I think it's important to note that this "gamma male" cheated to pass the vision test in order to serve in the Merchant Marine during WWII -- a service with a higher casualty rate than any of the armed forces during the war. In later life he built and sailed his own boats. How many wannabe-Alphas reading this can say the same?
This one hits home for me. Books were a big part of my life. "Pillar of Iron" and "Great Lion of God" by Taylor Caldwell were formative books that I read one long winter. Cicero, or her ideal of Cicero, became a an ideal of mine. I studied rhetoric (badly), and stoicism (less badly) as far as I could in the small Midwestern town of my birth.
But she was a certified nut. Crazy. When I read those books now, books that at the time formed part of my personality, I can see it burning through.
Same with Howard, Asimov, and a few others whose books I enjoyed. When I was able to see what they actually did in their private life, I had a few serious questions about how their books had been influenced by their views.
But I will credit Caldwell's book and later the Rome books by Colleen McCullough for my love of Roman history. Never mind that reality was not what the books portray, they led me to the source.
By the black pill schema, his facial attractiveness is 4/10, or 5 if you're really generous. Awkwardly balding, rubber face, feminine lower third, thin lips, sticky out ears, mediocre jawline visibility (and poor by standards of the time), overly large upper third etc..... But the big killer is the prey eyes. He looks hunted. The eyebrows are good and eyelid visibility nicely limited but it seems his eyes are not deeply set in their sockets, giving him the bugman aspect
Vance: " No question but that I was bright, but probably not very likeable, nor dripping with charm. In the first place, I was quietly arrogant, also introverted, with my own view on how the world should be run. I was not at all gregarious, and without social skills. "
Arrogance. Having a view on how to run the world is Alpha ambition. Lacking social skills is a lack of Alpha goods.
Omegas tend to accept their outcast status and adopt a "Leave me alone" attitude.
There is distance between having a view on how the world should operate and feeling qualified to run things.
The Gamma rationalization usually claims that others fail to realize how charming or attractive they are. My opinion of this is that either Vance broke out of the Gamma mindset to a large degree or was possibly a high Omega. That's why I'm wondering what the Gamma tell is in the self-description.
Having a view how things should be run is a judgement call that presumes oneself has enough information to understand how things should work and how reality is lacking.
"That's why I'm wondering what the Gamma tell is in the self-description."
What part of the word arrogance did you not understand? It's the interest in intervening in the affairs of others that differentiates the Gamma inside the hierarchy from the Omega outside the hierarchy.
The Gamma feels he should have more power than what he has. The Omega is hoping to be a part of the group if he hasn't given up already.
Most parents have opinions on how their children's sports team should operate, few will ever consider volunteering to coach.
He describes a 'quiet arrogance' which makes me disinclined to believe he was engaging in Gamma behaviors. The introverted aspect makes his operating within the hierarchy suspect as does being 'something of a freak'.
The world is a far larger concept than a children's sports team that one's beloved child is currently playing in. Your counter-example is confirming that Vance had Big Ideas, which is typical of a Gamma mindset.
It is obvious to everyone else. Stop arguing against the explanation you requested. It's Gamma to ask questions you don't want the answers to.
"He describes a 'quiet arrogance' which makes me disinclined to believe he was engaging in Gamma behaviors."
Arrogance is a Gamma trait. An Alpha/Sigma trait as well, but high rank men can back up their arrogance with competence. Gammas don't.
The fact that the women he fancied did not care for his attention confirms that he was engaged in low-rank arrogance. He explicitly connects his social failures to his arrogance. Pay attention to what Vance is telling you.
"The introverted aspect makes his operating within the hierarchy suspect as does being 'something of a freak'."
Introvert does not exclude from being part of the hierarchy. It is a handicap since introverts do less social stuff, but introverts can still be members of a social group and belong to hierarchies.
His brothers thought he was a freak because he was an intelligent precocious child who had low social skill. That type of child is on track to grow up Gamma.
"My intentions were honourable enough, as I recall; I merely wanted someone beautiful to listen to my daydreams and admire the scope of my intelligence."
