Tag: Sigma Game

The Sad, Stupid Rise of the Sigma Male

The Guardian has come a long way since it first started trying to discredit me back in 2013. Back then, I didn’t merit identification by name, but was merely “one particular individual” and John Scalzi’s “bête noir”. They started identifying me as Vox Day in 2016 when the Rabid Puppies upended the Hugo Awards, but now that the concepts of the Sigma Male and the SSH have entered the mainstream discourse, I’ve been upgraded to full “real name” status, complete with unequivocal libel and false attributions:

The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media

The “sigma male” emerged from this primordial testosterone swamp largely thanks to a 55-year-old American science-fiction writer and publisher named Theodore Robert Beale, who blogs under the name Vox Day. A proud Christian nationalist, racist and misogynist, Beale has argued that black men are genetically more inclined to violence than white men, that women should not be allowed to vote, and that feminism was “a seductive but destructive Jewish ideology that was more incoherent than communism, more bloodthirsty than nazism, and more histrionic than fascism”.

In 2010 Beale wrote a blog post in which he attempted to expand the “overly simplistic” division of men into alphas and betas. He came up with his own “sociosexual hierarchy”, with alphas at the top – “the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust” – followed by betas, deltas, gammas, lambdas, right down to omegas – “the losers”. Sitting outside this imaginary pyramid of masculinity were sigmas – “the lone wolves”. Beale defined sigmas as “outsiders who don’t play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow” and who “often like women, but also tend to be contemptuous of them”. They were on a par with alphas, but just didn’t show off about it.

“There is very little – if any – convincing science behind the notion that personality types exist or are fixed,” says Debbie Ging, professor of digital media and gender at Dublin City University. “It’s basically a really simplistic, misguided and bio-determinist account of human behaviour, which doesn’t take into account the sociocultural construction of gender identity or the impact of economic and political forces on people’s choices or lack thereof.”

The purpose, of course, is to seed Wikipedia and provide other publications with identification and spotting in order to encourage them to fire for effect. That’s why the full name, nationality, and age are provided, to ensure that the journalists in the SJW school follow this particular turn of direction correctly. So, we can anticipate a few more hit pieces from the lesser media sites, although I expect the Swiss journalists have learned their lesson about the validity of Internet sources by now and are less than enthusiastic about sitting down for another round of interviews with the police.

The piece by a pretty good specimen of journalistic deceit. The author, Steve Rose, is almost certainly aware that the idea that “black men are genetically more inclined to violence than white men” is not my argument, but rather an observation by the British editor of Science, Nature, and the science section of The New York Times, Nicholas Wade, in his controversial 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.

Rose knows this, because there are no less than 11 references to Wade’s work on this blog, including the direct quote from the book that is the basis for the argument to which Rose is referring and falsely attributing to me.

“As it happens, the promoter for MAO-A is quite variable in the human population. People may have two, three, four or five copies of it, and the more copies they have, the more of the MAO-A enzyme their cells produce. What difference does this make to a person’s behavior? Quite a lot, it turns out. People with three, four or five copies of the MAO-A promoter are normal but those with only two copies have a much higher level of delinquency…. He and his colleagues looked at the MAO-A promoters in African Americans. The subjects were the same 2,524 American youths in the study by Shih mentioned above. Of the African American men in the sample, 5% carried two MAO-A promoters, the condition that Shih had found to be associated with higher levels of delinquency. Members of the two-promoter group were significantly more likely to have been arrested and imprisoned than African Americans who carried three or four promoters. The same comparison could not be made in white, or Caucasian, males, the researchers report, because only 0.1% carry the two-promoter allele.”

Now, why would my fellow former contributor to the Atlanta Journal/Constitution – Rose didn’t mention that either, naughty naughty – falsely attribute my reference to Wade’s book and Shi’s study as being an original argument of my own? Because it’s just another hit piece, of course.

Anyhow, just as the Swiss hit piece only made me look like a prescient genius with regards to the Russian military victory in Ukraine, this British hit piece is going to demonstrate, once more, that I’m well ahead of the scientists and the current state of scientage. Because while the mainstream Narrative is asserting, correctly, that there is no “convincing science behind the notion that personality types exist or are fixed”, they are too low-IQ to understand that scientage is a dynamic and incomplete collection of accepted knowledge, some of which is verifiably true and some of which is provably false.

