The Rawness

Click here for Part 1, click here for Part 2.  Now let’s get started with this installment, part 3:

How and Why Modern Western Society Keeps Alphadom in Check and Penalizes Any Excess of It

I have to warn you, this will seem repetitive at times as I will cite overlapping points repeated by several sources, but I really, really want to make sure the logic behind my reasoning comes across clearly so bear with me.

Let’s start off with a passage from the book The Red Queen by Matt Ridley:

In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry:The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines: Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size: Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.

As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.

In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects: The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren: In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.”

The connection between sex and power is a long one.

There are several important lessons to derive from this passage. One lesson is that an unfettered, free-for-all competition for resources usually leads to incredible inequality where only a few of the men control most of the resources, including access to women, while most men are forced to suffer in misery and celibacy. The second is that being a major alpha male in today’s industrialized West is much, much less rewarding than it was at other moments in humankind’s history. We’ve gone from legalized harems and rule with an iron fist as a reward for major alphas to societies where we expect monogamy and a degree of humility exercised by comparable alpha males today. For example we recently saw the fallout a billionaire of today like Tiger Woods faces when he cheats for banging 14 low class hoes, which is nothing in comparison to the sexual escapades of the alphas of era past described above:

To get an idea of how powerful the vagina-hoarding effect of polygamy throughout history was, consider this: today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

How did we go from there to here? From polygamous societies where high status alphas with all the resources hoarded all the women and the average man didn’t get a chance to reproduce to a society where the most powerful alphas are expected to stay loyal to one wife and risk getting half their resources taken away from them if they don’t? How did we get from the richest alphas running harems to being publicly shamed on every television network and punished for straying even once?

The Red Queen tackles this question also, emphasis added by me:

[T]he long interlude of human polygamy, which began in Babylon nearly four thousand years ago, has largely come to an end in the West: Official concubines became unofficial mistresses, and mistresses became secrets kept from wives: In 1988, political power, far from being a ticket to polygamy, was jeopardized by any suggestion of infidelity: Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-ti once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.

What happened? Christianity? Hardly: It coexisted with polygamy for centuries, and its strictures were as cynically self-interested as any layman’s: Women’s rights? They came too late. A Victorian woman had as much and as little say in her husband’s affairs as a medieval one: No historian can yet explain what changed, but guesses include the idea that kings came to need internal allies enough that they had to surrender despotic power. Democracy, of a sort, was born. Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed.

Despotic power, which came with civilization, has faded again: It looks increasingly like an aberration in the history of humanity…[M]en have been unable to accumulate the sort of power that enabled the most successful of them to be promiscuous despots. The best they could hope for in the Pleistocene period was one or two faithful wives and a few affairs if their hunting or political skills were especially great:The best they can hope for now is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so.

Democracy happened. Democracy empowered lower status men and gave them a voice. Individually lower status men may have much less power than individual high status alphas, but as a group since there are so many more lower-status men in a society than there are powerful alphas, a “one-man, one-vote” society allows lower status men to collectively exercise much more power against alpha males than any others. And what these lower-status men will use that power to do shape a society that will (1) give themselves more access to women while giving alphas less access to women and (2) place limits to the abuses an uber-alpha can get away with. So democracy leads to legal limits on polygamy which leads to increased monogamy which leads to less sexual spoils and unfettered power for alpha males and more sexual spoils and more political power for all other lower-status males in a society. This means limitations on the upper-levels of alphadom are an essential part of a strong democracy.

The character of Hopper in A Bug’s Life understood the dangers of  lower status people, who naturally outnumber higher status people, getting an equal voice quite well:

Robert Wright also comes to a similar conclusion about the relationship of democracy to both the lessening of alpha political and sexual power and the increase of the political and sexual power of lower-class men:

Polygamy. This is the natural state of our species. Then again, the natural state of our species is also a small hunter-gatherer society, with little wealth and thus, only mild inequalities of status and power among men. In this “ancestral environment,” large harems were rare; competition for women, though intense, was seldom epically intense. But then came agriculture and other sources of economic surplus. Suddenly some males could be way more powerful than others. The commensurately massive sexual rewards made men ill-inclined to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most prolific genetic replicator in the history of our species was the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had 888 offspring. He was known as Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty. Get the picture?

And, in polygamous societies, low-status males weren’t exactly pacifists either. With scads of women monopolized by the well-to-do, less fortunate men could get mighty lonely and become very unhappy campers. This volatile discontent may be the reason that, as anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown, polygamy and authoritarianism have gone hand in hand. Back when the Zulu king was entitled to more than 100 women, coughing or spitting at his dinner table was punishable by death.

In this sense, monogamy meshes better than polygamy with the egalitarian values of a democracy. One-man-one-vote, one-man-one-wife.

So hoarding of women by powerful men in the form of polygamy and despotism go hand in hand, and more equitable distribution of women in the form of monogamy and democracy go hand in hand. A lot of men mistakenly believe polygamous society represents a paradise for men in general, but it doesn’t. It represents a paradise for one or a few men over all other men, who exist in a hell. Most men in highly polygamous societies are condemned to celibacy and their lives are less free and consist of extreme oppression by uber-alphas to boot.

Consider the following excerpts from this article by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy

When there is resource inequality among men—the case in every human society—most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy…

For an example of the mindset such an environment creates in lower-status men, let’s look at Muslim suicide bombers:

According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?

The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don’t get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Modern democratic society is a tradeoff. A lower status man ostensibly obtains the same vote and therefore voice as a higher status man. Since lower status men outnumber higher status uberalphas, they can now create a system of laws, checks and balances called the State that contains innate limitations to just how powerful an alpha can become. Powerful men keep adapting to the new status quos and try to become more powerful regardless, and the State, which mostly represents the collective voice of the lower-status peoplee, in turn keeps adapting to find new ways to put limitations on their alphadom. It’s an arms race between uberalphas who want to become as powerful as they can thanks to human nature, and the State, which is the tool lower status men collectively use throughout history to keep uberalphas in check by limiting their access to political power and the best vagina.

Yet because most men still harbor dreams of becoming more powerful and alpha themselves, these societies are still constructed with enough flexibility to allow for social mobility as well.  Evolution has designed men to naturally seek out power, status, and as a consequence, access to better and more women, so no matter how much lower-status men desire to squash uber-alphas, they will never tolerate a society that totally crushes the ability of everyone to become more powerful.  These tensions are what leads to our society that rewards people for being a mix of both alpha and beta as opposed to other societies that reward people strictly for being super-alpha, a society that crushes you for being too beta and for being too alpha, especially when you’re sandwiched between both extremes in the middle class.

This is a big reason why I said in the last installment that middle-class men are the worst equipped to achieve pure unadulterated alpha status in our society. Upper class men have the resources to possibly buy the State or work it from the inside. Lower class men often have little to lose and are used to hardship so they are often more willing to just straight up refuse to abide by the rules of the State. Then you have men who embody both attitudes, a ton of resources to buy off the State or work it from the inside combined with a willingness to thumb their nose at the rules of the State and refuse to abide by them when necessary. The patron saint of this last category is Joseph Kennedy. Is it any wonder his family is considered the ultimate American dynasty?

But even among these groups, sooner or later they more often then not lose against the State, whether it’s the IRS or divorce court for the rich or jail for the poor. So what chance does the middle-class man have to aim for pure alpha status in a society that by design is meant to curb any attempts to be alpha for the benefit of all men?

Next installment: The two major concepts modern industrialized democracies use to limit uberalpha potential: (1) alpha-proxies and (2) renegade alpha suppression.

Click here for Part 1.

The nightclub we were at was on the second floor of the building, with different landings in multiple directions that allowed you to lean on a railing and look downward at people entering from the ground floor and heading upstairs. I was spending my time at the club people watching rather than actively socializing.  As I saw one unremarkable person after another enter, my eyes began to glaze over with boredom.  I was just counting down the hours, no minutes, before I’d be heading home.

Suddenly my vision sharpened. I saw a man enter that caught my attention. Let’s call him CR Alpha.  On the surface there was nothing really impressive about him. He wasn’t remarkably fit. He wasn’t remarkably unfit. He was slim but not muscular. He wasn’t tall but wasn’t particularly short either. He wasn’t incredibly handsome although he wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t especially well dressed. He definitely wasn’t peacocking. He just had a basketball jersey, some track pants and some sneakers. He had a slight swagger but it was understated and not a godzilla-stomping-out-tokyo badass strut or anything like that; he had no chip on his shoulder or attitude that he was looking for trouble. He had some tattoos, but not the outrageous amount guys get when they’re blatantly overselling the bad boy image. But I could tell there was something about him.  He exuded maximum confidence and control of his domain with a bare minimum of cocky displays or overt exertion.