Only Gammas want others to be mesmerized by their intelligence and believe this to be a valid mating strategy. The Gamma was also in all likelihood not being truthful regarding his intentions concerning women, the previous sentence being
"The ones I admired and tried to impress would have nothing to do with me, which caused me bafflement."
"I was quietly arrogant and introverted, with my own view on how the world should be run". This phrase highlights what reinforces gamma delusion: focusing on how the world should be instead of how it actually is. Jack Vance's awakening is seen accepting the reality of the world as it is. This is a hard task for the gamma to come to terms with.
Vance was a jack of many trades, who lived into his late '90s with much life experience..He remains our extended family favorite, including the grandkids for his incredible imagination and artistry in pieces like the Eyes of the Overworld and the Maduc Trilogy...He did still tend to put women on a pedestal, although he usually showed them as naive and not major actors in his stories...I suspect that he and Herbert influenced each other, though Herbert was never the wordsmith that Vance became, but Herbert did develop a grand scheme in Dune and other novels, which might have been influenced by Vance's Alastor Cluster series...
Is Vance worth exploring? I love Herbert's work and style. From what I've read Herbert was a guy who didn't mind getting his hands dirty, a family man, and a journalist until he was able to live off his book writing. In Dune his interest in planetary climatic systems is evident.
A girl here. Loved Jack Vance (liked Herbert more) and also loved his descriptions of the men who would be heroic in his novels. There was hope that if men with surprising amounts of inner strength could stumble upon a girl with matching levels of grit and determination that would make for a Happily Ever After scenario.
A scenario for the female 7's and 8's of the world to find a hidden gem of a male, and be thrilled to find him.
I read a lot of Vance. Some good and bad memories:
I enjoyed the Dying Earth for its settings and all the left-over relics, although I realised some time later that I disliked all of the characters.
Read Night Lamp and hated it. As I recall, the characters took remarkably little action. Checked dates and realised that he was 80 when he wrote it, which made sense.
Read a bunch more of his stories via Kindle. Was disappointed. Don't remember them, which is indicative.
I enjoyed the Demon Princes series. It had some unusual ideas and sequences.
And I forgive Vance everything for The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, which I was lucky enough to be given when quite young. I've read each at least a dozen times.
People essentially never change at their core. They either get better or worse at dealing with their core life strengths and weaknesses. Happily sometimes an man given to rage puts reigns on his beast through virtue, somewhat less happily for the man of rage, but a joy to everyone else, age sometimes simple robs him of the vitality needed to run his engine at full blast.
In this world of tears, the wounds we bear can make these matters harder or easier...
A delusional romantic can always mitigate the worst of what the fantasies bring, but it takes a grand amount of virtue or a mighty wound to obscure those tendencies from the eye of man and woman.
Better to become Prince Charming in whatever little ways one can than believe that women do not yearn for the chad on high horse.
You're possibly right. Maybe we essentially never change at our core. However, when I look back at the young me, I feel that guy is a complete stranger. Sometimes I think, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and kick myself right in the ass.
People cling to the adult things they shouldn't and discard the parts a child has that were never meant to be discarded.
Craggy saggy face looking at babyface, certainly we lay foundations of foolery in youth, but how many can say they haven't betrayed the child they once were?
He's you, you're him, for better or worse. It's understandable a desire to turn back the merciless hands, throw down some hands.
Understandably, but still a poison of the mind.
We're still wrestling with our lesser selves each day, that's enough of a fight for a lifetime.
I want to strangle that guy way more than my youthful self. He'll kill me if I don't.
Jack Vance is one of the men who exemplifies the strength of the gamma: the loremaster. It should be noted that Dungeons and Dragons was largely ripped from the Dying Earth series, spells per day mechanic included. Gammas can create and keep track of such endless minutiae that even the fabric the socks the characters wear has history. It's the positive side of the endless quibbling and wiki-sitting they do when applied to their own personal works.
The pic of his wife really lends to the argument that any stable relationship has a net equal amount of masculinity and femininity. So if the man is very feminine the woman will have to make up the remaining masculinity. She has a better jaw than him.
