There's good takeaways for men here. Lack of courage underlines a lot of what this woman is saying. No courage to face reality about oneself or to sacrifice when the situation demands or leave the mother's nest.
I can confirm, in a family full of gammas, the mothering was insane. It is perverse and bizarre. As a bravo, I've suspected I escaped gamma-hood because I was the only one who wasn't mothered.
One hope I have for this Substack and the forthcoming SSH book is that it will serve as a collection of knowledge for how to prevent raising Gammas.
My observation is that most of man-made problems can be traced to Gammas. So whatever we can do to pushback the Gamma cancer will be good for humanity as a whole.
Gammas don’t get the form/content difference because they’re lying about things they can’t grasp. Like the poseur below, assuming it’s male. The rhetorical tactics are transparently self-indicting and low-wattage. Yet there is a real belief that that decontextualized gibberish is clever. So they end up unironically performing the opposite of what the words are intended to convey - the whole time they’re dancing.
No wonder they trigger self-protection instincts. That level of deep lack of self-assessment, terrible judgment & obnoxiousness as primary driver is dangerously delusional. Something anyone should want to step on.
A mother corrects her children-in speech, manners, facts, etc.- bc she wants them to be a useful functioning member of society who will find a good spouse and give her grandkids. The Gamma thinks they can do the same thing to adults, and that they will in turn be praised for this.
They are typically subject matter experts. Think of the guys in Big bang theory and the useless trivia they know.
The big thing is honesty. If Gammas are forced either by the people around them or by themselves to be brutally honest with themselves, then they can become better.
Seriously though, I have wondered that for a long time. Is Gamma a "defect state" of an otherwise Delta? Could a Sigma or Alpha be "mis-wired" (as the commenter below described) into a Gamma?
Does a cured Gamma always resolve to Delta? Or Omega? I've wanted to ask that for a while.
Delta is better, of course. But even Gamma to Omega -- at least, a high-functioning Omega at peace with oneself -- is still a promotion, not a demotion.
Coaching youth sports, I see many Gammas-in-training with their over-involved and doting mommas. Participation trophies anyone? Giving criticism, correction, and coaching these kids is made difficult by their fragility.
I can imagine based on the above female observations what the future holds for some of these boys in terms of their relationships with women.
Observing the SSH with teams has been interesting as I am dealing with not-fully-formed young men but one can see the hierarchy in action even in elementary and middle-schoolers. It has helped with coaching and player development in a few ways.
It is wholly - or partially Gamma, to enjoy the company of people who you acknowledge are better at something, and enjoy the challenge of trying to get to mid-level in terms of skill or knowledge? But for enjoyment instead of posturing or status.
I think that a lot of Gamma tendencies could come from lack of exposure/conditioning to leadership and training. As well as expertise and brilliance. The untrained dog that just barks all the time. Maybe a crucial aspect is how that person reacts when exposed to the higher skilled / smarter. Gratitude for the opportunity and humility as a learner is optimum. Attempts to feign equivalence or gain kudos = Gamma? Thoughts?
To add a fictional example think of Scar from Lion King. You cannot say that he lacked exposure to leadership and brilliance - in fact, in the reverse, gammas can be seen around both many times if only to try and push them off a cliff. Scar had talents but it was his wish to be leader while denying that he was unsuited for it. In another example, you can see that gammas flock around this blog and it's not improving their character one whit.
Scar tends to be a useful example to me simply because it can never be said that he was merely a 'misunderstood misfit'. He's actively a menace that you should keep away, did not deserve mercy and tries betrayal yet again when spared. (Of course he's an expert in hyena culture but exactly how valuable is that?)
No. Completely wrong. You're totally failing to grasp the fundamental characteristic of the Gamma, which is his dishonesty with himself and others. All exposure to leadership and brilliance makes him do is hate the leaders and the brilliant ones.
Sure, if you offer all those things, but it still boils down to them choosing to grow. You can't force them to be honest, have integrity, and seek to do better, they have to want it. TBBT is actually a decent example for this post as well as the female hierarchy from a few days ago.
"Do not reprove a scoffer, lest he hate you, reprove a wise man, and he will love you." That's the key to Gamma. As the woman who wrote the above piece observed, "Violate that fantasy in any way and brace for further machinations." They have been ingrained with an untrue, inflated sense of their own abilities. If you are better at something than them, more intelligent than them, or even know more useless trivia about something they consider their domain, they will dislike you. They will dislike you because you threaten the delusion that they use to shape their worldview, the one that has them at the top.
