"some combination of the following factors: a Gamma father or father figure, raised by women alone, bullied rather heavily, socially awkward and had trouble knowing how to act, overweight or possessed some other physical trait that made him overly self-conscious"
I can honestly say I experienced all of these growing up. I was a gamma for a few years but I started working a job at a tree service company that really shook me out of it. It's incredible what a role model can do for a 15 year old kid. The trades are full of grumpy assholes that are more than willing to call you out on your gamma bullshit. It probably saved my life.
On Stoicism application 1, this was my starting point, ESPECIALLY for sarcasm. Excise sarcasm from your vocabulary. Sarcasm is the tool of the weak, like women and adolescents. Sarcasm is an attempt to attack while avoiding reprisal, because of the deniability of "I was being sarcastic."
Take note of the sarcastic men in your life, and every single one of them will be a gamma. (No, not every man who says something sarcastic is a gamma, but the ones who are constantly sarcastic are.) Also, sardonic is not the same as sarcastic.
Eliminating sarcasm is also a major step towards practicing faithful Christianity. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
There's an author named Jerr who wrote about a similar experience in increasing his status. He described how trying to hold back his emotional self-expression at first felt like condemning his old personality to an agonizing death. He even described itching and burning sensations as if going through withdrawal (which would make sense if you assume lower status men are addicted to external validation for their emotions). He goes into depth on this process in his book "The Wall Speaks." There's a lot of good advice in there about quelling inner doubt and learning to trust one's self. Hopefully this doesn't come across as me shilling his book, but given the subject matter I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to adopt the psychological habits of higher status men.
Another one is learn to apologise. Not an overwrought apology which then transitions into another opportunity for you to ‘fix’ everything that was bothering you. It’s an apology which draws a simple line under the situation.
I made a habit of always doing this at the end of a soccer game. If I lost my temper with someone or there was a bit of an altercation, I would always make a point of a making a friendly apology afterwards even if I really didn’t the guy.
David tended sheep. I think he learnt how to deal with people from leading and protecting them from Lions and Bears.
I read a book about Leadership and that Book noted Pastoralist men who in mastering their animals are also able to transfer a lot of that skill onto leading people properly.
"Get rid of social media" is great advice for a man. Unless you are regularly getting your picture taken doing awesome things, you don't need an Instagram. It's for girls.
I deleted all of it about 3 years ago and I haven't missed it at all. If you're not using it for business it's mostly for women, children and retards. This is the only place that I ever post anything or interact with others online. This place has value because of the content and all of you that add to that with good commentary.
I like this phrase: 'Stoicism is a tool, not a straitjacket.' It serves as a warning not to take it to the extreme, which could make you seem overly rigid.
When an alpha embodies stoicism, it looks cool.
When a gamma does it, it looks awkward.
The goal is to embody the principles of stoicism in a relaxed and balanced way.
Yeah I don't think it's possible for a Gamma not to seem awkward, the question is only how badly. Women in particular, all protestations of wanting you to 'express your feelings' aside, absolutely do not tolerate emotional incontinence in a man. They get all of that they could possibly ever want from their girlfriends.
All good advice. I've also realized that using bad language too much, for no good reason, tends to exacerbate my emotions and is counterproductive to the advice here. It might not apply to everyone, but I've tried to commit more consistently to never swearing, and I find this helps with emotional regulation quite a bit in my case.
Another good follow up point to this recovery, rehabilitation, or reconstitution of engrained behaviors one can consider is one VD brings up on occasion. The "why" is not as important as the "what". Contemplating why you do what you do is not the same as changing what you do, moment to moment. Contemplation is low effort if not mental masturbation and often detrimental. One can find endless reasons why you are the way you are and sadly many will fall into the trap of using those "why"s as excuses or justifications. If you really want to change, stop giving yourself excuses to stay the same. Start doing the work, moment to moment and day to day.
