Hello, for those of you who don't know me, I am Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a host of other books and ebooks and videos and what have you on narcissism and narcissistic abuse. I've been around since 1995 and now I've become a professor of psychology.
And so these are my university lectures and seminars and courses, which I'm placing as a kind of public service online on my YouTube channel.
And today we're going to discuss the concept of the alpha male.
There is something called the Manosphere. The Manosphere are groups of frustrated, misogynistic men, many of them rejected by women, they are known as incels, others frustrated or they claim to have been abused by women, these are the meektows, etc., all kinds of communities.
Like the fans of Jordan Peterson, they also rely on total misinterpretation, misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology and evolution in general, those of them who know how to spell evolution, a tiny minority admittedly.
So these geniuses came up with a rendition of the alpha male. And if you were to read their descriptions of alpha males, these are drop dead gorgeous, amazing hulks and irresistible to women by virtue of their musculature and other parts of their anatomy.
Additionally, alpha men in the meektow and incel genius environments, alpha males are psychopathic, narcissistic, antisocial, go-getters, daring dudes, they lack impulse control, they are reckless and that's what makes them irresistible to women, probably of equal intelligence or lack thereof.
Today we're going to discuss alpha male, the alpha male in the context of scholarly research. These, you remember, are university lectures. So we're going to discuss scholarly lecture pertaining to alpha male. And we're going to approach the subject or the question.
In this new normal, in this highly narcissistic and increasingly more psychopathic civilization, could the meektows and the incels be right actually? Could the mother's fear be right? And psychopathic men and narcissistic men and grandiose men and consummation men and defiant men, maybe they are really the new alpha males in the new normal.
We're going to study this topic, but we should start by saying that the very concept of alpha male is widely disputed in the academic community and that it's not usually taught in universities and academic institutions because it's frowned upon. It's considered to be a misapplication of studies from ethology, the science of animal behavior to psychology and sociology.
Similar, many, many such things happen and similar branch of knowledge known as sociobiology seems to commit the same mistake. They extrapolate animal behavior onto human affairs and they draw very widespread and sweeping conclusions. And that is something which academics don't like to do or contemplate.
I think though that alpha male albeit a popular hype media concept, a YouTube creation, and unfortunately the plaything of people who's blown far outweighs their brains still has merit and needs to be investigated. But perhaps before we get there, just for you to kind of get the gist of what it is to be a narcissist, I'm going to read to you an excerpt from an account written by a Spanish conquistador.
The conquistadors were Spanish mercenaries, basically, who had embarked on the shores of the Aztec and Inca empires, mainly the Aztec empire, and conquered what is today South America, part of Latin America. So this was in the 16th century.
And here is a description of the first landing on shore of the leader of the conquistadors. His name was Hernan Cortes. With great bravery, the locals surrounded us in their canoes, pouring such a shower of arrows on us that they kept us in the water up to our wastes. There was so much mud and swamp that we had difficulty getting clear of it. And so many Indians attacked us, hurling their lances and shooting arrows that it took us a long time to struggle ashore.
While Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes was fighting, he lost a sandal in the mud and could not recover it. So he landed on shore with one bare foot.
Now this is a great, great metaphor, analogy, allegory of the narcissistic condition. The narcissist creates his own predicament. Then he has to wade through the mud that he had brought himself into. And then he loses everything he has, almost everything he has. He ends up barefoot, barefoot on the shore.
But this does not deter him. He goes on to conquer and to establish a new empire. He is a conquering hero.
Okay. Let me read to you a segment, an excerpt from a letter.
A letter, you know, there was an age where people wrote letters to each other, actually. So this is a letter written in January, 1926 by Zora Neale Hurston, a folklorist and author of black folklorist and author. So she had written a letter in January, 1926 to Annie Nathan Mayer. And Nora says very openly what today would be inconceivable and politically incorrect.
Here's what she says.
Oh, if you only knew my dreams, my vaulting ambition, how I constantly live in fancy in seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, but conscious all the time of being a mouse on a treadmill, the eagerness, the burning within.
I wonder the actual sparks do not fly so that they be seen by all men. Prometheus on his rock with his liver being continually consumed as fast as it grows another is nothing compared to my dreams.
