The question or debate over “alphaness”—does it exist, and if so, what is it?—seems never to end, even in the sphere, where you’d think it would be least controversial. My purpose here is to weigh in with a short summary of what some of the great thinkers of the past had to say on the subject.

I’ve thought about this for a while, initially from a frame of resistance. That is, I discounted such talk, in part based on what I thought I had learned from the classics. I won’t go into all the reasons why I thought so, though some are important and remain problems that I have not dispensed with. But the more I read and thought about it, I came to believe that in fact the concept is in there.

Approaching The Great Thinkers

But first a couple of caveats. First, none of the classics—so far as I have been able to find—talk about this concept exactly the way we do. So don’t look for exact parallels. But also, it’s important not to bring our prejudices to the task. The Great Books are (or were, though it’s still in the present tense for me personally) considered “great” for good reasons. These are the thinkers who made our world, the very most brilliant men of the past. Rather than come to them to see if they fit our preconceptions and this validate our prejudices, the better way to study them is as it were in submission. We should go to them full of humility to see what we can learn, beginning from the assumption that they are wiser than we (which they are).

Second, we must learn to overcome a very common objection or prejudice, which holds that the thought of the past has been superseded by later ideas and so is “out of date,” disproved, and of historical interest only. This is not the place to go into what is known as “historicism” except to say that this is an idea whose truth is more assumed than proved. Powerful refutations have been posed which the historicists have not dealt with, much less disposed of. Suffice to say, if you believe it is impossible for a thinker to be out of step with his time, to have access to permanent problems and ideas, then you can’t learn from the Great Books. You can’t understand them as they understand themselves. So there really is no point in studying them (or in reading on).

A corollary to this is the notion that the particular flaw of pre-modern thought, and even early modern thought, is that it is “unscientific” and therefore ultimately indistinguishable from myth, stereotype, speculation, etc. The great thinkers talk about human nature and the soul without recourse to numbers, microscopes, double blind experiments, peer reviewed journals, etc., so how can their ideas be any good, much less true? We today know better. In addition to the consideration outlined in the prior paragraph, I would also draw your attention to the philosophic concept of “noetic heterogeneity,” which again I don’t have the space to go into at any length here, but in very brief, it is a sort of philosophic “render unto Caesar.” That is, treat a given inquiry with the precision appropriate to the subject matter (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094b 12-27). It is not reasonable to expect mathematical precision from the study of the human soul. The human things are fundamentally different from the natural or heavenly things and require a different approach to understand. Once you understand “noetic heterogeneity,” it will change your entire way of thinking about the world. It is, truly, the single most important philosophic concept there is. Have you heard of the famous “Socratic Turn”? Well, that’s the heart of it.

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Greek Roots Of Manliness

That out of the way, let’s start with the Greeks. In the ancient Greek language there are two words for “man.” Anthropos (άνθρωπος; which gives us “anthropology” and so on) means “human being,” male or female, or “man” in the general sense of “humanity.” Anēr (ἀνήρ) means “real man” or manly man. (“Woman” is gynē; γυνή.) The anēr is a man who has developed his full male humanity and can participate in the highest functions of a man. Here then may be the root of this whole concept. It’s on clear display in Homer. Achilles, the warrior par excellence, is a “real man.” So is Hector. Whiny Agamemnon and prissy Paris, not so much.

The core of being an anēr is arete (ἀρετή). This word is variously translated today by scholars who are uncomfortable with what it means, which is virtue. Indeed, the Latin virtus was coined as a direct translation of the Greek arete, and virtus is the root of our word “virtue.” But virtue meant something back then: it is the particular excellence toward which a particular being is dedicated or aimed. So, the arete of a knife is sharpness and cutting. The arete of a man is … what?

Ah, that’s a very large question. The pre-philosophic Greeks would say politics and above all war. But it became clear that moral virtue is necessary for success in both, and the term came to encompass morality or right behavior. The contribution of philosophy was to show that in order to possess moral virtue, or any virtue, one must first know what it is. The unremitting analysis of Socrates and his followers showed that much of what people conventionally held to be virtue was not genuine virtue. They exposed the contradictions and flaws in the conventional understanding—not in a way akin to modern nihilism, which presents a destructive critique only to concluded that virtue is a sham, but in order to ascend from common opinion about virtue to the higher truth about what virtue really is. Eventually philosophy culminates in Socrates’ famous dictum that “virtue is knowledge” and the whole body of thought underlying that. But we won’t go into that too deeply now.

Instead we have to back up once more. The central practical question treated by political philosophy is, Who shall rule? And what is the legitimate basis for just rule?