There is little, if any, scientific evidence for generally fixed behavioral profiles because I am the one who provided the original hypothesis, just as I was the one who provided the original hypothesis in 2007, now supported by the scientific evidence of several studies, for the link between atheism and autism. The fact that the evidence has not yet been provided by professional scientists for a new scientific hypothesis says absolutely nothing about the hypothesis being supported or falsified by the scientody required to produce, or fail to produce, the scientific evidence.

And the fact that the SSH is a taxonomy, one that describes real and observable patterns of human behavior, means that the evidence to back the hypothesis will inevitably be forthcoming. There are no amount of experiments and studies that will deny the existence of the readily observable; deny the okapi all you like, but everyone can go and literally see it at the zoo.

Which is why I find this particular hit piece to be both informative and extremely useful. It’s informative because it tells us that the SSH is getting popular enough that Clown World wants to either a) disappear it or at least b) sever its link with me, and it’s useful because it will serve as additional proof of precedence for what will eventually be my well-deserved claim to be the father of anthrothesiology once the scientists begin to catch up with the concepts I’ve introduced and begin not only substantiating them, but utilizing them.

The Rise of Anthrothesiology

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46 Billion

Sometimes, I can almost empathize with the clowns whose job it is to suppress the various Unauthorized creators and prevent us from becoming mainstream figures. It’s got to be frustrating to keep us off all of the mainstream platforms, and yet see our ideas still winning out over all of their ticket-takers and approved, algorithm-pushed, and well-funded pet intellectuals. From Wikipedia:

Sigma male
Sigma male (or simply sigma) (/sɪɡmə məɪl/ ⓘ) is a term in internet slang used most often to describe archetype of a male who is a “lone wolf”. The name is a product of the manosphere message boards in the 2010s, the term has gained widespread prominence within internet culture, and since the early 2020s, has become an internet meme. Commonly regarded as the “rarest” type of male, a sigma male is typically denoted as an archetype of a male who is similar to the alpha male. Unlike an alpha male, sigma males are more introverted and seek to dominate themselves, in other words “self-mastery”. On social media, the term is often used to describe the idolization of masculine characters from films and TV shows, or celebrities.

Alternatively, the term has taken on an ironic and satirical meaning, mocking the concept of the manosphere and the sigma grindset.

In 2023, #sigma gained over 46 billion views on the social media platform TikTok.

I find it more than a little ironic that a) it is deemed a “contentious topic” and b) despite it having its own page, there is no reference to it on the Wikipedia page about me. It appears the Wikipedia admins would prefer to believe that I am known for imaginary things I’ve never said than for genuine things I have.

Anyhow, this is why you should contemplate subscribing to UATV if you haven’t already. It will put you somewhere between ten and 20 years ahead of the curve, depending upon the topic.

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Three Simple Steps to Sigma

It’s really quite easy if you know what to do. From Sigma Game:

I’ll be honest. Given my talent for unorthodox thinking and my ability to write more or less coherently, I assumed from a fairly young age that I would leave some intellectual legacy behind. Nothing particularly major on the scale of an Aristotle, a Thomas Aquinas, or an Adam Smith, but something more on the level of a Hermann Hesse, a Samuel Huntington, or a John Bagot Glubb.

Umberto Eco, I felt, probably represented my potential ceiling, although my inability to execute Summa Elvetica as I’d envisioned it made it pretty clear that even the Eco strata was beyond me. C’est la vie. It’s better to aim high and fall short than content oneself with mediocrity.

And while my small contributions to gaming, literature, science, and theology are likely to survive in some anonymous capacity to be expanded upon by future intellectuals, it’s been a real surprise to discover that the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy, and the concept of the Sigma Male in particular, have gone viral to the point that they are being adopted and applied, however erroneously, to a wide variety of cultural applications. Well and good, even if Sigma is literally the least important of the various behavioral profiles to understand for practical purposes.

But it’s more than a little bizarre to see the way AI systems have ingested and processed the concept, to the point that it has now even incorporated my personal clothing preferences…

My intellectual ambition circa 2005 to 2015 was to one day write the Summa Economica, doing for economics what Thomas Aquinas did for theology. Now my ambitions are considerably more curtailed, as I’m just hoping to be able to publish Steve Keen’s magnum opus, finish Arts of Dark and Light, and wrap up the definitive work on the SSH before my ability to string words together goes the way of Mr. Martin and other washed-up writers.

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There’s Always One

I pointed out a few obvious observations about tattoos at Sigma Game. I know you’ll find this very hard to believe, but one reader shared a personal anecdote that proved those observations are completely unfounded.

READER: Huh, my partner has tattoos and also a very good job at an old company with renowned retirement benefits. As in, an extremely conventional employer. He’s doubled his income in the past three years and recently got his annual salary in shares as a bonus.

