Monkey Business

About a year ago was the first I ever heard someone call another guy a “beta.” I was hanging out with some buddies just shooting the shit and they mentioned a guy we all knew that they very casually declared was “such a fuckin beta.”

I remember that moment very well. I did a double-take and thought to my self “Whoa. Is this what we’re doing now?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. As time went on I noticed it was becoming popular culture, at least among young guys, to start labeling men as either Alpha or Beta. “That was such an Alpha move!” became a serious saying that I heard pretty often. I wasn’t particularly surprised because after all my generation is hopelessly obsessed with putting people into boxes and categories. But where did this terminology come from anyway? It seems so primal to me since Alpha and Beta are historically labels that we reserve for animals living in packs and tribes.

This trend really didn’t sit well with me so I tried hard not to contribute to it. And ironically enough, I felt like the men using these terms the most often were actually the most insecure about being called a Beta themselves. Regardless, I’m convinced that there’s something seriously dangerous in implying that someone is inferior by saying they’re a Beta. So I did some research.

I was reading some of the research of Frans de Waal, a renowned Dutch primatologist at Emory University who studies chimpanzee behavior. As we know, chimps are some of the closest relatives to humans in the animal kingdom. And of course we’ve been studying their behavior for decades to learn about the basic psychology and natural instincts that drive ours.

Frans de Waal’s findings really intrigued me in relation to this topic. All the relevant research indicates that male chimps have a linear dominance hierarchy in which there is an Alpha at the top and Betas at the bottom of the chain. The Alpha gets his pick of the litter with the female chimps and the lowest ranking males don’t get to procreate with any females at all.

Unless.

Unless the hierarchy destabilizes and the pack enters a period of chaos, raping and looting. This is when the lower ranking chimps seize the opportunity to pass on their genes. It turns out that because they’re so incentivized to reproduce, low ranking chimps purposefully do things to create instability! That’s their natural instinct when the existing hierarchy leaves them at the bottom of the barrel.

What does this have to do with human beings? Well obviously we’re a little more complex. But let’s assume that we share a lot of the same instincts as our cousin the chimp. Except that we act on them differently because we exist in such a complex and vastly interconnected society. There are men out there who feel that they are among the lowest ranking in the human version of the dominance hierarchy. They feel like losers. They feel like betas. And what’s worst is they feel like there’s no way to pull themselves out of that sad reality.

So what’s their natural, primitive instinct in this case? To go and do something that creates instability.

In my view this is exactly the instinct that creates lone-wolf shooters who attack schools and places of worship. It’s exactly the instinct that makes someone incite a riot. It’s exactly the instinct that might lead someone to vote for a politician that’ll create instability.

A couple months back I mentioned the label “beta” in a blog anout anxiety but I mainly focused on the damage it does on those individuals being labeled. The suffering on the part of someone who feels isolated and desperate is self-evident. But these kinds of people aren’t neutral or harmless to everybody else. They’re inclined to help the entire system collapse.

Here’s the thing though— the message we send to those individuals matters. The way we label people matters.

Want to know what else happens with Chimp hierarchies? They shift. All the time. The Alphas aren’t Alphas forever and low status chimps often climb up the ranks. So let’s assume for a second it’s true that some guys are Alphas and others are Betas, just like with chimps. The fact is that those wouldn’t be static labels anyway. The category a guy would fall under is fluid and situational. You could be either one or the other depending on the room that you’re in.

So let’s stop making it out to be that people who are “betas” or “losers” or “failures” are destined to be that way forever. It’s not a good message. For anybody.

Maybe these labels are something that people have always silently thought to themselves. But why not keep it that way? As far as I can tell, a society where we tell people “sucks to suck, loser” breeds a lot of chimps that crave instability.

Filip, again.