The link between anēr (the “real man”) and rule comes to light from consideration of the uncomfortable truth that all rule traces back, in the final analysis, to compulsion, to sheer bodily force. That does not exhaust the topic. Rule is not simply compulsion, for at least two obvious reasons. First, even the strongest man can personally dominate only a handful of other men, whereas it is possible for political rule to extend over millions. Second, compulsion alone typically results in a low level of political achievement (though not necessarily of civilization; see, e.g., the pyramids). “Politics” in the larger sense requires something more for man to be fully man.

The “real man” will be best at compulsion, but if compulsion is merely a necessary but not the sufficient condition of political rule, then is he the best ruler? Does the anēr have some natural title to rule? Common sense insists, and philosophic investigation later confirms, that knowledge is an indispensable component of just and/or successful rule. The knowledgeable ruler may, or may not, be an anēr in the commonly accepted sense. And then you have the problem that, unlike with other species (queen bees and so forth), nature has not seen fit to set ruling men apart by obvious markers or traits which those who are to be ruled will recognize and accede to. Rule everywhere remains a point of controversy and contention.

As a practical matter, various groups or types of men make a claim to rule (I shall return to this theme later) but really it all boils down to two: the few and the many. The few may be the few best (aristocracy), the few brave or tough or spirited (timocracy) but in most cases the few means nothing more than the few rich (oligarchy). These categories are not always mutually exclusive; that is, in a genuine aristocracy the few will truly be “the best” which will encompass wisdom, courage, virtue more generally, and some wealth. Oligarchy is when wealth or acquisition becomes the guiding principle of the few. And, while aristocracy and timocracy are real, they are also rare and most regimes that claim to be such are really just gussied-up oligarchies.

The many are always and everywhere the common people, the demos (δῆμος) from which we get our word “democracy.” Today “democracy” is emphatically a positive word, but it wasn’t for the Greeks, and certainly not for the Greek philosophers. It means literally “the rule of the many,” which is to say, of the common people, or if you want to be a snob about it, of the mob.

Each side or party or part has a claim to rule, a rationale for why it ought to be in charge and not the other guys. The claim of the few to rule is very direct: We are higher quality! We’re wiser, have more invested in the city, we risk more on its behalf, we have more to lose, we give the city its character, we are responsible for nearly all of the higher things that make the city what it is, that is, not merely a tribe but a true city with all the peaks of civilization. The demos are merely drones, good workers at best, necessary fodder in wars, but tasteless and incapable of creating or maintaining the higher things for which life is worth living and for which the city exists. Moreover, the demos is unwise and easily moved by facile speeches (hence our word “demagogue”), often makes terrible decisions on impulse, and even when it doesn’t, it lacks the intellect, imagination and wherewithal to elevate the city above the most mundane level of basic-needs-fulfillment.

The demos’ reply to this is essentially: but there are more of us. Hence since we outnumber you, we should rule. That’s the essence of justice. Also, we do all the work. Maybe not the glamorous work, but the necessary Sine Qua Non (without which, nothing) work on which everything else depends. We are the essence, the foundation.

You may say that the essence of Greek political philosophy is the recognition that both sides have a point, but only a partial point, and that justice and political happiness depend on the reconciliation and harmonization (to the extent possible) of these competing claims.

Now, it by now should be at least faintly obvious that on some level we are talking about different, perennial types of men or, more specifically, of soul. And that “alpha” roughly corresponds to the few and “beta” to the many.

Plato’s City And The Soul

Let’s look more closely at how Plato treats the subject. The Republic is both his most famous book simply and the most famous and important book about politics or political philosophy of all time. It purports to present his ideal city—or country; the Greek word polis (πόλις) has no clear translation in English that captures its full meaning. City-state is about as close as we can get and even that is not great; polis really signifies an entire country and everything in it, the territory, people, religion, government, institutions, social life, etc. A polis was, by the standards of our time, much smaller than a modern country and it typically had only one urban center which was its core. But the polis was considered the fundamental political unit, and it’s where we get our word “politics” and all the rest.

Moving on, then, most Platonic dialogues are framed around a “What is” question. The question that launches the discussion in the Republic is “What is justice?” This question is kicked around for a while, to the frustration of some, especially Thrasymachus, who accuses Socrates of being naïve. Everyone knows, he insists, that “justice is the interest of the stronger,” that is, might makes right. Socrates is able to tie Thrasymachus in knots, but not in a way that fully satisfies the other participants, one of whom poses a tough question to Socrates. Essentially he challenges Socrates to prove, if justice is so great, that the perfectly just man but who has a reputation for perfect injustice and suffers every consequence (jail, beatings, fines, shunning, etc.) is better off and happier than the perfectly unjust man who gets away with every unjust thing he does.