That would seem to confirm that the milder behavior I was describing is more like Delta insecurity and leg-humping, not so much Gamma, because it was easily cured with some reassurance. And the people were then comfortable in their role.
Not sure if this is still true, but in the gaming community, when they were new at a game, Deltas would get called "newbie" but Gammas "n00b" (or even "nub"). Entirely based on how they behaved toward the other players, especially the more experienced ones.
This is slightly off topic, but the choice of gamma, delta etc just sound right. Delta sounds somehow useful, saying the word gamma gives me a chill down my spine. Sigma sounds somehow mysterious.
That being said I just had a thought about what would I call a group of gammas.. and the first thing I thought was a Shylock of gammas..
Jennette McCurdy's description of what it was like to work for Dan Schneider in iCarly and Sam & Cat is a pretty great case study. He strung her along for years, broke promises, and promoted actresses who tolerated his creepy behavior.
Actually thinking back to my teens/20s the "creep" label is disproportionately applied to gamma behavior...
Gammas "want to subvert the rankings. Instead of getting in the arena, they try to subvert the Alphas and Bravos by gossiping about them."
Absolutely. This was the attitude that was most vigorously beaten out of freshmen in my fraternity: do not whine about people behind their backs, do not criticize your brothers to women. Looking back, this kind of policing of Gamma-behavior was really important (though obviously we didn't have a name for it).
Is slapping down Gamma behavior in junior members of the hierarchy usually the job of the Bravos? The one time it happened to me, it was the Senior Alpha who did the slapping--maybe that's what made it a lesson I've never forgotten and one I'm still grateful for--but it seems that Alphas usually have better things to do.
This rings true (as do the comments). Particularly: "The Gamma is a profoundly selfish creature and a profoundly insecure one. He will verbally abuse and gaslight to control. He is toxic."
The worst of them take it further. A kid at my high school stabbed his "girlfriend" to death when she broke up with him (no one knew they were dating, and 40 years later we still have our doubts). Four years later a kid at college did same thing (both times >50 stab wounds, which probably says something about the freak-out rage of the killers when a girl said "no" to them).
I knew the first killer a little, and the second kid had been friends with my freshman-year roommate. Both were complete Gammas in every way--dress, speech, quoting movies and song lyrics inappropriately, no sense of when unwanted in a social interaction, etc. In the second case, I'm pretty sure the poor girl didn't even know she was supposedly the Gamma's "girlfriend," since she was dating someone else at the time.
It doesn't matter that the suit is $3,000 worth of delicate gold embroidered silk if the man wearing it is mommy's special boy. A man was a boy, but not all boys become men. You see that with the Gamma (as the woman in the post above points out).
I'm lucky in that the most terrifying man I've ever met is my brother. There's nothing Gamma about him, and there never was. If every person is born as an unopened pack of Lego, waiting to be built into something worthy of note, all his pieces have been removed from the case and put in its correct place. He is a complete individual, secure in self, more than capable of weathering both feminine clucking and solitude. A Gamma, in contrast, might well have put the pieces back in the case and placed the mess on a shelf out of some strange instinct to show off his dysfunction. The Gamma might have the pieces necessary to become impressive within him, but he either refuses to do anything about it, or actively self-destructs moments before achieving his life goal.
I witnessed the latter once: a set of successful twins, both of whom had been/ still were rugby players. They were set to inherit a business from a classic, older alpha type, and had most of the markers of up and coming Bravos. Under the nagging “guidance” of their girlfriends, the twins set about trying to mount a ill-thought-out usurpation of the company that was going to be theirs within a few years anyway. It failed abysmally, with one of the highlights of the whole debacle being the younger of the two sending the alpha an email that read “I feel bullied.” He was in the neighbouring room to the alpha when he did this.
Unsurprisingly, they became laughing stocks.
My brother is not yet as successful as the twins were before they imploded. Both are well over a head taller than him. It does not matter. Because under the appealing skin suit there was something fundamentally lacking with them. They were smaller on the inside, my brother is the opposite. He enters a room, and it is noticed, not because he is the tallest or the richest, but because he is completely his own creature.
Which is something a Gamma, at his core, can never be.
Siblings are always there, for better or worse. I've often found the best advice I can hope for comes from mine, as they're close enough to know what actually needs saying.
My brother's a remarkable man. I'm lucky to have him as a relative.
This is so interesting. My mother did everything outlined here, and I hated it and rebelled against it from the first I could remember. My mom and I are not close anymore. I married a Babe and have been pretty successful, and women aren't repelled by me, so maybe I managed to shake (most of) it off.