As I described before, the streets of Jaco were filled with a lot of crash test dummy criminal types. The kind of petty crooks who would try to sell you drugs or steal your stuff in a heartbeat if you left it unattended. They walked around trying to look as grimy and hard as possible all the time. I classified them immediately as opportunist punks, dangerous in that if they saw a moment of weakness, like you were drunk and outnumbered and a herb, they may try something, but if you were street smart and willing to show some heart they wouldn’t consider you worth the trouble of bothering. But this guy was different. I immediately identified him as a different class of criminal: a player.

I tapped my partner in crime Beethoven and pointed at the dude with my chin. “This fucking guy.”

Beethoven took notice and immediately knew who I was talking about. “Yeah, I see him.  He’s all business. He carries it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like if anything goes down, he’ll have the last word. But he’s not obnoxious about it. Like he’ll never go looking for trouble or causing unnecessary shit. Like he’s just chill as shit unless you come at him sideways. And then that’s that. No extra talk, no prolonged “man dance” where you argue and puff your chest out for 45 minutes straight but no one makes a move. He just handles his shit.”

Beethoven’s eyes stuck with the guy. “Yeah, yeah that sounds about right.”

The guy makes his way upstairs. We forget about him for a while. When I look at the beautiful girl from part 1 of this tale again, she is with him. Until he arrived, she was aloof and her expression was somewhat blank. She wasn’t acting stuck up or standoffish anything, just not particularly emotional one way or the other. But now that he was here, she was smiling, gregarious and warmer. She and her friend were only talking to him. But more important was the body language between him, the girl and her friend, who was also female. He would smile approvingly whenever they addressed him, speak a few words, but otherwise just lean back against the railing and stare at an undetermined spot in the room rather than at them. He wasn’t hugged up on the girl and she wasn’t attached at his hip. She and her friend would dance in his vicinity, almost for his benefit, but rarely directly in his line of sight. More like within his peripheral vision, so that he could keep his eye on them without having to look preoccupied with them. It was almost like there was an invisible semicircle area of personal space around him, a force field of unspoken protection, and they happily occupied the area within it, never going beyong the outer perimeter, held within his orbit by the invisible gravity of his quiet charisma much like a moon predictably orbits a planet and is content to never go beyond that orbit. He just leaned back, surveyed his domain and held these two girls in his sway with minimal maintenance.

Now you can always tell a winner mentality from a loser mentality by how they react to viewing situational winners. Losers see winners in a situation and try to visualize either how it should be the losers winning instead or try to think about how the winner doesn’t really deserve to be winning and got his gains unfairly. A man with a winner mentality sees someone winning in a situation and thinks, “Why is he a winner right now, and what can I learn from this?”  That was my attitude when seeing this guy.  I couldn’t hate, I had to congratulate.  A lot of square guys, especially from developed Western nations, would have seen this dude and say “What does he have? Why is that chick with his third-world criminal thug ass and not a classy civilized nice guy like me? The world is unfair.  After all, doesn’t she realize I’m smart, have a high IQ, am from the West, have American dollars, would treat her like a queen the way she deserves instead of ignoring her like this alpha thug does?  She must be brainwashed or low IQ trash to be content with a third-world badboy asshole like him instead of jumping through hoops for a good guy going places like me.” Even worse is the guy who puts a chick like that on a pedestal and imagines how all she needs is his nice treatment and exposure to his worldly ways to see the errors of her dating choices. That’s sucka mentality.

But there’s a saying in the hood, “game recognizes game.” Any guy with real game, I’m talking truly internalized game that comes from years in the game and not a bunch of barely tested scripts and gimmicks, would recognize that this guy deserved what he got, because he was giving her what she needed in that harsh environment. He was an alpha in the purest sense, and in an environment like that pure alphaness mattered more than anything else.  He was alpha in the way a middle class man could never be, especially in the West. The more primal and dog-eat-dog the environment, the scarcer the available resources for both the average man and woman, the harder the everyday grind, the weaker the property rights, the weaker the governmental representation, the more corrupt and powerless the police force and most importantly the more powerless and more nonexistent the middle class population, then the more women in said environment will select for pure, true alphas.

Here in the modernized West where there is a strong middle class and the average woman has more and more self-reliance thanks to feminism and doesn’t need a man as much for survival, a woman doesn’t need to select for pure alphadom as much, and probably won’t.  She may still be primally drawn to such alphas due to her genetic hard-wiring, a holdover from the more primal Pleistocene era, but she has enough counterprogramming from Western culture to ultimately balance it out.  What women in our modernized western societies are screening for, contrary to popular belief, are not the most purely alpha men but the most relatively alpha men within reasonable limits, or what I dub the Renaissance Man (credit for originally coining the term though goes to Tariq Nasheed).

To a chick surviving in the bleak, primal grind of a Jaco, Costa Rica, does she have time to seriously entertain this as an alpha male?

Is that really the pure essence of an alpha male in traditional evolutionary terms?  Or this frat guy?

No offense to any of the guys up there (Mystery, Style, Tucker Max), but most middle class men that are successful with women aren’t true alphas in the historical evolutionary sense.  They’re alphas in a relative sense, when compared to other middle-class men in their social circles.  Not only are most middle-class men not alpha males in the pure sense, but it would be stupid for them to even aspire to true pure alphadom.  Because true alphadom is a pointless goal for middle-class men in the West.

The successful middle-class alpha male is a mythical figure that can’t exist for any significant amount of time.  Our society is specifically built to put most alpha behavior in check.  The only types of men who can pull off any semblance of true alpha behavior in the West are men at the extreme lower end of the socioeconomic scale because they feel they have nothing to lose and men at the extremely high end of the socioeconomic scale because despite having something to lose they have more resources with which to get away with alpha behavior.  This is a society that keeps the peace and maintains the status quo by keeping alpha behavior in check through various disincentives and punishments.

Middle-class men in the West especially feel the pressure of these disincentives and punishments because on one hand they have enough resources and civility that they feel they have too much to lose by receiving these disincentives and punishment.  They have enough property and status and career that it will hurt them to lose any of it.  And if they end up in jail, they’re so civilized and genteel that they aren’t built for that setting the way a man from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale is.  Yet on the flip side they don’t have so much resources that they can shield themselves from the consequences of alpha behavior either, either buy buying themselves out of punishment or getting afforded a cushy punishment in the form of a country club prison stretch the way a man from the higher end of the socioeconomic scale can. For these reasons lower class and upper class men have much more freedom to push the envelope in pure alpha male behavior than middle class men do. And even for these groups in America there are limits to how alpha they can be, for various reasons.  I touched on limitations on the alpha status of the lower class already.  One of these days I’ll do the Myth of the Upper-Class Alpha Male as well.

Western middle class women are willing to enjoy these middle-class Western men because they have grown up conditioned to aspire to self-sufficient career woman status and expect to have two-income households when they marry.  So they don’t have to select mates with enough extreme wealth that can support a family singlehandedly.  Thanks to their own careers and middle-class status, they can still get a great quality of life from combining their own middle-class income with the income of a middle-class man, as opposed to the woman of the past with few big career opportunities who needed to rely totally on her prospective mate’s income and resources to improve her socioeconomic status.  Also, because of the higher expectations of monogamy in the modern West, even if a bunch of Western women wanted to effectively share a powerhouse alpha’s resources, it would be logistically too hard to pull off.  Rich men in America and the developed West are expected to be and actually are much more monogamous than rich men elsewhere in the world or throughout history because polygamy is very frowned upon here and the financial consequences to the rich man for engaging in it if caught can be very high.  Not to mention the social shaming (ask Tiger Woods).

Also, two more factors.  Rich people have less leisure time than ever, which is an important part of philandering.  They work more than ever nowadays, limiting the time they can spend on building and maintaining a harem.  Second, the cost of a decent standard of living in urban environments and big cities, the places that offer the most opportunity for rising in socioeconomic class these days, becomes a natural obstacle in harem building as well.  For a rich guy in a small town or the third world or a less expensive bygone era, maintaining a harem of extramarital women is a much less economically draining proposition than for a rich man in New York or Tokyo.  That’s why in America it takes a man of Tiger Woods’s flexible schedule and exorbitant wealth to pull off a harem of 14 women (not all simultaneously) throughout the years while a successful businessman in some parts of the world can accomplish the same feat with ease.

So rich men in America get monopolized by one lucky wife and may have one or two long-term mistresses with assorted quickies and escorts here and there.  The most access the average lower and middle-class woman can get to one of these high powered alpha men is the parting gift of occasional fling or quickie, and not the first prize of marriage or second prize of kept mistress status.  Societies like ours that strongly enforce monogamy shrink the supply of powerful alpha men women can choose from since they aren’t allowed to share these men amongst each other the way they could in a society that allows, explicitly or implicitly, long-term polygamous arrangements.  But as I pointed out, this shortage of powerful rich men available for long-term pair bonding is irrelevant because Western women don’t need such men for their survival like women in the past did.