VD: Well, your unverifiable personal anecdote is obviously conclusive and clearly obviates every other bit of statistical and observational data on the subject. We now understand that tattoos are sexy, high-class, and will only help one’s career progress. You must be exceptionally nice and pretty to have locked down such an exceptional partner. You should probably tattoo FUKC on your forehead; I’m sure it will do wonders for your future prospects, which we will follow with interest.

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Go Away, Gamma

In case I haven’t made it entirely and absolutely clear, being “a longtime reader”, being a “supporter”, being a “subscriber”, being a “backer”, or even being “your biggest fan” cuts absolutely no ice with me. In fact, to the contrary, if you are any of those things, I have higher expectations of you than I do of some random drive-by commenter who knows nothing of me or of this community.

Today at Sigma Game, I asked women who had experience of raising, dating, or marrying Deltas to share their opinions concerning some of the pros and cons of Delta males. I also specifically told men to not share their own opinions or experiences, but to limit themselves to commenting on what the women were saying.

Needless to say, there were a few Gammas who were too emotionally incontinent to restrain themselves and simply let the women talk. One, in particular, didn’t hesitate to ignore my directions and go right off the deep end.

Elwin Ransom: Comments are interesting, but as I read them I can’t help feeling that many classifications by commenters are very likely skewed by perception and situational biases. I have long thought about a Myers-Briggs style test for SSH, but instead of just creating one and guessing what certain types will answer, thereby invoking the “this is what me the Alpha/Sigma would say” type response, a better proposal would be to create such a test, then administer it to a known set including all types, then correlate responses based on what the known set of answers. Hard part would be to find and agree upon the classification of the set of base answerees – but once complete, would be more quantitative way of self-assessment.

Man of the Atom: What does your husband do?

[Very long digression by a few commenters on why Man of the Atom, as a commenter, would attempt to keep the comments on track and on topic redacted.]

Elwin Ransom: He’s providing an unasked-for service, anonymously, on a comment board on the internet. That makes him a loser. Not Gamma on your part, and no further contemplation required.

Vox Day: It’s fascinating how the Gammas always identify themselves so quickly. Do you simply not have any idea how transparent all your little machinations are to everyone, ESPECIALLY women, who play those games much better than you do?

Man of the Atom: You still haven’t told us what your husband does.

Elwin Ransom: He shuts the fuck up when no one asked for his opinion, that’s what he does.

Vox Day: You didn’t. Why should he? Also, you’re permanently banned. I don’t wish to turn this into a no-Gammas zone, but it’s probably going to end up that way over time.

But wait, there’s more! Because of course there is. Within 11 minutes of my banning Mr. Ransom from Sigma Game, I received an email which led to the following exchange.

“Elwin Ransom” (real name redacted): The commenter on your Sigma Game thread that you just banned was me. I have been a reader for close to two decades, and subscriber to both Castalia series since they started. No longer.

Vox Day: Excellent. You clearly learned nothing over those two decades. Your behavior was unwanted, disrespectful, vulgar, and you should be embarrassed for yourself. But you won’t be, because you’ll just fire up your Gamma delusion bubble and convince yourself that you were justified. We’ll be pleased to refund you for any books you haven’t received yet. Just email [the usual address] to make the request.

So, for those who didn’t subscribe early enough, if it turns out there is an extra Thucydides, we’ll let you know.

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A Significant Nexus

Some years ago, I predicted that Alpha Game would surpass Vox Popoli due to the fact that people are, on average, more interested in intersexual relations and the socio-sexual hierarchy than in the various esoterica that makes up the greater part of the posts here. That might have seemed unlikely, given the way in which VP grew to a daily pageview average of over 110,000 and the fact that I shut Alpha Game down entirely due to my lack of interest in people repeatedly asking what I refer to as The Incessant Inquiry.

The full poem will have to wait for the publication of my I novel to see the light, but it amounts to the simple, straightforward, and seemingly inescapable question: “what about me?” And it is tiresome in the extreme. What about you? Why are you asking me? I don’t care.

What’s interesting, perhaps only to me, is that the combination of the decline in VP’s pageviews that resulted from the move from voxday.blogspot.com to voxday.net with the spamalicious efficiency of Substack has unexpectedly resulted in Sigma Game traffic very nearly surpassing the Vox Popoli traffic yesterday, as Sigma Game hit 97.3 percent of the VP total. And given what I expect to be the popularity of today’s post on A Tale of the Two Heathers of the 1980s, I will not be even remotely surprised if Sigma Game ascends to the status I’d originally envisioned for Alpha Game before tomorrow.