It has not left me unaffected though. Being told from birth that you are special no matter what, that situations where you maybe failed was because the people just don't know how special you are, it leaves a mark. My entire adult life has been spent refuting that instinct and protecting my wife and kids from its expression.
When I was in my 20's, I read John Eldredge's books and those were like being struck by lightning. He put into words the very things I hated about the way I was raised. If there are any recovering Gammas on here, I highly recommend them.
These observations seem correct, but they're not all plausible as a core driver of female repulsion. The part about the gamma behavior being childish and womanly is probably closest to the mark.
"Women relate to and categorize him the same way they do children, gay men and trannies."
I recall the theory that birth control has led to the LGBTP support as well as open immigration.
•Women, while pregnant, have a preference for unthreatening men over the alpha traits who got them pregnant
•Birth control puts the woman's body into a faux pregnancy state
•Thus, birth control makes women prefer weak gamma-style traits and open borders.
Gamma proliferation, at least in positions of authority, may be a result of the increase in birth control as well. A BC woman may vote for Jeb! while a fertile woman will vote for Trump. It would be fascinating to hear if women on the pill tolerate gamma friends and 'lovers' more.
The Gamma male and the trauma-adled, bi-polar + borderline female are a match made in heaven. Absolute hell on earth.
There's good takeaways for men here. Lack of courage underlines a lot of what this woman is saying. No courage to face reality about oneself or to sacrifice when the situation demands or leave the mother's nest.
I can confirm, in a family full of gammas, the mothering was insane. It is perverse and bizarre. As a bravo, I've suspected I escaped gamma-hood because I was the only one who wasn't mothered.
One hope I have for this Substack and the forthcoming SSH book is that it will serve as a collection of knowledge for how to prevent raising Gammas.
My observation is that most of man-made problems can be traced to Gammas. So whatever we can do to pushback the Gamma cancer will be good for humanity as a whole.
Prevent raising Gammas:
Mothers, don't smother & coddle your special little boy.
Dads, don't push them to the bring of resenting you. But be the example of masculinity.
I heard a version of "mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be.... Gammas"
Turn the parody music ppl loose on this...
Gammas don’t get the form/content difference because they’re lying about things they can’t grasp. Like the poseur below, assuming it’s male. The rhetorical tactics are transparently self-indicting and low-wattage. Yet there is a real belief that that decontextualized gibberish is clever. So they end up unironically performing the opposite of what the words are intended to convey - the whole time they’re dancing.
No wonder they trigger self-protection instincts. That level of deep lack of self-assessment, terrible judgment & obnoxiousness as primary driver is dangerously delusional. Something anyone should want to step on.
A mother corrects her children-in speech, manners, facts, etc.- bc she wants them to be a useful functioning member of society who will find a good spouse and give her grandkids. The Gamma thinks they can do the same thing to adults, and that they will in turn be praised for this.
Are there no positive traits associated with gamma?
Yes, if you’re hiking in an area with many grizzly bears…
They are typically subject matter experts. Think of the guys in Big bang theory and the useless trivia they know.
The big thing is honesty. If Gammas are forced either by the people around them or by themselves to be brutally honest with themselves, then they can become better.
I could imagine many Deltas and Bravos as such. Maybe even an affable and resigned Omega. Gamma behavior seems to be a high price to pay for skillset.
Well people don’t consciously choose to become gammas. It’s just a trait that is associated with them.
Seriously though, I have wondered that for a long time. Is Gamma a "defect state" of an otherwise Delta? Could a Sigma or Alpha be "mis-wired" (as the commenter below described) into a Gamma?
Does a cured Gamma always resolve to Delta? Or Omega? I've wanted to ask that for a while.
Delta is better, of course. But even Gamma to Omega -- at least, a high-functioning Omega at peace with oneself -- is still a promotion, not a demotion.
Yes. Gammas don't become Alphas, much less Sigmas.
-Gay man: I think ur butt looks amazing in those pants
—Straight man: I’m not gay
-GM: But I would love u forever
—SM: Oh ok let me give u a chance
Gamma logic, paraphrased from one of Vox' recent Darkstreams.
Coaching youth sports, I see many Gammas-in-training with their over-involved and doting mommas. Participation trophies anyone? Giving criticism, correction, and coaching these kids is made difficult by their fragility.
I can imagine based on the above female observations what the future holds for some of these boys in terms of their relationships with women.
Observing the SSH with teams has been interesting as I am dealing with not-fully-formed young men but one can see the hierarchy in action even in elementary and middle-schoolers. It has helped with coaching and player development in a few ways.
