Expanding the Understanding

This is how to extend the utility of the SSH

As with all useful and original ideas, the SSH has no shortage of self-appointed apostles, experts, popularizers, explainers, and outright grifters attempting to expand and expound upon it for their own self-serving reasons. I’m not even remotely surprised, since I saw exactly the same thing happen in military circles after William S. Lind articulated the concept of 4th Generation War, or 4GW.

It wasn’t long before attention-seekers were announcing their definitions of 5GW, 6GW, 7GW, and even 8GW. Lest you think I exaggerate, allow me to quote the Warfare Evolution Blog:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun Tzu in his book "The Art of War."If you can convince your enemy that his military efforts will all be in vain, then you can win without fighting, which is where 7th and 8th generation warfare (7GW and 8GW) will lead us.

Eighth Generation Warfare, apparently, is defined as: “8GW, where no one dies on either side of the conflict.”

Clausewitz wept.

However, my disdain for those attempting to gain attention by riding on my coattails with their Zeta Males and Sigma Grindsets does not mean that the concepts utilized in the SSH cannot be usefully explored and expanded by others. One commenter here yesterday demonstrates how insight and logic can be usefully employed to give all of us a better understanding of how the SSH operates and is applied.

Vox time and time again keeps pointing out that the SSH is not a self-improvement program. Knowledge of the SSH is just for categorization of the people you observe around you. It is not designed and it is not capable to provide a roadmap to elevate yourself to a higher level within the SSH. People are trying to twist it into that tool and it will not work.

He starts off very well by demonstrating an understanding of what the taxonomy is and is not. A zoological taxonomy is not a roadmap to transform a horse into a zebra, much less a lion. In like manner, the SSH is not a roadmap for transforming an Omega into a Bravo.

Gammas are the first group to experience what it is like to routinely operate at the bottom of every group they happen to be in. They learn the hard way that life is built on status and that status counts for everything, in fact, to a much larger degree than normal people understand.

A key component of success, for example, is networking. Networking is the process of leveraging other people brains in exchange for them leveraging yours. It is a very useful skill because it means you do not have to learn and know everything to make your way in the world. You master a little piece and then trade that piece with others until you are working with a far more complete body of knowledge and experience then when you started.

To successfully network, however, you have to be an equal or a better to the people around you. You cannot be worse. A network will bypass the inferior node completely in favor of superior nodes. Only similar people, similarly situated, can be similarly treated.

The gammas lack of networking drives, in fact, one of the key components of the gamma’s personality: a slavish, pedantic devotion to subject-matter expertise and the need to display that expertise at every moment, whether appropriate or not. This is an attempt to build a network, but the effort is undone by the gamma’s low status, so none of these overt displays gain any traction.

This is genuinely insightful. Networking is a key component of success that I have never once contemplated within the context of the SSH. But it is absolutely vital, and it is indubitably connected to the SSH, as the commenter observes.

I spent a decade being active in the game development community, plus two years in the 2010s financing A-AAA game development. But my son never saw that, which is why, when we attended GDC in Germany a few years ago, he was absolutely astonished when a major game industry figure saw me while descending an escalator, shouted to catch my attention, then came running over and warmly embraced me. He was an old friend of mine from the Santa Clara Westin days, and I’m not sure if my son was more awestruck by meeting him or realizing that his old man had had a much higher status in the game industry than he’d understood.

The point is that networking is a very, very important element of success in any industry. And one could probably write several books on how SSH helps or hinders one’s ability to network, as the commenter points out.

There is also a very insidious problem operating against the Gamma. In order for the gamma to raise his status relative to the immediate group that he is in, he must socially interact with members of the group. Raising his status is an iterative process so this socializing is necessary. BUT…because the socializing is happening while the gamma is still low status, every social action chips away at the gamma’s margin of error. So long as the negative incongruity between the gamma and his superiors remains in place while the gamma is attempting to raise his status, he lowers his margin of error.

At a low enough margin of error, most people become enemies because almost anything the gamma does or says can be used against him. Gammas do experience people turning on them on a dime, for example, because this margin of error has now been exceeded.

This is an excellent and insightful observation that by itself is worth more than every attempt by a YouTuber to claim Sigma status and “explain” how his viewers can also become fake Sigma-wannabees. It explains why Gammas are always trying to a) elevate the public perception of their status and b) establish and display their subject-matter expertise. This is a valuable insight, which lends itself to improving the quality and performance of the predictive model.

And yes, while I focus on the WHAT here on this site, there is no reason that students of the SSH should not explore the various possibilities of the HOW and the WHY, so long as they a) don’t pester me about it and b) root their theories soundly in real examples of the observable WHAT.

The science never ends…