Yeah, this one is going to do, as they say, numbers.

This is not a bad thing. You may note the aphorism that has been the philosophical foundation of this blog since its inception is relevant here.

Success comes most swiftly and completely not to the greatest or perhaps even to the ablest men, but to those whose gifts are most completely in harmony with the taste of their times.
– Dame Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa Origo

And if this recent article by The New York Times is any guide, it appears my gifts may finally in harmony with the taste of our times.

Are you a “sigma”? Do you have “rizz”? The youngest generation is bamboozling its elders with terms all their own.

Sigma has something to do with wolves.

“Everyone in my grade, at least, says it in a way where they’re like the alpha of the pack,” Alta said. “If you’re trying to say you’re dominant and you’re the leader, you’ll call yourself ‘sigma.’”

Can You Understand Gen Alpha’s Slang?, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 11 November 2023

In any event, we’ll be scheduling the SSH and Hypergamouse crowdfund as soon as we get Midnight’s War Vol 1 and AH:Q out the door.

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Testimonials to the Power

The Socio-Sexual Hierarchy is such a powerful predictive model that casual observers are sometimes tempted to suspect they’re being put on. From the comments at Sigma Game, When the Secret King Wins Again:

  • This is so textbook it appears to be fake. But that’s the amazing thing about gammas, their mindset is so distorted that they parody themselves. One almost feels sorry for him, almost.
  • If it was any blogger other than Vox, you’d swear that they’d set up an alternate account in order to make the most QED reply of all time.
  • You are what you are and your basic underlying framework cannot be changed. As pointed out quite well by other commenters, this person displayed the predicted SSH behavior of the Gamma so well that it almost beggars belief. Again, I tip my hat to Vox for recognizing these behavior patterns. They’re so obvious yet they completely eluded modern psychiatry all these years.
  • Not a single clue, not even a fragment of a clue. One of my sons is a gamma and gets all kinds of feedback from his siblings (and me, and his dad) about his egregious behaviour. The other kids call it “resetting to factory defaults”. Whatever feedback he receives, if it doesn’t align with his delusion bubble he flushes it, resets and then carries on gamma-ing. It is painfully hard for him to learn anything productive that might help him.
  • SSH proves to be one of the greatest predictor of behaviour ever devised. In the future in addition to the usual IQ and personality testing, an SSH test will be a mandatory routine practice in the hiring process.

It’s a strong testimonial to the predictive power of the SSH that when one observes it in action, the repetition of the behavioral patterns is often so precise and so reliable that one is tempted to suspect that the anticipated behavior is somehow scripted or faked. But behavioral patterns exist for a reason; they persist because it is very, very difficult and requires a high level of self-discipline to surmount the emotional channels and instinctive reactions that are carved into one’s psyche during the formative years.

At any rate, no matter what happens, no matter what you think you saw, no matter how many iron-clad refutations and mathematical proofs you observed being provided, there can only ever be one result in the end. The Secret King will win again!

He did it again! And everyone applauded…

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No. Just No.

President Trump still just doesn’t get it. He never will.

Former President Donald Trump praised the parent company of Bud Light in a Tuesday post on Truth Social, saying it “deserves a second chance.”

“The Bud Light ad was a mistake of epic proportions, and for that a very big price was paid, but Anheuser-Busch is not a Woke company, but I can give you plenty that are, am building a list, and might just release it for the World to see,” Trump posted. “Why not, the Radical Left does it viciously to well run, Conservative companies – and people! Very nasty, but it’s the way they play the game!”

“On the other hand, Anheuser-Busch spends $700 Million a year with our GREAT Farmers, employ 65 thousand Americans, of which 1,500 are Veterans, and is a Founding Corporate Partner of Folds of Honor, which provides Scholarships for families of fallen Servicemen & Women,” Trump continued. “They’ve raised over $30,000,000 and given 44,000 Scholarships. Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance? What do you think? Perhaps, instead, we should be going after those companies that are looking to DESTROY AMERICA!”

I think we can safely rule out the President from having learned anything at all from being repeatedly stabbed in the back by his advisors, allies, and appointees. It’s not that he wasn’t a great president, because he was one of the best we ever had. But the USA needs a ruthless Putin or a Xi, with the willingness to wield the full power of the office to take on the oligarchs and the corrupt government officials, whereas Trump believes everyone just needs a good talking-to to set them right.

