Gammas Defend Their Own
In defense of word wizardry
Yesterday, Castalia House published Owen Benjamin’s HOW TO SLAY A WIZARD. It is a masterclass is detecting, identifying, and inoculating oneself to the subtle word-wizardry that is used to manipulate you, both on the micro and macro levels. Despite being written by a professional comedian, it is both insightful and perspicacious, as this observation from Chapter 5: The Art of Consent should suffice to demonstrate:
What is an enemy? Who is your enemy? These are good questions to ask, because the answer tells you everything about whether you’re dealing with a warrior or a wizard.
Two of the most famous wizards to ever live actually wrote books about their strategies. Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals. Edward Bernays wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion and several other books on what he called “the engineering of consent.” I’ve been researching these guys for years, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that their material sounded familiar. Then it dawned on me. It’s Sun Tzu. They stole from The Art of War.
Wizards can’t create. They can only mimic, regurgitate, steal, and distort. They’re not creative. So when Bernays calls himself the father of public relations and claims to have invented social engineering, he’s really just running a lesser version of Sun Tzu’s playbook. But Sun Tzu was elegant. Brilliant. Bernays is a con man who went really, really big with it.
The question is: what’s the difference? Both talk about deception. Both talk about exploiting weakness. Both talk about appearing strong when you’re weak and weak when you’re strong. Both talk about outthinking your opponent, maintaining momentum, and never dragging out a campaign so long that it becomes a drag. On the surface, the strategies are almost identical.
So why does Sun Tzu feel noble, and Bernays feel slimy?
The answer is who they define as the enemy.
Needless to say, the sort of men who regard dishonesty as a virtue and emotional manipulation as a birthright are taking direct offense to this exposure of their core methodologies. The bestselling book hasn’t even been out for 24 hours, and it already has two fake reviews from obvious Gammas.
If you’ve listened to a couple hours of his videos don’t waste time or money on this.
Subtitle should be How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet.
Because he now knows that someone can say anything online and enough people will believe it and send him money.
Haven’t read the “book” but I’ve heard enough of his videos to imagine what’s in it.
The prime consumer of this “work” will be his present listeners who have heard everything in the book before many times and probably are the source of most of it.
He hasn’t read the book, and yet he somehow knows what is in it. Now, I’m the editor, so I can testify that while the book is based upon a series of videos, it is the 186-page extract from over 30 hours of video transcripts. It is a distillation created for an intrinsically different medium, which is why it is appealing to the literary crowd in a way that the videos are not. I haven’t watched a single video in the series. It never even occurred to me to do so. But the book contains more than a few important insights that I found myself highlighting while editing, not because they needed correction, but because I wanted to note them for future reference.
Another Gamma tried to play the Smart Boy card of substituting reason for knowledge. But he was wrong, because unlike my recent books, which are unapologetically AI-augmented generative text, HOW TO SLAY A WIZARD, as previously mentioned, is comprised of edited video transcripts, not AI generation.
A throbbing pile of slop squirted out by an AI model
A fun premise buried under pages and pages of obviously chatGPT generated LLM slop. And I’m not talking the slop prose from a premium subscription. Imagine what you get from the free chatGPT models without even signing in.
I would raise to three stars if someone had taken the time to edit all the nails-on-chalkboard things like “It’s not just bla, it’s a BLA” phrasing and the other dozen or so obvious tells, but apparently no one even cared enough to do that. All the people leaving five star reviews are already fans of this guy or something.
Frankly, I’m offended at the idea that I would ever utilize ChatGPT for anything but Red Team Stress-Testing. I only use the finest customized Opus 4.6 Extended model to generate AI text, which, speaking as a professional editor nominated for several awards and recognized for my editorial talents by no less than two SF grandmaster - the late Jerry Pournelle and John C. Wright - is observably superior to the average human genre author.
In any event, if the Gammas are triggered and activated, you know there is truth in it.
For me Owen needs a ruthless editor and Vox filled the bill as needed. I'm about 20% thru it and I can say it is good because I will close the kindle and ponder what I just read a good many times already. And the next time some leftist crap bag throws the rhetoric of "White supremacist" at me in some attempt to bully me I will just throw the fact that we Whites are saddled with way too many gamma males to make any such claim. Which leads me to think a Hitler in the bunker video could be redubbed into gamma rage.
I think it difficult for gammas to see the difference between a genuine person and someone who is trying to trick them. Maybe it's projection maybe it's because genuine people often hurt the feelings they use for decision making. Either way the rest of us are very grateful that you guys put yourself out there publicly so we can be entertained by their mental gymnastics.