This blog and especially this post have helped me make sense of my dad. I'm pretty sure I've watched him claw his way out of Gammatude over the course of my lifetime.
My dad is intelligent and gifted, and he coasted through school on talent rather than hard work. He is very gifted in music and had a flair for the dramatic, so naturally he became a total theater kid.
Soon after graduating college, he found himself with a beautiful wife who he was terrified had just settled for him, and a new baby (me). He felt himself very lacking in self-discipline, so he decided to join the Army. This was in peacetime, before the military was fully converged, and it was very good for building his character. He achieved Sargeant before his honorable discharge, then went into church ministry.
My childhood is filled with many happy memories of singing around the dinner table and laughing heartily at my dad's jokes and funny voices and quotes. There are also unhappy memories of my dad keeping a tight rein over his wife and children as head of the house. I couldn't understand the deep insecurity I often sensed in him, but it makes a lot more sense now.
When my dad became a pastor, he over time realized that his role as situational Alpha required much more gravitas, so he began pulling back on the jokes and silliness. Over the years he became calm and stoic in public. Privately he still struggled, but his struggle was not in vain.
My dad today is well respected as a pastor, with loyal Bravos as deacons. My parents' relationship has improved over time, my mom is a sweet and submissive wife, and his ten kids, all grown or nearly grown, are all high-quality women and Delta or Bravo men. We still love to sing and laugh together.
Ever seen a bull at a fair? They've got these rings in their noses, and if you snap a lead onto that ring, a small child can lead that monster wherever they want.
Besides Gammas, I imagine this series is most useful to Deltas, in smoothing out some weaknesses they may have; and to Omegas, in those traits where they overlap with Gammas.
Deltas have a tendency to emotionally invest in things that aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things, such as their favourite sports ball team. You can read the Delta equivalent of the Gamma wall of text on any fans forum after a sore loss with various posters excoriating as to why the latest dismal performance is the ‘last straw’ and wholesale transformational change is required.
This is why I've had hesitations about becoming more of a delta. I've never been against general competency in the skills are good at. However, I saw too much of their allegiance to a team as something to pick up along with the rest.
Many a gamma considers themselves a super special boy with super special mind, but rather than intelligence...
There's a wild beast of emotion that dwells within some, far stronger than the usual still dangerous one that all humans have.
As a child, if you don't tame that emotional beast it'll rule you. So best to put heavy collar on it.
Really though in some ways, the man who confronts the wild beast late in life has one advantage. To master it, he will likely not break himself.
A child not knowing the way of things with little guidance, but understanding his emotions are too wild, that he's too sensitive...
Taming the beast is far better than starving it to silence.
This teller doesn't recommend becoming cold and indifferent, there's advantages, but in silencing the beast in this way, you unquestionably have lost something.
To master the emotions is to become more human.
To silence it is to be inhuman.
The child sometimes becomes a sigma, those functional often broken men, but more often a hollow omega, closing thick shell to hide from pain is the fate.
It's a mercy of God that the beast is so savage, that though a child wounds himself in trying to kill it, rare is it to utterly lose the ability to laugh and cry completely.
If you have the right authority and position, and see a child struggling with the grand wild beast of emotion, do help them.
On his own if he fails, he will be a gamma, and ill fate to be sure, but a twisted victory brings twisted results, and something darker than the patterns of omega and sigma can arise.
Would others who have struggled with this beast confirm or deny that accompaning this beast is a powerful often overactive imagination?
A strong imaginative powers are certainly a niche boon that lends itself well to the bane of making a delusion bubble.
Do tell if you aren't ashamed, of what gifts and burdens rode on the back of your beast, and did you triumph over it early in life or late?
This is correct. It's sometimes very difficult for a Sigma to relate to the emotional challenges of his wife or children, because of his inability to grasp why they care, or why they are upset about something.
It eventually becomes obvious that something is broken in the Sigma when faced with a situation that absolutely should generate strong emotion, but simply doesn't. The self-appointed would-be Sigmas who spiral because a girl rejected them or someone called them a name have no idea how wildly absurd their pretensions are.