Glaucon, who poses this question, posits a sort of “state of nature” in which justice has no power. Everyone is out for himself, has no hesitation to hurt others when it will benefit himself, and in such a state, the strong of course will benefit and the weak will suffer. Here, then, is another root of the distinction. For even Socrates does not deny this aspect of human nature. He denies that it is the last word but he must tacitly accept the basic distinction and then uses it as the basis for a key part of the “best regime” or perfectly just city.

In the course of outlining that, Socrates divides the human soul into three parts: the desiring part (eros; ἔρως), the spirited part (thymos; θύμος) and the reasoning part (logos; λόγος).

Thymos is most important for our purposes here. “Spiritedness” is the capacity for anger, indignation, pride, the refusal to submit, the demand for honor, etc. To some degree nearly all human beings have a spirited part of their soul, but for most people, it’s a relatively small part. For most people, the desiring part rules, and the things it desires are very basic: food, sex, security, comfort, material plenty. Spiritedness entails risk to all these things and most people have a low appetite for risk. Achilles, of course, had thymos in spades. But Achilles was an outlier.

Socrates proceeds to build his “city in speech” (the hypothetical ideal political community which forms the core of the discussion in the Republic) by treating the city as “the soul writ large.” That is, the parts of the city correspond to the parts of the human soul. There are people primarily driven by eros; these are the majority. There are people whose logos is in complete control of their souls; these turn out to be the famous philosopher-kings. And then there are people primarily driven by thymos; these are the warriors or “auxiliaries” (thought at first he calls them the “guardians”). These people’s defining traits are physical excellence or strength combined with thymos or spiritedness.

The parallel to “alphaness” should be clear by now. These are people who, by nature, are more aggressive, more prone to violence, less prone to take any crap or tolerate any insult or dishonor. This thymos is eminently useful—even necessary—to the city but also potentially dangerous and so a very careful, detailed education is prescribed for the auxiliary class to channel their thymos in useful directions. I would note also that up to this point, Socrates’ ideal city resembles an improved Sparta, but one of the improvements is to take the edge of Sparta’s warrior ethos. The best city will be strong and prepared for war but not be fully dedicated to war.

But I would be remiss if I did not mention some very great difficulties. Note that I have been using what we today call “gender neutral language.” That’s because in Socrates’ scheme, both men and women can be auxiliaries. There are to be naked exercises in common between the sexes and the same training and education.

So, one’s first reaction will be, if Socrates is that daft, then the rest of the book must be totally unreliable crap. Which is a reasonable first reaction. However, two considerations are key here. There is an extent to which this whole line of argument is a response to Aristophanes’ play the Assemblywomen, in which the women of Athens via subterfuge take over the rule of the city (and mess everything up). I can’t go into this here but maybe in a later post I will treat the red pill lessons of Aristophanes’ three “women plays” (Lysistrata, Assemblywomen, and Thesmophoriazusae). In other words, this proposal of Socrates’ is not meant seriously by Plato, but is a kind of thought experiment to show the limits and outlines of justice, and to show how and why Aristophanes was wrong by taking his premise all the way to the end. (Remember that Aristophanes’ most famous play, The Clouds, is an attack on Socrates, and Plato here is writing in defense of Socrates.)

Second, Socrates intends his perfect city to be a “meritocracy” in the sense that everyone will be given a task to which his soul and abilities are fitted. He more or less admits that, on the merits, few or no women would make it as auxiliaries. He says outright that the best women are always inferior to the best men. So why is this formal equality asserted? Part of it is to ensure that the auxiliaries have mates and can replenish their ranks. Part of it is to correct other flaws in the Spartan regime. I will go into this more in a subsequent post about Aristotle’s Politics (if I ever write it), but the Spartan women were notoriously loose and domineering. Socrates recognizes the lengths that men will go to in order to please women and how those lengths can be corrupting for the men and for the city as a whole. And his answer is that the women must be educated to care for the common good and to sacrifice as men do. The question of whether this is possible is left open to doubt; however, the point is made that the fully just city would require this; hence if it is not possible, we are left to wonder whether any city can be fully just.

Finally, and not unimportantly, we may have to some extent isolated certain foundational traits of “alphaness” in Plato’s most famous and important book, but these qualities seem to have nothing to do with mating and attraction (or eros). In fact, in addition to the outlandish proposal to make women soldiers alongside the men and have them exercise and train together, Socrates goes even further to prescribe what has been called the “communism of women and children.” That is, among the upper classes (the auxiliaries and the guardians), there will be no marriages and no families. Sexual unions will be directed by the state (the philosopher-kings) with a view toward the production of the best offspring. And children will be reared by the state and not know who their biological parents are, but will be taught that the entire elder generation are their “fathers” and “mothers.”