I realize now that the loremaking is the flip side of the rampant lying gammas do. The loremaster-archival ability is the exact same skill as keeping track of 100 different lies and their interactions which you have said makes lying difficult to maintain socially.
"Stop lying" in social situations becomes "Keep writing" in their professional work. "Delusion bubble" becomes "Verisimilitude". It's also why having a strong editor to clip out the obvious lie/lore-interaction fumbles makes mediocre gamma works into stellar ones. It's the same thing we see with politicians being presented only after careful editing and why Biden fans and Marvel movie fans overlap so strongly as social-fiction and movie-fiction overlap.
What is lore but a man's sublimation of the desire to create a delusional world in which you control everything and can define your own type as the King?
I can respect that honesty, but the passage from his novel was painful. While Vance is rated very highly by people, I am confident I will never read one of his novels.
“in order to encapsulate the whole of human knowledge”
Preposterous grandiosity is an underrated Gamma trait. I was a precocious reader with a post-adolescent college education and that kind of goal never occurred. Delusional starting worldviews must amplify personal delusions. Making the encounter with reality that much harder. And Vance overcame to a large extent…
Araminta Station is amazing. I'm glad he got the sequel out.
Planet of Adventure is arguably his most impressive set of created cultures.
Night Lamp and The Demon Princes may be my favorites, as revenge tales.
The Dying Earth in particular is used as an example of how his practical, grounded characters eschew flowery speech while his foppish characters turn it up to 11. So I think he is aware of this. And there is a spectrum between his shorter adventure stories which are more plainly written, versus his Lyonesse fairy trilogy which is hard to read.
"Which, I think, demonstrates that the psychologies we develop in our formative years tend to stay with us..."
When people speak of childhood trauma, they seem to naturally recall it from the first-person perspective of their childhood self that experienced it and continue to see it through that same lens even though they're now an adult. Reverting to the first-person childhood perspective seems like a sort of natural reflex.
Do you think it'd be helpful to folks to try to break that reflex, and see their childhood experiences instead from the third-person perspective of the adult that they now are? It seems like Vance did this to a degree, but his later self-insert at age 71 seems to be hung up still. Could telling people: "You're not 10 years old anymore. You're 38, you can let go of that 10 year old's perspective and better understand things from the perspective of the adult you are now, who has since matured and learned a lot about the world." maybe shake them out of that childhood psychology?
If he was interested in confronting (and recovering from) his trauma, he'd realize it wasn't personal. His parents would've traumatized any kid they had; it just happened to be him. Confronting this trauma would've meant confronting his abusers though - most people find that painful and aren't willing to do that.
I think that's absolutely right. Proper third-person might not even be totally necessary though, especially with more innocent social stuff. Just a more mature "first-person" that is the 38 year old rather than the child may well work-- i.e. Vance isn't still the kid his older brothers disliked, but he could be like, "Yeah, I was kind of an annoying little shit - I had to grow out of that."
Whether it be that or, "Yeah, mom was kinda nuts. She chased me around the kitchen with a knife when I was 8. Nothing an 8 year old can do warrants that." I think the key is looking at it from a more even keel. Whether one had some part in the negativity (Vance) or was totally innocent (8 year old Jane), I think the important thing is realizing that things when you're a kid really aren't personal.
Even as an adult, very little is personal. As a kid, even less so.
I think it's important to note that this "gamma male" cheated to pass the vision test in order to serve in the Merchant Marine during WWII -- a service with a higher casualty rate than any of the armed forces during the war. In later life he built and sailed his own boats. How many wannabe-Alphas reading this can say the same?
This one hits home for me. Books were a big part of my life. "Pillar of Iron" and "Great Lion of God" by Taylor Caldwell were formative books that I read one long winter. Cicero, or her ideal of Cicero, became a an ideal of mine. I studied rhetoric (badly), and stoicism (less badly) as far as I could in the small Midwestern town of my birth.
But she was a certified nut. Crazy. When I read those books now, books that at the time formed part of my personality, I can see it burning through.