A wounded man becoming a mighty cyborg is understandable, a man whole seeking such mutilation is a fool.
It's certainly high gamma behaviour to ignore and deny of one's birthright in favour of dreaming of a position that would rob them of it. Darkly amusing considering the desire to be special so dear to the gamma.
Alpha, Bravo, and Delta look whole regardless of their upsides and downsides.
Are Gamma, Omega and Sigma really only found in the broken?
What would a man broken into the pattern of an Alpha even look like?
The delta could apart from its healthy form take the shape of a whipped dog, but that's ultimately more omega than delta.
This feels, like morality, an axis apart from the usual form of the hierarchy.
That's certainly the excuse a lot of them give for their behaviour. Emotional hypersensitivity may be an extremity, but it's definitely a birth condition and not brokenness. Thanks for the clarity.
At some point, Gamma behaviors transition from annoying affects to mental disorder. It's one of those things that is difficult to assign a designated tipping point, but you know it when you see it. And, for me, familiarity with Cluster B disorder types makes seeing it much easier.
With ~7.7% of men in a given large population displaying a measurable degree of NPD (ie. a highly - developed false public persona & negative effects in their relationships with others), my experience & assessment strongly favors most are "born that way."
In large part, those personality types aren't able to significantly change. I reviewed some other literature about 10yrs ago (sadly, I didn't save that one) that expanded to roughly 1:6 men displayed at least one aspect of Cluster B dysfunction that had significant negative impact on their relationships. So, from 1 in 13, up to 1 in 6 men have some trait that is generally a Gamma manifestation.
For today's SSH essay, I absolutely agree that any Gamma type that can move out of that mold is highly laudable. Most will never even have the capacity to recognize the need.
Last, as Vox has noted, an optimal way to deal with Gammas is to keep them at maximum distance from your life. The same is true for NPDs - keep them out.
The only deviation I see in all that is the near-instant Creep factor Gammas cause in females, where many malignant NPDs are able to charm (mostly high empathy) women with a false persona before revealing their true abusiveness.
A lot of people, Gammas and to an extent, Deltas, forget that for most of history saying something inflammatory may very well get you killed on the spot.
Gammas are given pretty much a free rein in today’s culture. There’s even a prestige niche for Gamma media personalities and commentators. See Colbert, Stewart, Oliver, Pakman, Seder, and a whole slew of others I could be bothered to remember. How can Gammas graduate when they have these terrible examples to look to?
In a recent stream Owen Benjamin shared a story about an actor friend with whom he was starring in popular sitcom. The friend talked shit to a Ukrainian taxi-driver in LA. The driver hauled off & broke the actor’s jaw.
"some combination of the following factors: a Gamma father or father figure, raised by women alone, bullied rather heavily, socially awkward and had trouble knowing how to act, overweight or possessed some other physical trait that made him overly self-conscious"
I can honestly say I experienced all of these growing up. I was a gamma for a few years but I started working a job at a tree service company that really shook me out of it. It's incredible what a role model can do for a 15 year old kid. The trades are full of grumpy assholes that are more than willing to call you out on your gamma bullshit. It probably saved my life.
On Stoicism application 1, this was my starting point, ESPECIALLY for sarcasm. Excise sarcasm from your vocabulary. Sarcasm is the tool of the weak, like women and adolescents. Sarcasm is an attempt to attack while avoiding reprisal, because of the deniability of "I was being sarcastic."
Take note of the sarcastic men in your life, and every single one of them will be a gamma. (No, not every man who says something sarcastic is a gamma, but the ones who are constantly sarcastic are.) Also, sardonic is not the same as sarcastic.