In addition, thanks to a strong police force, strong property rights and strong paternalistic democratic government to offer physical protection and entitlement benefits if needed, thanks to feminism altering gender role expectations and giving women equal representational votes, thanks to a strong court system to provide retribution and justice if a man tries to violate them in any way, thanks to their own careers that allow them to be self-sufficient enough to provide their own sustenance and resources, thanks to birth control and abortions, thanks to the conveniences offered by appliance technology like washing machines, food processors, blenders and trash compactors, they are free to engage in sexual escapades and mating arrangements their female predecessors never dreamed of.  Or as I like to call it, “sport fucking” or “fun fucking” whoever she wants, be it bad boy alphas, metrosexual artfag hipsters, starving artists, ad account executives, Starbucks employees, and all types of middle class and working class guys who would have normally died without reproducing in the old dog-eat-dog primal eras of the past.  Choosing non-committing alpha males for flings or weak betas with little to moderate resources, while not the optimal choice of her genetic hard-wiring, doesn’t have the same dire consequences her in the Western world that it had for humans in the primal environments of the Pleistocene era or in modern third world hellholes.

In the West, a powerful resource-rich alpha isn’t a necessity thanks to the factors I described above, and in addition such an alpha isn’t widely available thanks to strongly enforced monogamy (only one women for each man) keeping the supply low.  This is why middle-class men are able to thrive in Western society.  They are a luxury only Western women can afford.  And the ideal middle class man is alpha enough to be a prize, but due to his circumstances there are natural ceilings to how alpha he can be.  A middle-class alpha who aims to have any longevity and reproductive success can’t exercise pure alpha status.  Sure he can work hard until he moves into a higher socioeconomic status and becomes rich, and at that point become more of a true, pure alpha, but so long as he remains in the middle-class status he won’t be able to pull off true, pure alpha status.  It’s for these reasons I specifically called my self-improvement series The Renaissance Man series and not The Alpha Male series.  The choice of terms was very deliberate and the two concepts are not interchangeable.  Because I think telling the average middle class man that alphadom is attainable or even desirable while remaining in middle class status is the biggest crock of shit going on today.  The best thing for a middle-class man to be in today’s society is not a true, pure alpha but a blend of the best aspects of an alpha male and the best aspects of a beta male, with the trappings of neither. A Renaissance Man.

Back to the Costa Rican Alpha Female I described in Part 1.  If you came up to her using some cheezy negs and magic tricks, she’d look at you like you were a joke.  The first thing she’d think is, if some crazy dude came up to me and tried to attack me or force me into prostitution or some drunk tourist tried to rape me, this dancing monkey couldn’t do shit. Can he guarantee that I’ll never have to resort to prostituting myself to get big bucks or slaving away at a shitty service or hospitality job for peanuts just to barely keep above grinding poverty level and stay at the same class level? This middle-class guy with his check-to-check existence, his meager 401(k) plan, his Netflix queue that he updates religiously, his mirthless materialism that he uses to convince himself he has more status than he actually has ans he works like a dog to maintain, his DVD box sets and encyclopedic knowledge of sports stats trivia, fantasy basketball league and collection of Bill Simmons Sports Guy columns, his 367 facebook friends, his witty repartee of popular movie quotes, his blog following, his X-Box 360 or whatever other middle-class trappings he has?  He’d be utterly useless to her.

“Fun-fucking” men like that for sport the way Western women can is a luxury not afforded to women who don’t come from the same environment.  For these women, choosing the right man is a decision so critical that it means the difference between surviving and thriving or wasting away in poverty, shame and degradation.  A woman like this may view such a middle class guy as as a trick or a simp and use him for some short term material gain like some free drinks or quick cash, but that’s it.  She may maintain a correspondence with him in hopes he’s a Captain Save-A-Ho type so that she can hit him up later with some sob story about her sick babies and get him to wire money to her if he’s enough of a big-hearted sap to go for it.  And if he’s a that type of jackpot middle-class sucker who can be used for a real long-term benefit like getting immigration to the West then she may really entertain him seriously, usually by playing to his emasculated Western male ego in a way American women would never do.  This type of treatment usually blows the  middle class Western man’s mind and he’s immediately sprung and wrapped around her finger.  But she’ll never respect him fully due to the type of men she’s grown up exposed to and once she immigrates and gets a foothold in her new country to the point where she no longer needs him anymore, she’ll leave him and get with the type of alpha male she’s been conditioned to be turned on by. Oftentimes she’ll even cheat with such an alpha behind her beta husband’s back soon after arriving in her new country.  Such stories are common.

Most of the time, what the average woman in a primal dog-eat-dog environment need in their immediate future is a lower-class guy who is so badass he can physically protect her from the dangers of the ghetto, or a guy uber-rich and uber-powerful enough to immediately lift her far away from the ghetto, so far in fact that she feels she is never in danger of going back.  In the specific case of Costa Rican Alpha Female, she is so top notch, even by the standards of the world stage, she can get the best of both worlds in Jaco: the guy who is both badass and tough enough to offer physical protection and powerful and rich enough to lift her far away from her poor beginnings.  A guy like CR Alpha.

So who exactly was CR Alpha?

The next day I discussed this with our guide for the trip.  This guy knew was a street-smart American expat who now lived in Costa Rica and functioned as both our concierge and tour guide.  He had been there for years and knew the ins and outs very well, from the seedy underbelly to the well-to-do parts.  We described the guy to him to see what he could tell us.  He immediately knew who we were talking about.  “He’s a lieutenant for the Colombians here.”  I can’t remember the full details because I was pretty wasted, but he was a ranking member of a Colombian organization known as either the White Colombians or the Black Colombians, I forget which.  He was their representative and highest ranking member in CR.  He ranked pretty high in the gang’s heirarchy, and of their members stationed in Costa Rica there was none higher.  Our concierge also said things that echoed the speculations Beethoven and I made the night before.  That he carried himself as a really cool guy and didn’t walk around acting like he had something to prove, but if there was ever a problem (which there rarely was because few were willing to cross him), he handled it in a definitive, unambiguous fashion.  He was no joke, and our concierge said over the years he even used him to handle some of his own “problems” that our concierge didn’t have the clout or muscle to handle on his own (presumably for a fee or in exchange for a favor, I didn’t ask for elaboration).

But that’s true alpha.  Not a fuzzy hat and black nail polish.  Not a cubicle job or middle management office. Not blog stardom.  None of this shit is true alpha.  And that’s fine.  For reasons I’ll explain in the next installment.

Next installment, how and why modern Western Society keeps alphadom in check and penalizes any excess of it.  And the pros and cons of such a system.

Click Here for Part 3

[Last week I promised a post that would go up on Monday and be controversial. As I started writing it, it kept getting longer and longer and was taking too much time to complete. So I decided to break it up instead, it will probably end up being three parts in total. Here's part 1:]

Last summer I was in Jaco, Costa Rica. It was one hell of a poor and cutthroat place. It was very much a crime and vice-infested town with a Wild West, anything goes feel and where the cops were basically a joke, except when it comes to harassing drunk tourists. It was incredibly grimy and bleak. I spent most of the vacation sitting by a pool in our house getting twisted and barbecuing.

There was a lot of petty crime and vice going on in Jaco. Drugs and other vices were everywhere out in the open, in daylight and nighttime. Lots of hustlers and crumbsnatchers. It was touristy in some densely trafficked areas but there were a lot of isolated spots where you could get got if you weren’t careful. But for the most part it wasn’t dangerous if you had even a hint of street smarts.

Most of the criminals I saw were local crash test dummies. Little dirt-poor young knucklehead locals who seemed influenced by too many gangsta rap images from America and too much reggaeton and ended up dressing and acting like bad parodies of a hip-hop stereotype. Punks trying to look hard and practice their ice grills, but as I said earlier nothing to worry about if you had even a hint of common sense or street smarts. But if you were careless and gave them an opening, they’d rob you blind.

At one nightclub we went to, I saw one girl who had to be the most beautiful creature I saw in my whole time down there. She was head and shoulders above every woman I had seen in the town. She had this style of dress that I can only describe as a modern haute couture/old world gypsy/bohemian/WWII European refugee chic/space age futuristic Paris runway mashup with lots of costume jewelry and gaudy accessories that she played straight yet managed to pull off without looking camp, kitschy, she somehow got all those disparate elements to blend together seamlessly and become more than the sum of their parts. For physical appearance picture Ava Gardner in Barefoot Contessa meets Shakira meets Dorothy Dandrige in Carmen Jones meets Jessica Alba…but with just a light sprinkling of light brown freckles on the olive skin of the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks, almost unnoticeable on first glance. The kind of appearance that’s so subtly exotic that she could conceivably belong to every race on the planet. And finally, she had a very seductive but classy body language that worked to maximum effect but without looking at all try-hard or desperate for attention. Ultrasexual but not slutty. Restrained but not prudish or icy. Great poise, posture and movement. Yet the final coup de grace was that despite all of this…she looked friendly, interesting and approachable. She somehow managed not to be intimidating at all, and didn’t put out the bitch shield unapproachable vibe that a comparatively hot women would if she were in America. My friend had a conversation with her and found her very pleasant and charming.