Same with Howard, Asimov, and a few others whose books I enjoyed. When I was able to see what they actually did in their private life, I had a few serious questions about how their books had been influenced by their views.
But I will credit Caldwell's book and later the Rome books by Colleen McCullough for my love of Roman history. Never mind that reality was not what the books portray, they led me to the source.
Where would you place Robert E Howard on the SSH? His books are written like a sigma but his biography sounds gamma
Probably Gamma, possibly Omega. Obviously a total mama's boy.
I love Conan. But the "romance" parts are off so badly it shows Howard had little non material female attention.
Struggling gamma imo, also a possible homosexual. It's a shame, because he knew how to write an entertaining story.
Another unfortunate gamma was Robert Anson Heinlein.
By the black pill schema, his facial attractiveness is 4/10, or 5 if you're really generous. Awkwardly balding, rubber face, feminine lower third, thin lips, sticky out ears, mediocre jawline visibility (and poor by standards of the time), overly large upper third etc..... But the big killer is the prey eyes. He looks hunted. The eyebrows are good and eyelid visibility nicely limited but it seems his eyes are not deeply set in their sockets, giving him the bugman aspect
Had never heard of Vance, despite reading almost nothing but sci-fi in my early teens.
I'm curious; what makes this mindset Gamma and not Omega?
The quoted piece doesn't seem to contain any delusions of grandeur or inclination towards rage.
Vance: " No question but that I was bright, but probably not very likeable, nor dripping with charm. In the first place, I was quietly arrogant, also introverted, with my own view on how the world should be run. I was not at all gregarious, and without social skills. "
Arrogance. Having a view on how to run the world is Alpha ambition. Lacking social skills is a lack of Alpha goods.
Omegas tend to accept their outcast status and adopt a "Leave me alone" attitude.
There is distance between having a view on how the world should operate and feeling qualified to run things.
The Gamma rationalization usually claims that others fail to realize how charming or attractive they are. My opinion of this is that either Vance broke out of the Gamma mindset to a large degree or was possibly a high Omega. That's why I'm wondering what the Gamma tell is in the self-description.
Having a view how things should be run is a judgement call that presumes oneself has enough information to understand how things should work and how reality is lacking.
"That's why I'm wondering what the Gamma tell is in the self-description."
What part of the word arrogance did you not understand? It's the interest in intervening in the affairs of others that differentiates the Gamma inside the hierarchy from the Omega outside the hierarchy.
The Gamma feels he should have more power than what he has. The Omega is hoping to be a part of the group if he hasn't given up already.
Most parents have opinions on how their children's sports team should operate, few will ever consider volunteering to coach.
He describes a 'quiet arrogance' which makes me disinclined to believe he was engaging in Gamma behaviors. The introverted aspect makes his operating within the hierarchy suspect as does being 'something of a freak'.
To add a line to SirHamster's thorough answer in regards to 'quiet arrogance', recall that the descriptor for gamma's internal state is 'secret king'.
The world is a far larger concept than a children's sports team that one's beloved child is currently playing in. Your counter-example is confirming that Vance had Big Ideas, which is typical of a Gamma mindset.
It is obvious to everyone else. Stop arguing against the explanation you requested. It's Gamma to ask questions you don't want the answers to.
"He describes a 'quiet arrogance' which makes me disinclined to believe he was engaging in Gamma behaviors."
Arrogance is a Gamma trait. An Alpha/Sigma trait as well, but high rank men can back up their arrogance with competence. Gammas don't.
The fact that the women he fancied did not care for his attention confirms that he was engaged in low-rank arrogance. He explicitly connects his social failures to his arrogance. Pay attention to what Vance is telling you.
"The introverted aspect makes his operating within the hierarchy suspect as does being 'something of a freak'."
Introvert does not exclude from being part of the hierarchy. It is a handicap since introverts do less social stuff, but introverts can still be members of a social group and belong to hierarchies.
His brothers thought he was a freak because he was an intelligent precocious child who had low social skill. That type of child is on track to grow up Gamma.
Indeed. And when it comes to women:
"My intentions were honourable enough, as I recall; I merely wanted someone beautiful to listen to my daydreams and admire the scope of my intelligence."