Eliminating sarcasm is also a major step towards practicing faithful Christianity. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
There's an author named Jerr who wrote about a similar experience in increasing his status. He described how trying to hold back his emotional self-expression at first felt like condemning his old personality to an agonizing death. He even described itching and burning sensations as if going through withdrawal (which would make sense if you assume lower status men are addicted to external validation for their emotions). He goes into depth on this process in his book "The Wall Speaks." There's a lot of good advice in there about quelling inner doubt and learning to trust one's self. Hopefully this doesn't come across as me shilling his book, but given the subject matter I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to adopt the psychological habits of higher status men.
Another one is learn to apologise. Not an overwrought apology which then transitions into another opportunity for you to ‘fix’ everything that was bothering you. It’s an apology which draws a simple line under the situation.
I made a habit of always doing this at the end of a soccer game. If I lost my temper with someone or there was a bit of an altercation, I would always make a point of a making a friendly apology afterwards even if I really didn’t the guy.
An apology with no explainations. "I'm sorry, I was wrong, I'll try not to do that again."
Owning a dog is so important for children.
Get them to teach him to heel and come when he's called, even allow him growl at a stranger when necessary.
They will learn those virtues in themselves.
David tended sheep. I think he learnt how to deal with people from leading and protecting them from Lions and Bears.
I read a book about Leadership and that Book noted Pastoralist men who in mastering their animals are also able to transfer a lot of that skill onto leading people properly.
Good post.
"Get rid of social media" is great advice for a man. Unless you are regularly getting your picture taken doing awesome things, you don't need an Instagram. It's for girls.
Other than YouTube, substack, telegram and X. I don't use social media at all.
I deleted all of it about 3 years ago and I haven't missed it at all. If you're not using it for business it's mostly for women, children and retards. This is the only place that I ever post anything or interact with others online. This place has value because of the content and all of you that add to that with good commentary.
I like this phrase: 'Stoicism is a tool, not a straitjacket.' It serves as a warning not to take it to the extreme, which could make you seem overly rigid.
When an alpha embodies stoicism, it looks cool.
When a gamma does it, it looks awkward.
The goal is to embody the principles of stoicism in a relaxed and balanced way.
"When a gamma does it, it looks awkward."
Still a win if he keeps his mouth shut.
Yeah I don't think it's possible for a Gamma not to seem awkward, the question is only how badly. Women in particular, all protestations of wanting you to 'express your feelings' aside, absolutely do not tolerate emotional incontinence in a man. They get all of that they could possibly ever want from their girlfriends.
"Yeah I don't think it's possible for a Gamma not to seem awkward"
I showed a video a gamma was in to a girl and she said, "He looks like an alien in a person suit".
Emotional Buttons ready to be pressed to trigger self-defeat isn't something you want in a man.
The hazing of friends is there to desensitise yourself to that. Fathers and brothers are good at giving it and ensuring you can handle it.
Agree.
Probably goes without saying but quitting drugs and alcohol also seems really necessary to overcome the emotional rollercoaster.
In my limited experience, the most prevalent among the gammas I got to know was weed and they could never stop talking about it.
I mean, both can be nice, but you've got to plan it out. No one wants to be hungover or otherwise impaired when it's time to get things done.
All good advice. I've also realized that using bad language too much, for no good reason, tends to exacerbate my emotions and is counterproductive to the advice here. It might not apply to everyone, but I've tried to commit more consistently to never swearing, and I find this helps with emotional regulation quite a bit in my case.
Avoid swearing, lying, and sarcasm, and you'll find your attitude changes with it. It's weird.
Another good follow up point to this recovery, rehabilitation, or reconstitution of engrained behaviors one can consider is one VD brings up on occasion. The "why" is not as important as the "what". Contemplating why you do what you do is not the same as changing what you do, moment to moment. Contemplation is low effort if not mental masturbation and often detrimental. One can find endless reasons why you are the way you are and sadly many will fall into the trap of using those "why"s as excuses or justifications. If you really want to change, stop giving yourself excuses to stay the same. Start doing the work, moment to moment and day to day.