She wasn’t just hot by the relative standards of the uninspiring local talent. She would turn heads in the trendiest bar in Hollywood filled with aspiring starlets and models. It was the combination of her physical assets, her unique and well-conceived fashion style and her demeanor that would make her stand out in any room in any country in the world.

She was on the balcony of the club standing next to me, and I thought to myself In a third world shithole like this, who does this chick fuck with? See, in a Vegas, Los Angeles or a New York, a chick with looks and game like this girl would be fucking with straight moguls. She could golddig with the best of them if she wanted, without much effort. I’m not talking the glorified groupie chicks who mistakenly call themselves golddiggers and waste their time being jumpoffs for athletes and rappers and B-list actors for occasional shopping spree money or a free bottle here and there in a nightclub. I’m talking the type of chick who skips all the bullshit athletes, rappers and actors and gets wifed up by the team owner, the record label owner or entertainment mogul. The kind of chick dudes would be courting not with expensive dinners, vacations and jewels but by buying her a home, a car or a business. She’d get a new promise to make her famous every day. I totally would know her story and her type in the type of urban metropolis I’m from. But here, in Jaco, Costa Rica, in this almost primal, dog-eat-dog grimy town that is dirt poor and virtually lawless, who does an alpha female like this fuck with?

I was about to find out.

Click Here For Part 2

For an archive of previous installments in the series click here.

Procrastinate on Things You Enjoy

Pick something you are really looking forward to and get much joy from.  Now delay experiencing it.  Or miss it altogether.  Miss your favorite show.  Don’t even tape it.  That new blockbuster movie you were planning to spend the night outside waiting for to open?  See it three weeks after it comes out.  Procrastinate on the things you eagerly look forward to and do some chores you’ve been avoiding instead.  Leave that dessert you’ve been craving on your desk  and don’t eat it until the end of the day.  American Idol results tonight?  Live?  Go home and go to sleep instead.  Feel like taking a break to check email or Facebook or Twitter for the umpteenth time?  Finish your work project first and take the break in about five hours.

The point here is training yourself to forego immediate gratification when you have to.  The reason many of us don’t do the things we need to do to get long-term benefits for our lives is that our lives our filled with too many instances of succumbing to short-term gratification.  These short-term gratifications are distractions from more important lasting goals.

Here’s a great article by David Brooks on Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Experiment:

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

Brooks then goes on to discuss how these findings on the correlation between self-control and future success could positively influence policymaking. He also notes the following:

Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That’s probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don’t work. Sheer willpower doesn’t seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn’t stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis,” is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off — and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren’t so largely ignored by educators and policymakers.

The New Yorker goes more in-depth into Mischel’s research.

The scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

If Mischel and his team succeed, they will have outlined the neural circuitry of self-control. For decades, psychologists have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

This will be a fascinating investigation to track. If Mischel is right, raw intelligence isn’t so much the primary cause of future success but rather one of a series of causes of future success, a series that begins with capacity for self-control and capacity for delay of gratification. Rather than focusing on intelligence and whether it is mostly hereditary or can be changed, it may be more beneficial to study self-control and whether that is mostly hereditary or can be changed. It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it’s actually quite the paradigm shift.

I think learning to delay gratification is an important trait that it is never too late to develop.

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”…

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

I would suggest examining your own capacity for delay of gratification and creating challenges for yourself. Can you have a bowl of your favorite candy in front of you and only eat a couple and leave the rest of the bowl sitting there? Or do you have to pick at them until they’re finished? If the season finale or most important episode of your favorite show is on your DVR, do you have to watch it the same night it aired or can you leave it sitting there all week long until you’ve accomplished the more pressing matters in your life and are ready to finally get around to watching it? If challenged, could you force yourself to not DVR-record it at all, knowing it won’t be repeated and you’ll likely have to wait around for the box set to view said episode? It’s good to practice gratification delaying exercises and seeing how they make you feel. 

Read Iceberg Slim’s Pimp book to read how he mastered women by excruciating bouts of practicing delay of sexual gratification.

An encouraging finding:

The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.” For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.

But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Also:

Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

Start with small things you look forward to and practice putting those off or missing them altogether. Then challenge yourself to practice with bigger and bigger things.

But like the article quotes above say, the best way to achieve the gratification delay and build patience is by not thinking of the gratification and distracting yourself from dwelling on what you’re missing by focusing on something else. Here’s what you should focus on: Periodically make an ongoing list of long-term goals and short-term tasks you need to accomplish. Order them from 1 to 4, with 1 being “important and immediate,” 2 being “important but not immediate,” 3 being “unimportant and immediate” and 4 being “unimportant and not immediate.” The things in 3 and 4 more often than not are usually the things you need to procrastinate on but tend not to. Tasks and goals in 1 and 2 are usually things you should be doing immediately but tend to procrastinate. So as you learn to delay gratification and practice patience, usually with items falling in the 3 and 4 categories, use the new free time to distract yourself from what you’re missing by focusing on category 1 and 2 tasks instead. Eventually eliminate all the 1s from your list and strive to keep the list of 2s as small as possible and keep them from becoming 1s. And even then keep practicing patience and delaying gratification, because new temptation is always around the corner.

Earlier installments in this series can be found here:
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Let’s get down to it.

Understand and Merge Your Three Faces. This is one of those great insights that I read in a book at some point growing up, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the book was anymore. If anyone recognizes who originated this idea, let me know.

But the basic concept is, there are three “faces:”

1. The face of the person you see when you see yourself.
2. The face of the person you try to present to others
3. The face of the person that other people actually perceive when they see you
   

Based on that basic concept of three faces, I took it further and came up with the following observations.

People who are strong, charismatic, successful, confident and contented tend to understand and merge their “faces.” They try to manage and know their faces as thoroughly as possible and keep very similar, always fighting to keep them from drifting apart. They present themselves to others as they see themselves. And other people tend to also perceive them as they perceive themselves. It creates an exciting and fluid interaction. It inspires confidence. It’s automatically addicting once you’re around it.

People who are weak, uncharismatic, fractured, neurotic, self-pitying and miserable tend to have big gaps between their “faces” ["face-gaps"]. Here are some examples of “face gaps.”

(1) Let’s say a person sees themselves a certain way. We’ll call this face “A.” (2) He deliberately tries to present a different face to the world. We’ll call this face “B.” There is a face gap between how he sees himself (“A”) and what how he presents himself (“B”). Now (3) the final component is how other people see him. If he’s terribly transparent, some people will see him as he sees himself, face “A,” even though he is trying to present face “B” to the world. This would be an “A-B-A” face transaction. If the guy is a very good faker, others may actually believe the face he is trying to present to the world, face “B.” This would be an “A-B-B” transaction. If he’s totally socially inept or poor at image management, other people might see a totally different face altogether, face “C,” which is neither face “A,” how he sees himself, nor is it face “B,” which is how he tries to present himself to the world. He’s managed to give off an unrelated third impression instead. This would be an “A-B-C” face transaction, which is the worst of the lot. Many people who tend to view themselves one way and try desperately to present themselves another way suffer from a face gap that leads to what is called “impostor syndrome.”

The Impostor Syndrome, sometimes called Impostor Phenomenon or Fraud Syndrome, is a syndrome where sufferers are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It is not an officially recognized psychological disorder but has been the subject of numerous books and articles by psychologists and educators.

Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

There is a phrase that says “fake it ’til you make it.” People who follow this advice choose to willingly create this face gap between how they see themselves and how they present themselves to others. It works for some people but fails for others, even driving some mad. Why the different results? Because when you’re faking it until you make it, the end goal should be to eventually make both faces merge. After presenting yourself a certain way for long enough, you eventually start seeing yourself that way as well. The face gap you create when faking it til you make it should be a means to an end, and that end is the eventual elimination of said face gap as you begin to genuinely see yourself as the person you present to others. People on the other hand who live indefinitely with this face gap between how they view themselves and how they present themselves to others end up over a long enough time neurotic, sneaky, paranoid, distrustful, miserable and constantly afraid of being discovered as a fraud. I believe this is what, among other things, happened to Michael Jackson.

Another common face gap problem is when (1) a person sees themselves one way (face “A”), (2) tries hard to present this face to others (again face “A”), but (3) what actually gets communicated to others is something totally different (face “B”). This would be an “A-A-B” face transaction. Many people who consider themselves great people yet still are unlucky in love and friendship usually suffer from this form of face transaction. They consider themselves awesome people, try to show people how awesome they are, but something gets lost in translation somewhere for whatever reason. Maybe they get too nervous and mess up and come off creepy instead. Maybe they try to hard and come off too insecure and eager to please. Maybe their body language and fashion sense are conflicting. People who suffer from these types of face gaps are usually socially frustrated.