I dream such wonderfully complete ones. So radiant in astral beauty, I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die. But even as they fade, I have others.
Now this is an excellent encapsulation of the narcissist world of fantasy, including shared fantasy.
So I gave you these two glimpses from different periods of history, different ethnicities. I give you these two glimpses of narcissism.
And I want now to resort to one of the world's leading authorities on alpha males. And I'm going to read to you an extended excerpt.
This is from a book titled Mama's Last Hug by Franz de Waal. Franz de Waal has published this book. It was published by Norton and Company. It was published in 2019. It's a pretty recent book. And here's what he has to say.
In animal research, the alpha male is simply the top ranking male of the group. The term dates back to wolf studies of the 1940s by the Swiss ethologist Rudolf Schenkel. And it remains in use today.
In political parlance, however, it has come to denote a certain type of personality. Evermore business tutorials instruct us on how to become an alpha, emphasizing self-confidence, swagger, and purpose.
Alphas are not just winners, it is argued. They beat the hell out of everyone around them and remind them every day who had won. They don't let up. A true alpha goes it alone and crushes the competition like a lion among the sheep.
These business tutorials, they could have added, by the way, dating tutorials. These business tutorials promote a cardboard caricature version of the whole concept, however, not just for human society, but also in relation to wolves and chimpanzees.
Alpha males are not born and they don't achieve their position based purely on size and temperament. The primate alpha male is a much more complex and responsible being than a bully. Merciless tyrants do sometimes rise to the top in a chimpanzee community.
But the more typical alphas that I have known – that's the greatest scholar of primates, by the way – the more typical alphas that I have known were quite the opposite of bully. Males in the position of alpha males are not necessarily the biggest. They are not the strongest. They are not the meanest ones around, since they often reach the top with the assistance of others.
In fact, the smallest male may become alpha if he has the right supporters, if he builds coalitions. Most alpha males protect the underdog, keep the peace and reassure those who are distressed.
Analyzing all instances in which one individual hugs another who has lost a fight, we found that although females generally console others more often than do males, there is one striking exception – the alpha male.
The alpha male acts as the healer in chief, comforting others in agony more than anyone else in the community.
As soon as a fight erupts among its members, everyone turns to the alpha male to see how he is going to handle it.
He is the final arbiter, intent on restoring harmony. He will impressively stand between screaming parties with his arms raised until things calm down.
Franz de Waal, greatest primatologist and ethologist in Mama's Last Hug, 2019.
The problem is that MGTOW's, business coaches, dating coaches, all this riffraff of con artists combined with intellectually challenged, whose muscles far outweigh any other organ.
All these people, the riffraff, the flotsam and jetsam of human society, glamorize narcissism. They elevate and idealize psychopaths. They equate narcissists and psychopaths, erroneously of course, as we just heard, with alpha males.
They rely on totally distorted understanding or misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology and evolution in general because they don't have the capacity, intellectual or otherwise, to understand any text, let alone these complex text.
And they are egged on. They are egged on by gurus, coaches and even by some scholars who are surfing the wave. They are surfing the wave because there is money in it and they prostitute themselves, these scholars, in order to tell these misers, these misers, these miserable riffraff to tell them what they want to hear.
And so we have scholars today who discuss in all earnestness, high functioning narcissists, we saw how that worked with Donald Trump, who discuss productive psychopaths, scholars who claim that narcissists and psychopaths should be in charge. They're great leaders, they're wonderful surgeons, they're great military commanders, you know.
This kind of glamorizing, academic glamorizing is nothing short of irresponsible, fallacious, these scholars had converted themselves into con artists because self enrichment overtook ethical values of adhering to research and to knowledge and science as it accumulates.
And so recovered narcissists is another example of such hyperbole intended to cater to a specific group and of course to take their money and love all the way to the nearest bank.
So we have an example, Dr. Hugo Mahuttan. He had written an article titled The Complimentary and His Psychopath.
Hugo Mahuttan and the article was translated by Mary Grannon. It was published in March 2008, The Complimentary and His Psychopath.
He starts the article by quoting Schopenhauer, Artur Schopenhauer, the great optimist and man lover.