Only Gammas want others to be mesmerized by their intelligence and believe this to be a valid mating strategy. The Gamma was also in all likelihood not being truthful regarding his intentions concerning women, the previous sentence being
"The ones I admired and tried to impress would have nothing to do with me, which caused me bafflement."
"doesn't seem to contain any delusions of grandeur or inclination towards rage"
You serious? He even said he was arrogant and felt deserving of ruling the world.
"I was quietly arrogant and introverted, with my own view on how the world should be run". This phrase highlights what reinforces gamma delusion: focusing on how the world should be instead of how it actually is. Jack Vance's awakening is seen accepting the reality of the world as it is. This is a hard task for the gamma to come to terms with.
Good on him for not only the self awareness but being able to publicly admit it
Vance was a jack of many trades, who lived into his late '90s with much life experience..He remains our extended family favorite, including the grandkids for his incredible imagination and artistry in pieces like the Eyes of the Overworld and the Maduc Trilogy...He did still tend to put women on a pedestal, although he usually showed them as naive and not major actors in his stories...I suspect that he and Herbert influenced each other, though Herbert was never the wordsmith that Vance became, but Herbert did develop a grand scheme in Dune and other novels, which might have been influenced by Vance's Alastor Cluster series...
Is Vance worth exploring? I love Herbert's work and style. From what I've read Herbert was a guy who didn't mind getting his hands dirty, a family man, and a journalist until he was able to live off his book writing. In Dune his interest in planetary climatic systems is evident.
Vance is an all time great, check out the Demon Princes quintet, apart from the works I mentioned....
A girl here. Loved Jack Vance (liked Herbert more) and also loved his descriptions of the men who would be heroic in his novels. There was hope that if men with surprising amounts of inner strength could stumble upon a girl with matching levels of grit and determination that would make for a Happily Ever After scenario.
A scenario for the female 7's and 8's of the world to find a hidden gem of a male, and be thrilled to find him.
Agree with the article.
I read a lot of Vance. Some good and bad memories:
I enjoyed the Dying Earth for its settings and all the left-over relics, although I realised some time later that I disliked all of the characters.
Read Night Lamp and hated it. As I recall, the characters took remarkably little action. Checked dates and realised that he was 80 when he wrote it, which made sense.
Read a bunch more of his stories via Kindle. Was disappointed. Don't remember them, which is indicative.
I enjoyed the Demon Princes series. It had some unusual ideas and sequences.
And I forgive Vance everything for The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, which I was lucky enough to be given when quite young. I've read each at least a dozen times.
People essentially never change at their core. They either get better or worse at dealing with their core life strengths and weaknesses. Happily sometimes an man given to rage puts reigns on his beast through virtue, somewhat less happily for the man of rage, but a joy to everyone else, age sometimes simple robs him of the vitality needed to run his engine at full blast.
In this world of tears, the wounds we bear can make these matters harder or easier...
A delusional romantic can always mitigate the worst of what the fantasies bring, but it takes a grand amount of virtue or a mighty wound to obscure those tendencies from the eye of man and woman.
Better to become Prince Charming in whatever little ways one can than believe that women do not yearn for the chad on high horse.
You're possibly right. Maybe we essentially never change at our core. However, when I look back at the young me, I feel that guy is a complete stranger. Sometimes I think, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and kick myself right in the ass.
People cling to the adult things they shouldn't and discard the parts a child has that were never meant to be discarded.
Craggy saggy face looking at babyface, certainly we lay foundations of foolery in youth, but how many can say they haven't betrayed the child they once were?
He's you, you're him, for better or worse. It's understandable a desire to turn back the merciless hands, throw down some hands.
Understandably, but still a poison of the mind.
We're still wrestling with our lesser selves each day, that's enough of a fight for a lifetime.
I want to strangle that guy way more than my youthful self. He'll kill me if I don't.