There are tons of combinations of face gaps and face-transaction scenarios, and it would take too long to create an exhaustive list. I just wanted to give examples of the concept, and I hope I was able to make it clear.

The most inspiring and mentally tough people tend to be the people who first understand their three faces, then work to merge them.

Some people for example either don’t realize how they view themselves, don’t realize how they present themselves to others, or don’t realize how others actually perceive them when interacting with them. Or worse, some people are guilty of being ignorant of all three faces at once. One guy thinks he’s hilarious and is unaware of how painfully unfunny he actually is to others. Or he may think he gives off a loveable bad boy persona when he’s actually coming off as an unlikeable dick with no social skills. Or a girl may think she is way hotter and bringing way more to the table than she actually is. I’m sure you get the picture. Understanding your three faces requires brutal honesty with yourself. Another great way is to get a self-improvement buddy, a friend or group of friends who will be brutally honest with constructive criticism. Everyone beforehand promise not to take anything personal, and all criticism should be constructive and useful. It’s not enough to criticize each other, you also have to inform each other what your respective strengths are so that you can lead with them.

Once you get an idea of the state of your three faces and are operating under no illusions, you need to start working toward merging them and eliminating gaps. The goal is to achieve “A-A-A” transactional state. To illustrate the merge using an example. Say (1) a guy thinks he’s funny as hell and filled with great stories (“A”). He (2) goes out trying to showcase his self-perceived funniness by telling jokes and stories at social gatherings, and thinks he’s killing it (“A,” consistent so far). But (3) he’s actually coming off to others as long-winded, unfunny, and oafish (“B”). To accomplish a merge, he has several options. After properly assessing the state of his three faces, he can proceed to find out what his strengths are. Say he discovers his strength is being a good listener, talking less and sharing good life lessons. He (1) starts seeing himself as that type of guy instead of as the life of the party (“A”). He (2) conveys himself as such (again, “A”). And (3) other people also start perceiving him as that guy because that persona plays better to his natural strengths (Again, “A”). A-A-A. Or alternatively, rather than change how he sees himself, he can choose to still see himself as funny and instead focus on working on changing how he presents that persona to others by learning how to actually convey humor well. He can study funny people and take notes on what they do, get honest feedback from others on how he can improve his humor and what his sticking points are and practice, practice, practice until he reaches the point where (1) he still sees himself as funny (“A”), (2) he’s still trying to convey himself as funny to others, but is now much better at it because of the work he’s put into it (again, “A”) and (3) people genuinely see him as being as funny as he sees himself and wants others to view him (again, “A,” hat trick).

Another thing to keep in mind is the internet. The internet can really create some horrible face gaps. Compare who you’re selling on your Myspace, Match.com or Facebook profile to who you believe you are. I’m especially aware of this as a blogger, as I struggle with who I am, what I’m trying to present myself as with this blog and what actually comes across to people reading. With all the technology, photoshop programs, online questionnaires and info manipulation out there, it’s incredibly hard not to experiment with how you present yourself to others and veer from the truth. And with all the instant feedback and limitless potential exposure, how can you not become insane about how others perceive you once you do open yourself up online? When messing with the internet, be very aware of how it’s affecting your three faces.

It’s more of a neverending struggle than a true end goal you can simply achieve once and for all, as daily life and new experiences constantly work to change our various faces and cause them to grow apart. It requires constant and brutally honest self-assessment to understand the state of your faces, and it requires the vigilance and self-discipline to keep them aligned when they start to drift apart. But it’s worth it.

Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Today I’m going to discuss two areas I still have problems with occasionally:

Raise Your Bragging Threshold and Stop Fishing for Compliments

A lot of guys brag and fish for compliments about the flimsiest things. It broadcasts horrible insecurity. No one likes that guy who looks for an excuse to brag about the same story every time you see him.

The level of events you’re willing to brag about or fish for compliments about also becomes the level at which you being to feel disappointment when things go wrong. For example, say you brag when your boss gives you a compliment about your work. By bragging about something so insignificant, you have given that event a strong value in your mind. So now, if that event doesn’t happen, or worse the opposite of the event happens and your boss makes a negative comment about your work, you’ll play it over and over in your head and become despondent. If you fish for compliments about your looks or brag every time someone compliments your looks, you have made such physical recognition a major event in your mind. Now if someone doesn’t compliment your looks, or worse says something negative about your looks, you make a big deal about it and get depressed. If you fish for compliments about your car, you’ll feel like a loser when no one notices your car. If you brag about every time you get a girl’s number, you’ll be depressed whenever you don’t get a number. If you brag about your job title, you’ll get flustered, embarrassed and erratic whenever someone gets it wrong. The lower and more insignificant your bragging threshold, the easier it will be to shake you and throw you off your A-game.

The other thing bragging does is create sticking points. When you brag about an occurrence, you give your subconscious mind the message that something significant and noteworthy has just happened. And as a consequence, you are training yourself to become satisfied with that occurrence whenever it repeats itself. You won’t feel much of a drive to surpass it. For example, when I was young, I would brag about getting numbers. I’d get a phone number and I’d act like I just scored a threesome with Raquel Welch and young Mia Farrow in their prime. I was creating a mindset in myself that phone numbers were a big deal, to the point they subconsciously became my endgame. As a result, once I got a number or two, I’d start to slow down because I already accomplished bragging rights. I subconsciously felt like I did all I needed to do. It wasn’t until I stopped bragging about such silly things and started treating phone numbers as no big deal that my game moved up to the next level.

The Patrick Ewing Knicks were the same way. They’d celebrate after every single basket they made. Patrick Ewing would do a layup and he’d literally be doing pirouettes down the court. Someone would dunk and the whole team would run around like idiots doing chest bumps in the first quarter. As a NY Knicks fan, I found it embarrassing. And unsurprisingly, they’d never win championships. They’d choke a lot. Michael Jordan and Bulls were different. He rarely stopped to celebrate prematurely. A basket was just a basket. He’d make it, maybe smile at most and just move on. He just treated it like the norm and it became commonplace. After a while, he even made championships seem commonplace.

What you are willing to brag about reveals the limits of your past accomplishments, you current ambitions and future expectations. So broadcast that all three of those things are high by raising your bragging threshold accordingly.

Avoid Screening Your Calls As Much As You Can

Society and technology makes it easier than ever to postpone or avoid confrontation. First the answering machine made it easy to screen calls. Then Caller ID made it even easier, as you knew who was calling from the moment the phone started ringing. This was huge for me, and I would screen all my calls for no reason. I would especially screen calls from numbers I didn’t recognize.

What I grew to realize is that the extent to which you screen phone calls is the extent to which things in your life are incongruent and out of whack. When every aspect of your life is in place, from your job performance to your personal finances to your love life to your friendships, you don’t have to screen calls. Think of the times in your life when you were most obsessed with screening phone calls. You were probably juggling multiple women and pretending you weren’t. You were probably bad about paying your bills and had a lot of creditors and collection agencies calling you. You were routinely overpromising and undelivering to friends and employers and as a result had to dodge them until you caught up on the things you promised them. And so on.

Routinely resorting to call screening puts you in a comfort zone where you allow these dysfunctions to never get fixed, or even worsen. That’s why you have to set a goal for yourself to never screen calls again. Now of course there are times when you won’t pick up your phone, like in a public library or a business meeting, but this is not the same as call screening as you would avoid that call no matter who was calling, because the timing is inconvenient and it would be offensive to people around you if you picked up at that moment. That’s fine. It’s the selective avoidance of phone calls you want to eliminate.

When you resolve to not screen phone calls anymore, this is what happens: You find yourself making sure your bills are paid, because if your creditors call, you’re going to be forced to speak to them. You start being honest about what you want from relationships, and you tell women you want to break up with them honestly rather than just avoid their calls until you hope they get a hint. Dodging them is no longer an option. Or you start honestly telling them you don’t want to be exclusive to one woman rather than secretly juggle multiple women. You start underpromising and overdelivering with your personal and professional obligations, because you know you aren’t planning to avoid the consequences later on. You start living with integrity and realizing a lot of people are more understanding than you think. When you take away from yourself the option of dodging future consequences, you suddenly find yourself acting with more character and foresight in your current transactions.

In the old days, avoiding people was harder. Especially because people lived in small towns where everyone knew everyone else, life was much less anonymous, people knew when you were home and would call on you, and people ran into each other more because of engagement in public and civic life (bowling leagues, church, etc.) We have so many elements in our life to create distance, anonymity, isolation and screening that personal accountability has gone out the window. But not for you. Not anymore.

To review prior installments:

Introduction
Introduction explaining the premise of the series
Part 1 in the series
Part 2 in the series.