This blog and especially this post have helped me make sense of my dad. I'm pretty sure I've watched him claw his way out of Gammatude over the course of my lifetime.
My dad is intelligent and gifted, and he coasted through school on talent rather than hard work. He is very gifted in music and had a flair for the dramatic, so naturally he became a total theater kid.
Soon after graduating college, he found himself with a beautiful wife who he was terrified had just settled for him, and a new baby (me). He felt himself very lacking in self-discipline, so he decided to join the Army. This was in peacetime, before the military was fully converged, and it was very good for building his character. He achieved Sargeant before his honorable discharge, then went into church ministry.
My childhood is filled with many happy memories of singing around the dinner table and laughing heartily at my dad's jokes and funny voices and quotes. There are also unhappy memories of my dad keeping a tight rein over his wife and children as head of the house. I couldn't understand the deep insecurity I often sensed in him, but it makes a lot more sense now.
When my dad became a pastor, he over time realized that his role as situational Alpha required much more gravitas, so he began pulling back on the jokes and silliness. Over the years he became calm and stoic in public. Privately he still struggled, but his struggle was not in vain.
My dad today is well respected as a pastor, with loyal Bravos as deacons. My parents' relationship has improved over time, my mom is a sweet and submissive wife, and his ten kids, all grown or nearly grown, are all high-quality women and Delta or Bravo men. We still love to sing and laugh together.
Ever seen a bull at a fair? They've got these rings in their noses, and if you snap a lead onto that ring, a small child can lead that monster wherever they want.
Emotions can be a ring in your nose.
This is good advice for any man, no matter where he falls on the SSH.
Besides Gammas, I imagine this series is most useful to Deltas, in smoothing out some weaknesses they may have; and to Omegas, in those traits where they overlap with Gammas.
Deltas have a tendency to emotionally invest in things that aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things, such as their favourite sports ball team. You can read the Delta equivalent of the Gamma wall of text on any fans forum after a sore loss with various posters excoriating as to why the latest dismal performance is the ‘last straw’ and wholesale transformational change is required.
This is why I've had hesitations about becoming more of a delta. I've never been against general competency in the skills are good at. However, I saw too much of their allegiance to a team as something to pick up along with the rest.
Hilarious, and unfortunately true.
Many a gamma considers themselves a super special boy with super special mind, but rather than intelligence...
There's a wild beast of emotion that dwells within some, far stronger than the usual still dangerous one that all humans have.
As a child, if you don't tame that emotional beast it'll rule you. So best to put heavy collar on it.
Really though in some ways, the man who confronts the wild beast late in life has one advantage. To master it, he will likely not break himself.
A child not knowing the way of things with little guidance, but understanding his emotions are too wild, that he's too sensitive...
Taming the beast is far better than starving it to silence.
This teller doesn't recommend becoming cold and indifferent, there's advantages, but in silencing the beast in this way, you unquestionably have lost something.
To master the emotions is to become more human.
To silence it is to be inhuman.
The child sometimes becomes a sigma, those functional often broken men, but more often a hollow omega, closing thick shell to hide from pain is the fate.
It's a mercy of God that the beast is so savage, that though a child wounds himself in trying to kill it, rare is it to utterly lose the ability to laugh and cry completely.
If you have the right authority and position, and see a child struggling with the grand wild beast of emotion, do help them.
On his own if he fails, he will be a gamma, and ill fate to be sure, but a twisted victory brings twisted results, and something darker than the patterns of omega and sigma can arise.
Would others who have struggled with this beast confirm or deny that accompaning this beast is a powerful often overactive imagination?
A strong imaginative powers are certainly a niche boon that lends itself well to the bane of making a delusion bubble.
Do tell if you aren't ashamed, of what gifts and burdens rode on the back of your beast, and did you triumph over it early in life or late?
This is correct. It's sometimes very difficult for a Sigma to relate to the emotional challenges of his wife or children, because of his inability to grasp why they care, or why they are upset about something.
