SSH in Literature

The circle is now complete

Knowing the futility of resistance, the headman of Iida submitted to the leader of the Mita Ronin.

This is an example of SSH being demonstrated in the literature of the past, in this case, in a Japanese novel entitled Before the Dawn by Toson Shimazaki, published in 1929, about the events taking place in Japan just prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1867.

Hanzo and his companions entered Iida around dusk. They had come to the place where the Mito ronin had made their decision to bypass the town, and the scene of the still greater upheaval when the townsmen had then to confront the pursuing shogunal army under Tanuma.

It was not for headmen or toiya from Nakatsugawa and Magome to know the details of the death by seppuku of the steward of Iida. Yet once they had settled down in an inn in this town so important to the people of the Kiso region, they found it possible to imagine something of the nature of that tragedy. When a person is directly confronted by a violent end, he has no choice but to yield to that fate. But why had the steward, the official most responsible for the han, been subjected to such a violent, pointless death? Why had the shogunal council brought its power to bear on this allied domain of less than twenty thousand koku revenue? To Hanzo and the others, it appeared that it was because Iida had gone too far in actually repairing the back roads, and had gone still further out of its way to contribute three thousand ryo to the Mito ronin for military expenses. Yet the order for the steward to disembowel himself had been given by a shogunal commander who had not come near Wada pass on the day of the desperate struggle by the Matsumoto and Suwa forces at Tozawa, and who had always been careful to maintain a distance of at least fifty miles between himself and the rebel army.

Needless to say, Tanuma, the shogunal commander in question, is a Gamma whose severity toward a low-ranking official who acquiesced in the face of a vastly superior rebel army rather than resist and cause his town to be attacked and pillaged is only surpassed by his cowardice in refusing to give battle to that same army even though it was outnumbered by his own troops. Even more damning, he’d also failed to come to bring his army to the assistance of his fellow imperial troops and reinforce them prior to their defeat by the Mito ronin at Tozawa.

As Shimazaki shows, the Gamma doesn’t hesitate to exhibit shameless hypocrisy by punishing others whose failures are considerably less serious than the failures he readily excuses in himself.

But this example is very different, as instead of unconsciously presaging the articulation of the taxonomy, it is a conscious application of it. This is from The Many-Angled World by Christopher Nuttall, published in 2024.

Sir Pellaeon stepped down beside him, his face grim. Norris glanced at the Knight, feeling a complicated mixture of emotions he didn't want to look at too closely. Admiration and fear, awe and resentment...

Norris wanted to become a Knight himself and yet he knew he could never make it, no matter how hard he worked. Sir Pellaeon was a true leader, a hero among men, a man so certain of himself he didn't need to raise himself up by putting everyone else down. Norris had never believed in the alpha male concept, not least because those who did believe in it insisted he was a worthless gamma male, but just looking at Sir Pellaeon made him wonder if there really were such things as alpha males.

This is the first of what I suspect will be countless applications of the SSH in the literature of the future. Indeed, I anticipate that most authors will begin incorporating it in an integral sense that is more akin to the historical example than the more overt sense seen in the recent one.