Find Good Role Models and Study Them

Misery loves company, so people often have a tendency to pick friends who share similar problems, are enables and reinforce their negative traits. Another problem with picking toxic people is that they encourage you to hate successful people. This is poison to your subconscious, because anything you actively hate, you train your subconscious mind to keep out of your grasp. You are telling your subconscious mind to keep you from ever becoming that type of person.

You’ve never seen someone who actively believes money and power are evil ever becoming rich and powerful. Even politicians who rail against the rich and powerful to get votes, if you examine their pasts, have often spent their lives pursuing status and power. Their words are just for rallying votes. But it goes for anything, if you truly grow to hate something, you will never become that thing because your subconscious mind will keep you from that goal. And your subconscious mind will do this because it feels it is doing you a favor.

If you want to be richer, study and learn to admire rich people (but those with good character of course). If you want to be popular, study and learn to admire popular people. If you want to be good with women, study and learn to admire people who are good with women. Petty, bitter whiny people instead tend to surround themselves with other petty, bitter whiny people to use as an ongoing pity party and together they spend their time actively hating the people who are experiencing success. Is it any wonder they stay stuck in a rut?

At the other extreme, don’t take it to worship level either. They’re just people. Worship is another defense mechanism of the weak. By worshiping and being overly reverential of the successful, that is yet another way people put success out of their grasp. They put the successful on a pedestal, which is another way to make them unattainable, as they achieve almost diety-like status. And people get creeped out by those who worship them, which pretty much guarantees they’ll never respect them, much less mentor them.

Find role models, study them, and if possible befriend them. Learn what you can. And don’t be a leech or a user, find something you can offer in return. Bring something of value to the table. For example in high school I had a friend Stan who was the most popular guy in school, the best player on the basketball team with lots of alpha male swagger and swimming in girls. I remember I’d occasionally see him hanging out with this chubby Indian kid who was really nerdy. Sometimes we’d meet up after school and I’d see him parting ways with the guy before coming over to us. Eventually he introduced the guy to us. His name is Marshall. I figured if Marshall was cool with Stan, he must be cool too, so the rest of us occasionally started talking to him as well.

As the months went on, Marshall seemed to get less nerdy. Whenever he did something socially awkward, Stan would immediately check him, firmly but in a reassuring way. Stan would mock him on some of his clothing choices, but in the way male pals bust on each other (that’s how guys constructively criticize, especially at that age). The social proof seemed to help the kid out too, as I started seeing him with more and more friends every month.

One day I remember asking Stan how he even started becoming friends with Marshall in the first place, as he seemed to have nothing in common with our circle of friends. Marshall’s main circle of friends always remained a small group of somewhat geeky but nice guys. Stan told me “He offered to tutored me and helps keep me on the team. He’s a cool guy.” I was surprised because of how they related in public. You’d never know Marshall was tutoring Stan. They seemed totally at ease with each other and acted like equals. At that moment, I understood Marshall’s hustle and really admired the hell out of it. He didn’t just hate on the popular guy from the sidelines, but when he got an in with him, he didn’t kiss his ass either. He got the mentoring and the social proofing, while keeping his dignity and self-respect, and reaped the social benefits from it. He learned a lot and his confidence shot up too.

Now if you can’t find living, breathing role models for whatever reason, use movies, TV, books, autobiographies and interviews as a substitute until you can find some real life ones. Minimize your exposure to any media that saps your testosterone, like an NBC sitcom or a Judd Apatow movie. Don’t cut them out, just don’t make them the bulk of your entertainment. Your mind absorbs that. Don’t immerse yourself in those “nice guys finish first while bad boy jerks always lose” fairytales that movies have become.

Watch as many old movies and TV shows and books as you can. Read biographies and interviews with old school guys. Old movies kept it real. They weren’t obsessed with assuaging the egos of losers. They gave hard life lessons. Although leading men were becoming more sensitive and vulnerable since the 60s, they were still expected to have some swagger as late as the 80s. Even 80s movies like Revenge of the Nerds were funny precisely because they were supposed to be taken as so outlandishly unrealistic. No one was expected to aspire to be a nerd the way movies today try to seriously sell Michael Cera’s characters as someone who goes from hot girl to hot girl just living his life as a socially awkward hipsterish nerd. In the 80s, his counterpart was the lead from The Last American Virgin or Corey Haim in Lucas or Ducky from Pretty in Pink. Painful to watch, yes, but they taught a valuable life lesson: More often than not, life is unfair and the weak, ugly and socially awkward lose more often than they don’t. Being your best is the key, but character and perseverance are also important.

Today though, and I think it started with John Cusack movies but hit critical mass in the late 90s onward, we got the glorification of the slacker, the geek, the wuss and the shlub. And they aren’t even losers who are good, hardworking people with character. They’re losers who are immature, petty, lazy slackers with zero ambition. We are supposed to root for them to win against the bad boy and get the girl simply because they’re losers, as if that is their redeeming factor. Is it any wonder we have so many twentysomething whimpsters who feel entitled to a girl whose out of their league and filling up websites like this one? Nice Guy Entitlement Syndrome is out of control with young men now, who feel they deserve a 9 or a 10 just for having never been an ax murderer.

So what old movies. Go to your DVR and check out the offerings from American Movie Classics, Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies and start recording right away. Don’t just look for movies you still currently hear a lot about, go for movies you never heard of in your life with names you don’t recognize. In fact, don’t even read the synopsis for some of them, just go by what has a title that grabs you. Just start recording random movies, and when you watch them, note the years they were made. Then note how the men act, how the women act, what generates attraction, what inspires men to follow other men, who the role models are supposed to be, what are held up as good male values and bad male values. Look at how the alpha males and the beta males are portrayed, and how things turn out for them. Engage it critically, not slavishly. What do you think works? What do you think doesn’t? Also, as you watch more and more of these movies, always keep in mind the years they were made and try to form an overall cultural narrative in order to trace the evolution of gender roles in media portrayals. I’ve found, in my opinion, the first very dramatic shift occurred in the 70s.

The primary purpose of this exercise is to develop more role models. Also, it’s to expand your definitions of what men can be besides just the archetype of today’s post-feminist man, and to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each era’s male expectations. And finally, it helps you realize how so many of our current culture’s mindsets that you take for granted are very, very recent developments…ongoing experiments actually that we still don’t know the results of.

It also works with old books, like those by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and Henry Miller.

This old movie and old book assignment was something I discovered by accident. I started watching old movies because I wanted to try a new hobby, and all my favorite series like The Wire and The Shield were ending. And after immersing myself in these movies for months I started noticing all types of things. For example, if you think I’m exaggerating about the state of men, ask yourself this: who is a current American actor under the age of 35, not including black/ethnic guys, athletes or rappers, who can convincingly pull off a tough guy role? The only guy I can think of right now is that new actor Channing Tatum. The rest are just prettyboys or wusses. Even the ones with muscles aren’t convincing tough guys, they just look like vain pampered gym rats. Deniro and Pacino for example never had huge muscles but came off way tougher than some of today’s musclebound actors. My friends and I have been rattling off names and every guy we think of turns out to be over 35 or foreign. It’s reached the point where we’re using Matt Damon as our generation’s ultimate action hero. Shia LeBeouf is being groomed to take over the Indiana Jones franchise. Shia LeBeouf, the Disney guy! We import most of our tough guys now, like Jason Statham and Christian Bale.

Is it any wonder that we’re action-hero starved to the point where we’ve seen the likes of Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone brought out of storage to resurrect old franchises like Indian Jones, Die Hard, Rocky and Rambo. Or Clint Eastwood in the recent Gran Torino. And for the two of those movies that did have young guy sidekicks, who were they? Justin Long, the smug, hipster douche from Mac commercials and Shia LeBeouf, the nebbish kid who became famous from a Disney Channel knockoff of the old sitcom Boy Meets World called Even Stevens.

You get the point by now, but in closing, let me link to two brief, great interviews with older men that are very inspiring. First is an article of quotes from Clint Eastwood where he describes what he’s learned in his life. Next is one from Michael J. Fox where he does the same. I highly suggest reading both in their entirety, they’re quick and worthwhile reads.

Click here for the introduction explaining the premise of the series

Click here for Part 1 in the series.

Here are two more steps to become a Renaissance Man, and they are related:

Become an Expert on Your City

Most of us don’t experiment in the cities we live in. We settle into routines. We do the same daily commute, eat lunch at the same rotation of restaurants, or maybe just one restaurant. We have our favorite movie theater and our favorite bookstore and our favorite handful of restaurants. This is normal, as routines give a sense of comfort and predictability in a wildly unpredictable world.

When you’re a tourist someplace else though, you probably do the opposite. You probably try to see and experience as much as you can because you have a limited stay and you are excited by the newness of everything. You check out all the museums, try as many different bars and cafes and nightclubs as possible, do walking tours, and try to learn the story behind all the architecture.