A picture of Jack Vance and his wife: https://shorturl.at/mfcvo
Jack Vance is one of the men who exemplifies the strength of the gamma: the loremaster. It should be noted that Dungeons and Dragons was largely ripped from the Dying Earth series, spells per day mechanic included. Gammas can create and keep track of such endless minutiae that even the fabric the socks the characters wear has history. It's the positive side of the endless quibbling and wiki-sitting they do when applied to their own personal works.
The pic of his wife really lends to the argument that any stable relationship has a net equal amount of masculinity and femininity. So if the man is very feminine the woman will have to make up the remaining masculinity. She has a better jaw than him.
She was cuter than one might have anticipated. But yes, the loremaster is an ideal Gamma occupation.
I realize now that the loremaking is the flip side of the rampant lying gammas do. The loremaster-archival ability is the exact same skill as keeping track of 100 different lies and their interactions which you have said makes lying difficult to maintain socially.
"Stop lying" in social situations becomes "Keep writing" in their professional work. "Delusion bubble" becomes "Verisimilitude". It's also why having a strong editor to clip out the obvious lie/lore-interaction fumbles makes mediocre gamma works into stellar ones. It's the same thing we see with politicians being presented only after careful editing and why Biden fans and Marvel movie fans overlap so strongly as social-fiction and movie-fiction overlap.
What is lore but a man's sublimation of the desire to create a delusional world in which you control everything and can define your own type as the King?
I can respect that honesty, but the passage from his novel was painful. While Vance is rated very highly by people, I am confident I will never read one of his novels.
“in order to encapsulate the whole of human knowledge”
Preposterous grandiosity is an underrated Gamma trait. I was a precocious reader with a post-adolescent college education and that kind of goal never occurred. Delusional starting worldviews must amplify personal delusions. Making the encounter with reality that much harder. And Vance overcame to a large extent…
Araminta Station is amazing. I'm glad he got the sequel out.
Planet of Adventure is arguably his most impressive set of created cultures.
Night Lamp and The Demon Princes may be my favorites, as revenge tales.
The Dying Earth in particular is used as an example of how his practical, grounded characters eschew flowery speech while his foppish characters turn it up to 11. So I think he is aware of this. And there is a spectrum between his shorter adventure stories which are more plainly written, versus his Lyonesse fairy trilogy which is hard to read.
Also Jack Vance is one of only three authors who can send me to the dictionary.
His use of the English language is a thing of beauty.
I feel like the cynicism level varies by story. It didn't bother me.
"Which, I think, demonstrates that the psychologies we develop in our formative years tend to stay with us..."
When people speak of childhood trauma, they seem to naturally recall it from the first-person perspective of their childhood self that experienced it and continue to see it through that same lens even though they're now an adult. Reverting to the first-person childhood perspective seems like a sort of natural reflex.
Do you think it'd be helpful to folks to try to break that reflex, and see their childhood experiences instead from the third-person perspective of the adult that they now are? It seems like Vance did this to a degree, but his later self-insert at age 71 seems to be hung up still. Could telling people: "You're not 10 years old anymore. You're 38, you can let go of that 10 year old's perspective and better understand things from the perspective of the adult you are now, who has since matured and learned a lot about the world." maybe shake them out of that childhood psychology?
If he was interested in confronting (and recovering from) his trauma, he'd realize it wasn't personal. His parents would've traumatized any kid they had; it just happened to be him. Confronting this trauma would've meant confronting his abusers though - most people find that painful and aren't willing to do that.
I think that's absolutely right. Proper third-person might not even be totally necessary though, especially with more innocent social stuff. Just a more mature "first-person" that is the 38 year old rather than the child may well work-- i.e. Vance isn't still the kid his older brothers disliked, but he could be like, "Yeah, I was kind of an annoying little shit - I had to grow out of that."
Whether it be that or, "Yeah, mom was kinda nuts. She chased me around the kitchen with a knife when I was 8. Nothing an 8 year old can do warrants that." I think the key is looking at it from a more even keel. Whether one had some part in the negativity (Vance) or was totally innocent (8 year old Jane), I think the important thing is realizing that things when you're a kid really aren't personal.
Even as an adult, very little is personal. As a kid, even less so.