(Much later in the book, the question is raised of how the philosopher kings will ensure that the best regime continues on, and the key turns out to be a kind of eugenics or selective breeding, and they will manage that via the “nuptial number,” which is one of THE most enigmatic passages in all of philosophy and much chewed over since ancient times. There are three “solutions” to the problem which seem most plausible, however, the real point seems to be, such eugenics is impossible, even for the philosopher kings, so the whole project is doomed to fail no matter what.)

The reason for the “communism of women and children” goes back to the initial “What is” question. The purpose of the “city in speech” is to show as fully as possible what justice is. Socrates is indicating that the private passions of eros and attachment to children (favoritism, nepotism and so on) are in conflict or tension with justice. In a way, this is a tenet of the West as compared to the East which places much more emphasis on the clan or extended family as opposed to the nuclear family. The West did not go as far as Socrates’ proposal (which at any rate is not serious) but it did succeed in limiting the ties and obligations of kinship to a smaller circle, which paradoxically increases societal trust.

Anyway, for justice to be fully realized, or as close as we can get, eros has to go. That’s not going to happen in the real world, but so long as men’s loyalties are divided, perfect justice is impossible. That’s the point.

Plato does, however, have a lot to say about eros, just not here. The classic text on this subject is of course the Symposium, but I would also suggest the Charmides, the Lysis and the Eratai (sometimes translated as Lovers or Rivals). Also, to see how Socrates himself deals with women, take a look at something I wrote on another blog. Socrates knew how to be a player 2,500 years ago

Alphas Virtue And Self Love

Ok, now let’s skip ahead toward the end of the Republic. Socrates says that there are five types of regimes or forms of government, and he names them from best to worst: kingship or aristocracy, timorcracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. All of these correspond with a type of man, which is also described in detail. (If you want a very clear and unflattering picture of our age, read the description of democratic man in Book VIII.) Four out of the five partake of traits we would call “alpha”—the exception being, of course, democratic man.

The difficulties in this passage are quite close to the same difficulties one encounters in the sphere. E.g., how can the loser rockbanddrummer and the superstud Navy SEAL both be alpha, when they seem to have nothing in common? This or a related point is often cited as a devastating dismissal of the whole concept. And the usual answer is something along the lines of, “because both are attractive to women,” which is unsatisfying because it veers toward tautology.

But when we look at those four in Plato, we see a commonality, which is that they all—and unlike democratic man—yearn for distinction from the herd, they yearn to be set apart, above, because they value themselves, see themselves as above. This springs from an inner quality of soul. It is not quite thymos, though you might say it is a part of thymos. But it’s more precise to skip forward to that great Platonist Rousseau and appropriate his term amour-propre. This is yet another untranslatable term. We can understand the idea, but there is no single word that captures it. “Self-love” comes the closest, and fails. Amour-propre is a mixture of vanity, pride, willfulness, and the insistence that others treat you with the deference that you are convinced you deserve. Most who have it are born with it. Some (a few) can acquire it.

This is, according to Rousseau (and Plato, I believe), the true origin of all inequality. Democratic man lacks this passion, at least individually (although collectively, they have something akin to it). The few are defined by it. Amour-propre really is the root idea underlying, if not exactly “inner game,” then certainly “irrational self-confidence.”

But that only points to a deeper difficulty. Who actually deserves to be so treated and who does not? For Plato, there is a world of difference between the genuine aristocrat and the mere oligarch (or tyrant or timocrat)—whatever their similarities, which are real. But the differences define each much more than the similarities. So, in game terms, yes, rockbanddrummer and the SEAL both get laid with ease. But this does not make them equal.

And that is because, for Plato and all the philosophers until late modernity, virtue is real. It is the true human good. A related difficulty as that, on the baser level, amour-propre is simply a passion, and often a destructive one. A gang-banger who starts a gunfight over being “dissed” is acting on amour-propre. But that is really the opposite of “inner game.” In the final analysis, “inner game” points to the philosophic transcendence or serenity that Socrates and all his followers argue is the very peak of human virtue or excellence.

Which points to get another difficulty, with which I will attempt to close, lest I use up every pixel in the Internet. To the non-philosophic “alpha,” or spirited man, the philosopher seems unmanly. Precisely his transcendence of, or indifference to, the honors of the world is what the man with amour-propre finds incompressible and contemptible. In another dialogue, the Gorigias, a character named Callicles (who is very similar to Thrasymachus in the Republic) accuses Socrates precisely of this, at one point calling Socrates unmanly because he cannot avenge an insult. The reality, though, Plato indicates is not that Socrates can’t but that he won’t because he doesn’t care. Socrates is “outcome independence” raised to the highest possible level. He is the closest person possible to a perfectly self-sufficient being who is utterly imperturbable by other human souls. To the majority of men, and above all to the vast majority of “alphas,” this is not merely incomprehensible, it seems perverse. Yet Plato insists that this is the highest form of “alpha” there is: the philosopher. But also the rarest.