Here's an honest question for the group:
It is wholly - or partially Gamma, to enjoy the company of people who you acknowledge are better at something, and enjoy the challenge of trying to get to mid-level in terms of skill or knowledge? But for enjoyment instead of posturing or status.
I think that a lot of Gamma tendencies could come from lack of exposure/conditioning to leadership and training. As well as expertise and brilliance. The untrained dog that just barks all the time. Maybe a crucial aspect is how that person reacts when exposed to the higher skilled / smarter. Gratitude for the opportunity and humility as a learner is optimum. Attempts to feign equivalence or gain kudos = Gamma? Thoughts?
To add a fictional example think of Scar from Lion King. You cannot say that he lacked exposure to leadership and brilliance - in fact, in the reverse, gammas can be seen around both many times if only to try and push them off a cliff. Scar had talents but it was his wish to be leader while denying that he was unsuited for it. In another example, you can see that gammas flock around this blog and it's not improving their character one whit.
Scar tends to be a useful example to me simply because it can never be said that he was merely a 'misunderstood misfit'. He's actively a menace that you should keep away, did not deserve mercy and tries betrayal yet again when spared. (Of course he's an expert in hyena culture but exactly how valuable is that?)
No. Completely wrong. You're totally failing to grasp the fundamental characteristic of the Gamma, which is his dishonesty with himself and others. All exposure to leadership and brilliance makes him do is hate the leaders and the brilliant ones.
Sure, if you offer all those things, but it still boils down to them choosing to grow. You can't force them to be honest, have integrity, and seek to do better, they have to want it. TBBT is actually a decent example for this post as well as the female hierarchy from a few days ago.
"Do not reprove a scoffer, lest he hate you, reprove a wise man, and he will love you." That's the key to Gamma. As the woman who wrote the above piece observed, "Violate that fantasy in any way and brace for further machinations." They have been ingrained with an untrue, inflated sense of their own abilities. If you are better at something than them, more intelligent than them, or even know more useless trivia about something they consider their domain, they will dislike you. They will dislike you because you threaten the delusion that they use to shape their worldview, the one that has them at the top.
That would seem to confirm that the milder behavior I was describing is more like Delta insecurity and leg-humping, not so much Gamma, because it was easily cured with some reassurance. And the people were then comfortable in their role.
Not sure if this is still true, but in the gaming community, when they were new at a game, Deltas would get called "newbie" but Gammas "n00b" (or even "nub"). Entirely based on how they behaved toward the other players, especially the more experienced ones.
This is slightly off topic, but the choice of gamma, delta etc just sound right. Delta sounds somehow useful, saying the word gamma gives me a chill down my spine. Sigma sounds somehow mysterious.
That being said I just had a thought about what would I call a group of gammas.. and the first thing I thought was a Shylock of gammas..
Good read.
I'll play the Gamma and be...
FIRST!!!!
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2013/04/socio-sexual-hierarchy-collective-terms.html
Gammas love correcting people. They love it even more when they can do it for an audience. There... that was my Gamma flex for the day.
I hereby permit the rest of you to continue you discussions, with my blessings...
the other one i thought of later on was a "Procession of gammas".
From personal experience, I liked a "confusion" of Deltas... Just me tho
Jennette McCurdy's description of what it was like to work for Dan Schneider in iCarly and Sam & Cat is a pretty great case study. He strung her along for years, broke promises, and promoted actresses who tolerated his creepy behavior.
Actually thinking back to my teens/20s the "creep" label is disproportionately applied to gamma behavior...
If radiohead were writing the song today it would be called gamma not creep
IIRC, Prince was a Sigma who was in touch with his feminine side.
Gammas "want to subvert the rankings. Instead of getting in the arena, they try to subvert the Alphas and Bravos by gossiping about them."
Absolutely. This was the attitude that was most vigorously beaten out of freshmen in my fraternity: do not whine about people behind their backs, do not criticize your brothers to women. Looking back, this kind of policing of Gamma-behavior was really important (though obviously we didn't have a name for it).
Is slapping down Gamma behavior in junior members of the hierarchy usually the job of the Bravos? The one time it happened to me, it was the Senior Alpha who did the slapping--maybe that's what made it a lesson I've never forgotten and one I'm still grateful for--but it seems that Alphas usually have better things to do.
Yes. The Alphas will do it occasionally as an example and the Bravos will follow his lead.
"Oh, okay, THAT'S what we watch out for."
Also, the Alpha will always be more merciful. Alpha's prerogative.
