing.com/wp-content/uploads/old/Report-Card(2)_1.jpg
Intelligence looks like this:
There are ways to make pretty graphs and fancy interpolations out of the latter! Ontologies are a thing we can science all the ding-dang-day, but it’s hard. It makes me so frustrated to watch everyone pour their time into the easy way just because it’s easy, when the right way is staring us in the face.
IQ metrics are dumb. Intelligence is the capacity to reorganize ones ontological map of concepts on encountering new information. IQ tests barely touch on that.
grumble gromble
Addendum: That concept map I showed as an example is actually not a great one – or it would represent a novice’s understanding of the concepts. An expert tends to have a lot of cross-links and cycles all throughout the ontological depth of the map. This one’s fairly hierarchical and completely acyclic, so it was probably put together by someone who’s all “oo, space is neat!” but didn’t really know much beyond some fun trivia.
and now you know!
Ah, yes, Dunbar’s number. Which has some of its own evo-psych issues. (That page notes that prior to the development of agriculture, nomadic band sizes were more likely limited to 50 just based on how much food they could gather.)
And, yeah, there definitely does seem to be a lot of ‘you must believe all these mutually contradictory ideas to be part of the tribe’ in there. Which can be used as a social control method, as it automatically weeds out people who actually do critical thinking, or who value truth over conformity.
One of the problems that’s come up over the last few decades seems to be a combination of people being raised in such a toxic political stew and not knowing anything different, combined with the ability of the Internet to allow people to easily connect with others with shared social interests. It used to be that the politicians would regularly lie to stir up the true believers and point them in the desired direction. You’d get clusters of self-led true believers (Birchers, Larouchites) but they were mostly fringe groups used by the more mainstream types. Nowadays they seem to have gotten tired of being used as patsies, and are trying to run things themselves, while being confused as to why the things they’ve always considered as obviously true and which used to be given a pass by the people using them are suddenly hitting so much resistance…
Chiomara, I’m so glad to hear things are starting to get better! I hope you get to have many more good days than bad as things progress toward normalcy.
I have a head cold and my head hurts, so I won’t try to give any on-topic commentary today.
If I ever appeal to evolution in a manner that is problematic I encourage you to challenge it. Otherwise I agree that there are issues with the hypothesis and it’s use in general. Here I think that it’s reasonable to consider social conflict behaviors that evolved for small groups and how they might be expressed in groups too large for the higher empathy that the small group would have for one another. I certainly don’t see any differences between groups that can’t also be explained by culture.
The fight over being outraged at bigoted behavior is another one. It’s apparently fine to outrage others with one’s beliefs, thoughts, actions and communications. But complain about it at an intensity relevant to how one really feels about it is too much to bear. If the first group can bear it well enough to substantively speak about it the second group can be expected to address that substance despite tone and intensity.
I find it unsurprising. Old barriers between groups with serious differences and ingrained ways of thinking and believing are gone. It accelerates the resolution of the contrast between the groups due to the desire to challenge things that one is bothered by, justifiably or not. New barriers are going up, online communities acting as echo chambers for example, but there will be people crossing in both directions that challenge the existing narratives and dynamics as well as external information aimed at such places. Society will evolve around that.