It eventually becomes obvious that something is broken in the Sigma when faced with a situation that absolutely should generate strong emotion, but simply doesn't. The self-appointed would-be Sigmas who spiral because a girl rejected them or someone called them a name have no idea how wildly absurd their pretensions are.
A wounded man becoming a mighty cyborg is understandable, a man whole seeking such mutilation is a fool.
It's certainly high gamma behaviour to ignore and deny of one's birthright in favour of dreaming of a position that would rob them of it. Darkly amusing considering the desire to be special so dear to the gamma.
Alpha, Bravo, and Delta look whole regardless of their upsides and downsides.
Are Gamma, Omega and Sigma really only found in the broken?
What would a man broken into the pattern of an Alpha even look like?
The delta could apart from its healthy form take the shape of a whipped dog, but that's ultimately more omega than delta.
This feels, like morality, an axis apart from the usual form of the hierarchy.
Gammas aren't broken. They are mostly born that way.
I don’t think it’s all too surprising that a particular ethnic group has a far higher proportion of gammas than others…
That's certainly the excuse a lot of them give for their behaviour. Emotional hypersensitivity may be an extremity, but it's definitely a birth condition and not brokenness. Thanks for the clarity.
I think of C.S. Lewis alot ever since Vox mentioned he was a gamma who lived well:
-Got to read all day and not deal with leadership
-Got to lecture people and write books people read all day
-Had status as a wise boy, as opposed to a smart boy but still pretty good. A sense of authority without having to be a leader
-Gets quoted a lot
-Had friends like Tolkien who were high status in his circles too
It really is the ideal life for a gamma. Respect, immersion in his hobbies, no underlings to get mad at him, no alphas to make him envious.
At some point, Gamma behaviors transition from annoying affects to mental disorder. It's one of those things that is difficult to assign a designated tipping point, but you know it when you see it. And, for me, familiarity with Cluster B disorder types makes seeing it much easier.
With ~7.7% of men in a given large population displaying a measurable degree of NPD (ie. a highly - developed false public persona & negative effects in their relationships with others), my experience & assessment strongly favors most are "born that way."
(Example citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669224/)
In large part, those personality types aren't able to significantly change. I reviewed some other literature about 10yrs ago (sadly, I didn't save that one) that expanded to roughly 1:6 men displayed at least one aspect of Cluster B dysfunction that had significant negative impact on their relationships. So, from 1 in 13, up to 1 in 6 men have some trait that is generally a Gamma manifestation.
For today's SSH essay, I absolutely agree that any Gamma type that can move out of that mold is highly laudable. Most will never even have the capacity to recognize the need.
Last, as Vox has noted, an optimal way to deal with Gammas is to keep them at maximum distance from your life. The same is true for NPDs - keep them out.
The only deviation I see in all that is the near-instant Creep factor Gammas cause in females, where many malignant NPDs are able to charm (mostly high empathy) women with a false persona before revealing their true abusiveness.
If ever there was a good way to drive yourself mad it's by trying to maintain a web of lies.
Neither a wild horse nor a slain horse may be ridden, but a tamed horse can accomplish much.
A lot of people, Gammas and to an extent, Deltas, forget that for most of history saying something inflammatory may very well get you killed on the spot.
Many a dual was fought over some petty words.
Bankers or Brahmins with their positions in Society or even Bureaucrats are shielded from this selection far more than other groups even in history.
Gammas are given pretty much a free rein in today’s culture. There’s even a prestige niche for Gamma media personalities and commentators. See Colbert, Stewart, Oliver, Pakman, Seder, and a whole slew of others I could be bothered to remember. How can Gammas graduate when they have these terrible examples to look to?
In a recent stream Owen Benjamin shared a story about an actor friend with whom he was starring in popular sitcom. The friend talked shit to a Ukrainian taxi-driver in LA. The driver hauled off & broke the actor’s jaw.