One is the torturer, the court says, one is the torturer and one the tortured. The torturer is in the wrong because he believes he is not taking part in the suffering. The tortured is in the wrong because he believes he is not taking part in the guilt.
And so Mahutton suggests and I'm quoting, to be a psychopath is a way of being, personality, a variable of human types. It is not an illness but a typical way of being.
Infrequent, raucous, raucous due to the patterns of behavior that don't fit in on some occasions with the general patterns of behavior in the community.
Psychopath says Mahuttan is a person who has a different behavior because he has different needs to satisfy. That's why he makes a particular use of his liberty. He draws his own codes and he repeats patterns of behavior and his needs of intense stimulation.
So he proceeds in this article to describe the various strategies and techniques of the psychopath, how he objectifies other people. And then he describes relationships between psychopaths and psychopaths and how the balance of such a relationship is maintained through a give and take where actually the extremely narcissistic, egocentric attachment, they afford, they provide, caters to the needs of what he calls the complementary and so on and so forth.
And then there's all these analyses of the complementary and he says about the complementary.
Complementary is the sidekick of the psychopath, the intimate partner of the psychopath. So he says the type of need that the complementary satisfies with the psychopath or the type of bond that leads this relationship to this relationship being maintained is not based on logic but on the irrational.
When attending these people, the first thing that arises is the complaint.
The complementary uses the scenario of the therapist-patient relationship to communicate his complaints.
But he says the complementary has secret pleasure. One could ask, what's this person doing with the psychopath? What are the benefits of maintaining the relationship?
Then he says, even if the circumstances that lead to acts of aggression and the ways of preventing them can be analyzed, these are repeated. And so he says, the complementary must be getting something out of it.
And he says, I think the bond is the pleasure obtained, not necessarily the pleasure of suffering. It is an indescribable suffering where the suffering is a secondary effect of the enjoyment.
The complementary person brings us the complaint, shows us the price of their pleasure, shows us the bump on the head.
This type of secret enjoyment in the sense that it is consciously unknown to the complementary, sometimes even to the psychopath.
However, there is something that unites them. Perhaps their animalness, alpha male, in the irrational, there lies the pleasure.
Some complementaries maintain that they tend to relate it to some kind of special enjoyment with sex, for example, but that does not manage to justify paying the price of humiliation, lowering the other person's self esteem.
They are able to grasp that the psychopath they were with, they were able to uninhibit, disinhibit their repressions, they're able to carry out the forbidden, and so on and so forth.
I quoted from this article extensively, because it is part of a trend of normalizing psychopathy, glamorizing, glorifying and idolizing the traits of the psychopath and the traits of the narcissist.
And even in case of abuse, victim blaming, shifting the blame to the victim, the victim chooses to remain in the relationship because it gives her pleasure.
And the psychopath is not a bad guy, nor is he sick at all. It's just a lifestyle choice. It's just what works for him.
He's a libertarian. In a way, he chooses liberty over social conformity. Nothing wrong with with a psychopath as a chief executive officer, Kevin Dutton and others. Nothing wrong with the narcissist, as a for example, president or, or in some position of power or as a creative person, narcissism actually and psychopathy are revolutionary advantages, which the collective can leverage to its own benefit.
Narcissists are productive. Psychopaths are high functioning. Everything is okay. Nothing to worry about. Just harness them, harness these energies, and you will be fine as an individual and as a collective.
Well, we see how that went with Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump.
Additionally, psychopathy is of course not a lifestyle choice. Psychopathy is a brain disorder. This has been established numerous times in numerous studies. The brain abnormalities of psychopaths, the physiological abnormalities, for example, skin conductance, sweating, heartbeat, autonomous systems, autonomous reactions, they are all very different to normal people. Very different.
That's not the case with narcissists. Narcissists, the behaviors of the narcissists are choices, but narcissism itself is not.
To present narcissism and psychopathy as evolutionary modifications, they are the new alpha males.
It's not only immoral. It's simply untrue. It's profound, unmitigated ignorance.
And I don't care if those who perpetrate and purvey and convey this ignorance have a doctor preceding their names, real doctor or fake doctor, nevermind, preceding their names. I don't care that your doctor doesn't make you an expert on everything.
So when we try to reconceive or consider the issue of alpha male, we need to get rid of two policies.