Meanwhile, many of the locals you meet on vacation have probably never felt the urge to see the sites you want to see. The same goes for you in your hometown; there are probably many attractions you’re never even been curious to visit and much information and history you don’t bother to learn because you take your hometown for granted, plus you figure there will always be time to try new things eventually since you live there year-round.

What you need to do is become a tourist in your own town. Buy tourist books on where you live. Make an adventure out of it. First off, know where to eat, drink and shop for anything you need. Using NYC where I live as an example, you can get books like Time Out 1000 Things to Do in New York or Time Out New York Eating and Drinking 2009. In addition to the basics of eating, drinking and shopping, you can also add some guidebooks more tailored to your personal hobbies and interests. Do you like exercise like biking, hiking or running? Then try a book like Outdoor Escapes New York City or New York Running Guide (City Running Guides). Are you into political history? Get a politically themed guidebook like Radical Walking Tours of New York City (2nd ed). Are you a cheap bastard? Try a book like Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in New York. Do you like exploring obscure and little-known areas of historical interest? Try a book like Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis. These examples are all NY books because that’s where I live, but you get the idea. Also scour your city’s local alt-weekly paper to check for events and find some good local blogs that deal with happenings and exhibits around your city in general and neighborhood in particular. Pick up a free museum guide from a tourism stand. The possibilities are endless.

Make a plan every weekend to explore new places and sights in your city. Combine activities. Do them alone sometimes, do them with a group, combine them into your dates, make it an outing with your buddy, vary it up. The attitude to take is that there are things you plan to do anyway, and it’s up to whoever you’re inviting whether they want to come along for the ride. You’re going regardless.

This is good for several reasons. Men should know how to navigate every corner of their terrain. A man should be resourceful. He should be able to give directions confidently, he should be able to know where to go to get what he needs at any given time in his city to the best of his ability. He should be able to recommend things confidently. Also, it makes a man well-rounded and helps him feel rooted and tapped into the continuity of where he lives as opposed to being just another one of those nomadic, floating ghosts you find who live their lives isolated and detached from their surroundings thanks to their books, internet, ipods and daily routines. Plus, men need to have hobbies to stay sane, and exploring your city is a great hobby. Men are also hardwired to be naturally curious explorers. Doing this step helps satisfy all those needs to a degree.

But more importantly, it leads into my next tip:

Grasp Any Opportunity To Make Decisions

The following phrase needs to be exorcised from your vocabulary: “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

Never…ever…say that again. Don’t say it to your coworkers. Don’t say it to your friends. Don’t say it to your family members. And most importantly, never say “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” to a woman.

For men raised in a postfeminist world where supposedly men and women are not just supposed to be equal but fundamentally the same except for body parts, this can be confusing. When I give guys this advice, they usually say “But Ricky, if she says first that she doesn’t know what she wants to do, why is it so bad when I respond with the same thing and tell her that I don’t know what I want to do either? Why is it okay for her but not me?” Easy. Because life isn’t fair, and no matter what egalitarian ideology women verbalize in politically correct circles, they are biologically programmed to want their men to be leaders and save them from the strain of making decisions if they don’t have to. This is not the same as saying they can’t make decisions. They’re totally capable. They’d just prefer to have the man make them whenever possible and save them the effort and responsibility. Even if a woman has no idea where she wants to go, it will still piss her off and make her lose respect for you if she hears you say the same and pass the decision-making buck right back to her.

As a self-help guru I heard once said, it’s better to make a boldly make a bad decision than to meekly make no decision at all. Because even when think you’ve make no decision, in the mind of the woman you actually have made a decision. You’ve decided not to lead.

And this is where the last step of becoming an expert on your own city becomes crucial. If you’re an expert on your own city, you’ll always have home court advantage and will be able to make more informed decisions than whoever you’re with. People with a hustle mentality rather than a mastery mentality only want to learn things at the moment when they desperately need the information, and are therefore always playing catch up, getting by by the skin of their teeth and constantly making mistakes. By learning things throughout your life just for your own benefit and enjoyment without any immediate critical need for the information helps you always stay a step ahead of the game. Because you’re well-prepared, having the decision-making responsibility passed to you is not something to avoid; for a Renaissance Man it’s something he eagerly looks forward to. You’ll welcome the chance to lead. Always grasp any chance to lead whenever you spot moments of hesitation and indecision in others.

Some tips to make decision-making moments a welcome opportunity rather than a burden:

• Like mentioned above, be well-rounded and knowledgeable about many areas, especially concerning the area where you live so your decisions can be confident and informed.
• Practice making quick decisions about small things throughout your day, each and every day. Limit the time you spend weighing pros and cons. For example when shopping for something, give yourself a time limit for deliberating and weighing comparative specs. This teaches you to trust your gut and not get frozen by “analysis paralysis” or act wishy-washy.
• Be willing to risk a bad decision, and the consequences that come from it. And if you do make a bad decision, own up to it and don’t make excuses, whine or blame others. You would have taken the glory if it went well, so don’t avoid the blame if it goes badly.
• If you make a bad decision, instead of dwelling on it, focus on what you learned from the mistake, what you can do to avoid it next time, and rather than beat yourself up for the mistake, be happy for the valuable lesson you learned instead.
• Don’t look back or keep second-guessing once you’ve made the decision. Treat it as final and binding and move on unless some new critical information comes to light.

Whether dealing with your guy friends, business contacts, clients or a female you’re dating, look for and embrace opportunities to take leadership roles. A Renaissance Man is a leader of both men and women. But with women, it’s not just recommended, it’s mandatory. Make every decision first that you can. If you notice, she may be indecisive about making the first decision, but once you come up with a suggestion she’ll suddenly have a bunch of opinions and criticisms and alternative suggestions like “No, I don’t like that place” or “What about this place instead?” That’s just how it goes. Don’t be a tyrant, negotiate, take what she has to say into account and even if you do ultimately decide to go with her suggestion, make sure frame it’s clear that it’s because you felt it was the best choice and made the final call accordingly. You must make the first decision and the final call.

It sounds chauvinistic, I know, but put it in action and get back to me. I bet you’ll be plenty surprised.

Read the introduction if you haven’t done so already to understand the basic concept of the series.

Now let’s get into ways to become more of a Renaissance Man. Rather than give ultra-specific steps, my approach is to give general ways to live that will help you become more of a Renaissance Man in every aspect of your life.

Be Willing to Throw or Take a Punch If Needed

I touched on this in the introduction post. This does not mean to go out looking for fights, or to use fighting as your first resort to solving problems. Part of being a man is knowing when to let things slide and when your pride and self-respect demands physical action. Some drunk guy bumps into you in a bar and is unapologetic? Probably not worth it. Somebody threatens your girlfriend and/or kid in public and is unapologetic? Confrontation is needed. Some chick you haven’t been dating long is trying to get you and another guy to battle over her in a classic case of the mindgame “Let’s You and Him Fight?” Charge her to the game and move on. You’re wife’s ex is calling you out and pushing your buttons to a ridiculous degree as shown in this comment by Private Pigg in the comments section to the previous post? You have no choice but to throw a punch at that point.

Also important is to get a sense of who you’re dealing with. If you’re a middle class professional guy and you are dealing with a lower-class thug who may have been in and out of jail numerous times, you have much more to lose than him and he’s probably willing to take it to a level you don’t want to bring it to, like stabbing or shooting. Also, does he have a group of guys who look willing to jump into the fray?

Like I said, one has to use their judgment, and it should be a last resort, not a first. But you can’t go through life telling yourself it should never, ever be an option at all. Most guys fear fighting for the same reason most guys have anxiety about approaching strange women. Their ego can’t handle the prospect of failing publicly. It brings to mind that scene in Fight Club where one of the assignments Tyler Durden’s disciples must complete is to start a fight with someone else and deliberately lose, and they find that it’s harder than they expect because most people in civilized society will do anything to avoid fighting.

Control Your Apologies and Gratitude

We apologize and show gratitude much too often in our society. From what I hear from foreigners, Americans and the British are actually the worst at this. (If anyone who is well-traveled out there can support or refute this for me, it would be appreciated)

It gets so bad sometimes that you can bump into someone and they’ll reflexively apologize to you before you have a chance to even say anything. We overapologize and overthank to the point that apologies and gratitude become cheap, insincere and meaningless. As an assignment, start keeping track of how many times you and others around you apologize and thank people over the course of a day and you may be surprised by what you notice.

I used to overapologize and overthank all the time. At a restaurant, for every single thing a waiter would do for me, I’d respond with a “Thank you.” Most civilized people on average do this, so I thought nothing of it. One day my friend says to me, “What the fuck are you thanking him for? For doing the bare minimum of his job description?” At first it seemed like an assholish thing to say until I thought about it further and realized he was right. Why was I thanking him for doing the minimum of what I expect, for doing what he was being paid to do? And multiple times for every single task he did?

