An explication of the way in which those pushing self-improvement have managed to completely misunderstand the concept of the Sigma from the SSH:
A little over 11 years ago, Vox Day introduced his breakdown of the social-sexual hierarchy for men. In his breakdown, he introduced the concept of the Sigma male.
This concept has been hotly debated over the years, with many people who analyzed Game either denying their existence or outright declaring themselves to be Sigma males. Generally, I’ve found that anyone who classifies himself as a Sigma is more than likely a Gamma or Omega.
That aside, the concept was largely romanticized by armchair social analysts because they were perceived as the ideal man. They were James Bond, the renegade who was suave with women but also literally went his own way, only settling down with a woman who accepts his disinterest as nothing personal.
More recently, Vox correctly pointed out that Hunter Biden was a Sigma male. This, despite the fact that Hunter had zero qualms about banging his widowed sister-in-law, his niece, Obama’s daughter, and funding Biolabs in Ukraine while smoking crack.
He doesn’t sound like much of an ideal man, does he?
The truth is, the social-sexual hierarchy as laid out by Vox was never meant to be one to be something you can apply morality to. This is a mistake that many men, especially Gammas and Deltas, make, assuming that men higher in status are also morally superior, in some way, with the Sigma being the chaotic good guy, as it were.
The social-sexual hierarchy is amoral. It describes the behaviors of men at different levels of the hierarchy, it does not describe their moral inclinations.
As a general rule, you can be certain that anyone who is particularly obsessed with his SSH categorization and wants to discuss it at length in public is a Gamma, for the same reason that anyone who is particularly obsessed with anything from anime to Star Wars and wants to discuss it at length in public is a Gamma.
While I think it’s good that people are utilizing the Sigma concept to help men self-improve, and while I have no objection to people attempting to put their own spin on things no matter how objectively stupid it might be – don’t be surprised, the individual who literally coined the acronym MPAI is unlikely to have lofty expectations of human behavior – I also think it is important to be sure that those who wish to correctly understand the SSH and utilize it to anticipate human behavior would do well to distinguish between the actual concept of the SSH: Sigma Male and whatever vagaries of imaginative self-puffery have been inspired by it.
Being at the top of the social hierarchy is not indicative of being a good person. To the contrary, in an evil society, most of the people at the upper levels are bad people, with the most wicked tending to rise to the top. And there is no intrinsic value in any of the ranks, they are merely appellations that describe persisting behavioral patterns.
That being said, I do wish those who “just want to ask honest questions” or “get clarification” or “wonder if there might be a need for a new rank” would understand that pretty much everyone grasps that these are nothing more transparent efforts to talk about themselves.