Alphas make for the best leaders the vast majority of the time. But when the ship is heading straight for the rocks, that’s when you want a Sigma who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about him, the lighthouse, the maintenance schedule, the planned course, the evening menu, the map, the compass, or anything else, and is perfectly willing to throw overboard anyone who tries to get in his way.

Once converged, always converged. You can’t fix a zombie.

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Attack of the Cat Ladies

That was fast. The feminists have clearly sent out the cat signal in reaction to Sigma Game.

Imagine how they’re going to react to the SSH book itself. Last Friday, I answered a woman’s question about female solipsism.

Female solipsism can therefore be described thusly: the female tendency to perceive all things solely as they relate to and affect her.

1st Man: Did you hear that Russia has invaded Ukraine!
2nd Man: Oh, wow, I wonder if they’re going to go for Kiev or Odessa first?
Woman: I had a Ukrainian hairdresser once. She took off way too much so I didn’t tip her.

This female tendency toward self-centric perception is readily observable in casual conversation, so you can easily test it for yourself. Throw in a new topic at random at any point and see how fast the woman being addressed is able to discover a tangent and utilize it in a manner that allows them to turn the conversation back to themselves.

1st Man: Is there a female version of the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy?
2nd Man: Maybe. I don’t know.
Woman: There definitely is! This one time, at band camp, a popular girl was mean to me! I used to play the clarinet. I just love music!

Among other things, this led to a long and unprofitable descent into the philosophical navel-gazing of what some would like to be able to call a “Female SSH”, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s more interesting is the fact that some women from outside the community, clearly sensing the danger inherent to perceptive men accurately discussing their observable behavior in a manner that might inspire other men to knock them off their pedestals, have already leaped into incompetent, and even oxymoronic, action.

This was easily the most amusing attempt at an ad hominem critique, as it revealed the way in which the would-be critic doesn’t even understand the concept she’s trying to criticize, much less the way that concept renders her repeated attempt to attack the author impossible. She was so impressed with her discovery of the concept of “projection” that she underlined her own oxymoronics by repeating it three different times in three different comments.

KAT HIGHSMITH: He’s engaging in pure projection. Males have been projecting their bullshit on women for years. Everything they’ve been saying about us is actually about them because they’re self-obsessed and lack the ability to be embarrassed at their stupid behavior (“trans” is the epitome of this male behavior). Men are crazy, and they’re about to start WWIII as they insist how rational they are.

VD: It struck a little too close to home, obviously. And since you’re too retarded to grasp the obvious, I’ll spell it out for you: One cannot project solipsism, by definition. You are far too short for this intellectual ride.

You’d think people would stop trying to use rhetoric, especially inept and oxymoronic rhetoric, on the individual who wrote what presently passes for the modern book on the subject. But you’d be wrong.

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Castalia Library on Substack

In the aftermath of the extremely successful launch of the Sigma Game substack, I brought up the idea of a substack devoted to Castalia Library with the idea that it might help those who somehow miss out on a) blog posts, b) the monthly emails, c) Gab and SocialGalactic announcements, and d) LibraryThing posts keep tabs on the current state of things with the various Castalia Library books, including Library, Libraria, History, the Junior Classics, and the various one-off editions.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and since Castalia Library is nothing if not responsive to its subscribers, I duly set up a Castalia Library substack. Those who sign up for a free subscription will be kept up to date on the latest production schedules with regular emails, and it should even be possible to allow new subscribers to sign up through the paid subscription option at some point.

It should be noted that this substack is absolutely not a substitute for anything else or any other platform. Rather, it is an attempt to cast a wider net, as the primary challenge facing Castalia Library at the moment is that the vast majority of book collectors, and therefore, the vast majority of its potential subscribers and customers, have never heard of it. So even if you’re on the mailing lists and receiving the monthly emails, it’s probably not a bad idea to widen your net before you get caught in a bounce and your email is scrubbed by the mail service.

And speaking of the Sigma Game substack, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention today’s post on my thoughts concerning a female SSH and the various attempts to construct it. No offense intended to the various men and women who have thus far attempted to formulate one, but the fact is that most of those who do appear to be more interested in relating various anecdotes about their personal experiences than in an objective analysis of the complexities of female social interaction.

Not that it’s my concern or my interest, but I would point out that anyone who fails to take into account either the fat factor or the sexual availability and experience factor in what purports to be a “socio-sexual” hierarchy can’t reasonably be considered to be serious about the task. And due to the female discomfort in honestly addressing both of those issues, to say nothing of the male ignorance, and inability to grasp the details, of female competition, I find it difficult to believe that anyone will succeed in describing a functional female SSH any time soon.

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