This rings true (as do the comments). Particularly: "The Gamma is a profoundly selfish creature and a profoundly insecure one. He will verbally abuse and gaslight to control. He is toxic."
The worst of them take it further. A kid at my high school stabbed his "girlfriend" to death when she broke up with him (no one knew they were dating, and 40 years later we still have our doubts). Four years later a kid at college did same thing (both times >50 stab wounds, which probably says something about the freak-out rage of the killers when a girl said "no" to them).
I knew the first killer a little, and the second kid had been friends with my freshman-year roommate. Both were complete Gammas in every way--dress, speech, quoting movies and song lyrics inappropriately, no sense of when unwanted in a social interaction, etc. In the second case, I'm pretty sure the poor girl didn't even know she was supposedly the Gamma's "girlfriend," since she was dating someone else at the time.
It doesn't matter that the suit is $3,000 worth of delicate gold embroidered silk if the man wearing it is mommy's special boy. A man was a boy, but not all boys become men. You see that with the Gamma (as the woman in the post above points out).
I'm lucky in that the most terrifying man I've ever met is my brother. There's nothing Gamma about him, and there never was. If every person is born as an unopened pack of Lego, waiting to be built into something worthy of note, all his pieces have been removed from the case and put in its correct place. He is a complete individual, secure in self, more than capable of weathering both feminine clucking and solitude. A Gamma, in contrast, might well have put the pieces back in the case and placed the mess on a shelf out of some strange instinct to show off his dysfunction. The Gamma might have the pieces necessary to become impressive within him, but he either refuses to do anything about it, or actively self-destructs moments before achieving his life goal.
I witnessed the latter once: a set of successful twins, both of whom had been/ still were rugby players. They were set to inherit a business from a classic, older alpha type, and had most of the markers of up and coming Bravos. Under the nagging “guidance” of their girlfriends, the twins set about trying to mount a ill-thought-out usurpation of the company that was going to be theirs within a few years anyway. It failed abysmally, with one of the highlights of the whole debacle being the younger of the two sending the alpha an email that read “I feel bullied.” He was in the neighbouring room to the alpha when he did this.
Unsurprisingly, they became laughing stocks.
My brother is not yet as successful as the twins were before they imploded. Both are well over a head taller than him. It does not matter. Because under the appealing skin suit there was something fundamentally lacking with them. They were smaller on the inside, my brother is the opposite. He enters a room, and it is noticed, not because he is the tallest or the richest, but because he is completely his own creature.
Which is something a Gamma, at his core, can never be.
This brings up a whole new perspective - that of a sister. The familial love that a mom should have, with none of the "my little boy..." blinders.
Mind. Blown.
Glad you have a brother you respect. That's what we should try to be.
Conversely...
"If you're afraid to ask your sister what she thinks of you, you might be a Gamma..."
Siblings are always there, for better or worse. I've often found the best advice I can hope for comes from mine, as they're close enough to know what actually needs saying.
My brother's a remarkable man. I'm lucky to have him as a relative.
This is so interesting. My mother did everything outlined here, and I hated it and rebelled against it from the first I could remember. My mom and I are not close anymore. I married a Babe and have been pretty successful, and women aren't repelled by me, so maybe I managed to shake (most of) it off.
It has not left me unaffected though. Being told from birth that you are special no matter what, that situations where you maybe failed was because the people just don't know how special you are, it leaves a mark. My entire adult life has been spent refuting that instinct and protecting my wife and kids from its expression.
When I was in my 20's, I read John Eldredge's books and those were like being struck by lightning. He put into words the very things I hated about the way I was raised. If there are any recovering Gammas on here, I highly recommend them.
These observations seem correct, but they're not all plausible as a core driver of female repulsion. The part about the gamma behavior being childish and womanly is probably closest to the mark.
All the observations are correct; like ingredient labels, whichever is listed first will be the overall "flavor" of the gamma's personality.
"Women relate to and categorize him the same way they do children, gay men and trannies."
I recall the theory that birth control has led to the LGBTP support as well as open immigration.
•Women, while pregnant, have a preference for unthreatening men over the alpha traits who got them pregnant
•Birth control puts the woman's body into a faux pregnancy state
•Thus, birth control makes women prefer weak gamma-style traits and open borders.
Gamma proliferation, at least in positions of authority, may be a result of the increase in birth control as well. A BC woman may vote for Jeb! while a fertile woman will vote for Trump. It would be fascinating to hear if women on the pill tolerate gamma friends and 'lovers' more.
Someone did a deep dive on this way back in the manosphere days. Wish I remember who.