After that, I only would thank once with any encounter with a service person, and only at the very end of the transaction. Any extra thank yous before the end would only come if the service person was doing something above and beyond what he needed to do. The most important form of thank you, the one that mattered most, was the gratuity I paid at the end of the encounter, and I now realized if I compensated well at that point, that was what really counted.

The same goes for apologies: apologize selectively, and only when sincerely sorry. Don’t apologize for your thoughts, although you may apologize for expressing them tactlessly or at an inappropriate time. Apologize for your actions such as stepping on someone’s toe, but not for your beliefs.

The reason for this rule is because of the messages overapologizing and overthanking send both to yourself and to others. It conveys what you think you deserve. You are telling other people and yourself that they are doing you a favor just for being nice to you and treating you decently. If you work hard for your money and are spending it in someone’s establishment, you deserve good treatment. If you believe something and express it without malice and with tact, you don’t have to apologize. If you slightly bump people in the shoulder in an extremely crowded train where everyone can’t avoid bumping into each other, you don’t have to say “sorry” or “excuse me” every 10 seconds each time it happens. It’s unavoidable, it’s par for the course, it should be expected, and as long as it’s not excessive or painful contact it should be understood. Anyone who can’t get that is an unreasonable dick, which is not your problem.

This is a harder rule to implement than it seems at first glance, because we are unaware of the many covert ways we thank and apologize. It’s bigger than just verbalizing the words “sorry,” “excuse me” and “thank you” less. We often unwittingly thank and apologize with our emotional reactions and our body language.

For example, picture as a single guy you walk into a club and you see a group of women. The average guy will try to innocuously or meekly make his way over to them and maybe open by stammering “I don’t mean to bother you, but…” If he doesn’t get blown out right away, he visibly gets excited and looks elated and continues on. STOP RIGHT THERE AND THINK ABOUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED. His body language and words were apologetic. Before he even opened his mouth, his walk was apologetic, like he was sorry for taking up space and didn’t want to call attention to himself. He had no swagger and no confidence in his physical approach, and swagger and confidence are inherently unapologetic. Then he started with “I don’t mean to bother you..” Openers like this are also apologetic. So are openers like “Excuse me, but..” or “Sorry, but…” He is apologizing for talking to the person, as if a conversation with him is such a bad thing that he must apologize whenever he inflicts the experience on another human being. It sounds harmless, but people pick up on that language on an unconscious level and often respond accordingly. That’s why I used to like opening up with things like “Hey, you know what?” or “You’re not going to believe this” or “What are you guys gossiping about over there? or even just “Hey!” Anything except an pseudo-apologetic setup. Look around at guys around and you and you’ll see that not only do many guys lack swagger, they actually have an apologetic walk to them. Some people are so bad they give off the vibe like they’re apologizing just for existing.

Same goes for that physical reaction that implies gratitude. When someone responds positively to your approach or request, you don’t act pleased, you act like you’re entitled to it, like you expected no less. The message you send when you visibly show gratitude is that you are not used to such good treatment, that you don’t feel like you deserve it, that it’s an anomaly, something special that you only get as an occasional fluke. Since that is the opposite of how an alpha male or renaissance man is used to getting treated, the person reasons you therefore must not be an alpha or renaissance man. Even leaning in too much whenever she speaks to make sure you don’t miss a word is borderline apologetic. Lean back, look relaxed, force her to speak up or lean in to close the physical gap if you can’t hear her. Make her work to please you. If you ask someone out on a date and they say yes, don’t act excited or noticeably happier like she did you a favor, act like she did herself one by accepting. Go as far as saying something cocky like “See, I could tell you were a smart girl.”

The same goes for asking for a raise for your boss or asking your landlord to fix something or sending your food back to the kitchen when it’s subpar. This is bigger than a trick for picking up women, it’s about lifestyle and expectations. Don’t say “Sorry to bother you, but this food is cold.” Why are you sorry for expecting good food. Don’t preface your raise request with complimentary fluff like “I just want you to know I really enjoy working here, but…” That’s an apologetic intro, you are conveying you feel guilty for what you are about to ask, as if you don’t deserve it.”

Don’t take it too far and become an abrasive, unapologetic ingrate. Courtesy and manners are an important part of being a gentleman in a civilized society. The point is that you want to convey what you feel you deserve and how you expect to be treated, and you also don’t want to cheapen your words. Overapologizing and overthanking cheapen your apologies and gratitude. When used sparingly, your apologies and gratitude end up carrying more weight when they do get expressed, and you also train people to work harder to please you.

A quick note: it appears that I lost 150 subscribers, almost half my total, after my last Obama post. Well, at least you can’t say it didn’t move the readers.

Second quick note: it seems the immortality drive series was depressing the shit out of people, so I put it on hold for a while. I’m coming back to it sometime next week.

Anyway, I get a lot of ideas for posts suggested by readers, and I store them away for future reference. I figured now would be a good time to dig up one of those suggestions.

Someone, can’t remember who, asked that I give a 12 step plan on being an alpha male. I thought this request over for a while and realized I couldn’t give him the kind of post he was asking for. I imagine he wanted some tips on how to stand, talk or dress that would make him more of an alpha male. There are two reasons I felt unable to write such a post. First, there are many other sites that already write about such things, and do it much better than I ever could. And the second, and probably more controversial, reason is that I don’t really think it’s possible for most of us guys to even become alpha males in today’s society. Yes, you read that right.

Too many of the behaviors and attitudes associated with being a true alpha male are either extremely frowned upon socially, or are outright illegal. The very, very highest level of alpha male throughout history has been the guy who has been willing to either injure or take life (even if by ordering someone under him to do it) or risk injury and even his own death. For example it used to be perfectly acceptable, if a guy insulted you, to punch him in the face if you wanted. Now in today’s society, a guy can pretty much insult you all he wants until the cows come home, but the moment you get sick of it and punch him in the face, you have committed a crime. Back in the day though, you not only had the option of punching a dude, you could even duel him to the death. I’m sure the number of passive-aggressive pricks was much lower back then as a result, given repercussions like that. But not only is it illegal, we have a generation of men socially conditioned to avoid and frown on fighting from the moment they enter the school system. It’s drilled into their heads to the point where the average middle-class guy would do anything to avoid punching another guy in the face, not only because it would be illegal or because he fears the scorn of his community, but also because deep in his heart of hearts he feels like he failed as a civilized human being. Fighting has become a moral failing in the mind of modern men. The prevalent social attitude is to either stand there all day and bicker like a woman or take the “high road” and just walk away. Even guys who have asked me about how to be more alpha in the past, when I suggest punching a guy in the face once in a while when they get fed up as one of the steps, balk at this suggestion. And given the ways the community and the legal system will punish you for engaging physical violence, I can’t totally blame them. I once believed the same thing, but I made a pledge to myself two years ago though that to the best of my ability I would no longer shy away from physical violence to solve problems, or view it as a sign of weakness to do so. The people who created such rules were women and powerful but physically weak intellectual men who wanted to find a way to level the playing field for themselves against alpha males by using the legal system.

Most men are afraid to fight for the same reason they’re afraid of approaching women. They’re afraid of that ego-shattering sensation of failing, and publicly to boot. It’s safer to not try. With fighting, they even take it one step further by reframing their fear into a virtue, which is why most civilized men will try to portray their unwillingness to fight as a virtue.

But that’s just one of the many ways society has neutered the ability of men to be alpha males. One of the effects of a society with men totally free to be as alpha as they want is (1) incredible inequality as much of the power and sexual opportunity gets concentrated in the hands of the few and powerful, and (2) lack of security for the average person. Societies with unbridled alpha aggression free a man to go for the things he wants, but also leave him open to someone bigger and stronger doing the same thing to him at some point. And for women, these societies can be especially dangerous and volatile.

As societies become more civilized and become more democratic, they tend to start valuing things like equality and security above all else. Consequently these civilized societies start relegating all alpha status to the state, and to its enforcement arm, the legal system, in exchange for more equality and security. The State is the biggest alpha in America now. The only individuals who can achieve true alpha status in the West nowadays are the people who are rich and powerful enough to influence and control the state, the criminals because they refuse to play by the State’s rules and thumb their nose at its legal system enforcement arm , and the members that make up the frontline of that aforementioned enforcement arm such as police, prosecutors and military men in times of war.

The only option available for the rest of us is to be as much of a man as we can while still toeing the line. We can only be alpha within limits. So in trying to come up with a term beside Alpha Male, I decided to use Renaissance Man instead. This is a term that is also used by Tariq Nasheed. The Renaissance Man is a modern man who is as alpha as he can be despite not being rich and powerful and while still living within the limitations set upon him by society and his power level. You can often see examples of such men in old movies that were made before the 70s.

This is an open-ended series with no set ending, I’ll just keep adding installments whenever I feel like it. Part 1 comes tomorrow.