Policy number one, that you can extrapolate from the animal kingdom fully onto human affairs, human moods, human beliefs, human cognitions, human emotions, human behaviors, human traits. No way. Humans are not animals. They're not animal or not fully animals. They're not fully animals because they're subjected to the influence of culture, cultures and societies so complex that they far exceed anything in the animal kingdom. And they are also subjected to language, highly metal layered, complex, hyper complex, super complex language, language, society, and culture modify evolution and distance humanity from the animal world sufficiently so that we are unable to extrapolate knowledge from the animal world, ethology, for example, onto humans.
Let's follow us in number one.
Follow us in number two, psychopaths and narcissists are sick people. They are sick people. They are self-defeating, destructive to themselves and to other people. End of story. They are never productive. They are never high functioning. They are never successful. Even when they are successful, they botch it at the end. They destroy everything in an orgy, an orgy, explosive orgy.
So narcissists may present or psychopaths may present for a while a facade of success, accomplishments, self-efficacy. But this is a facade. It's a mirage. The narcissism is enmeshed in a world of fantasy. Don't forget this.
Reality testing of narcissists is short, is destroyed. They can't function in reality. They try to adopt reality. We'll talk about it in a minute. They try to convert reality into an internal space with internal objects, into fantasy left. That's not conducive to productivity or high functioning.
Narcissist personality has very justly, correctly observed. Narcissist personality is ruined. It's in shards. It's in smithereens, not to mention the border lines. It's broken irredeemably. There's no glue in the world that can put it together. It's a humpty dumpty. And humpty dumpty cannot be put together.
So this is the second fallacy, the glamorization.
So let's now discuss a few issues tangential or essential to alpha males.
And we start with script analysis.
Script analysis is a method to uncover early decisions made unconsciously as to how life shall be lived.
One could argue that alpha males in childhood make a decision, a richer decision to become alpha and not, for example, beta.
So in narcissism, the child renders a sometimes conscious decision to become a narcissist or an abuser or a psychopath or someone in power rather than subjected to power, like a codependent child has various options and choices.
And to choose to be an alpha male is to script life.
So script analysis uncovers this process. It is a part of transactional analysis, and it involves a progression from structural analysis.
Eric Byrne, who was the father of transactional analysis, of course, also discussed script analysis. Script analysis allows you when you analyze the script that you had written offered as a child and that had dictated and directed your entire life, it shows you the influence of the script on everything, on your values, decisions, behaviors, cognitions, emotions. It allows you to counter the script, to decide against the script.
And some people, their script, I'm not going to have a script. So they have a script free script. Like my script is I'm never going to accept any script, internal or external. An external script is known as epi script. So I'm not going to accept an internal script. I'm not going to accept an epi script from outside.
These are, of course, the psychopaths. The narcissist script is I'm going to write my own script and it's going to have nothing to do with reality. I'm going to write a fantasy, a land of imagination, creativity. I'm going to come up with a work of art, and that's going to be my script.
So scripts have a variety of faces. More scripts in healthy people are responsive to the environment, responsive to data and information, but some scripts are divorced from reality. And some people choose to be script free, a real, authentic, liberated person.
Yes.
And so the trip analysis assumes that from the early transactions between mother, father and child, a life plan, a life plan had evolved. The child put together the bits and pieces created a life plan. That's the script, the unconscious life plan.
And the person's behavior is programmed by the script, the life plan that is set down in early life. Scripts are not inborn. They're learned.
And so the alpha male would adopt an alpha male script, but he's not born with an alpha male script as Franz De Waal had observed in Primus, our closest relatives.
The life script has effect not only on the person who had developed the life script, but later on, on everyone around him.
So actually human society can be conceived or reconceived as a constant conflict, eternal clash between competing life scripts. And there are life scripts of winners and life scripts of losers.
Eric Byrne had written from the earliest months, the child is taught not only what to do, but also what to see, what to hear, what to touch, think and feel.
Each person obediently ends up at the age of five or six with a script of life, life plan, largely dictated by his parents. This life plan tells him how he's going to carry on his life and how it's going to end.
Winner, non-winner or loser. It seems that we are beginning to converge on the concept of alpha male. It's whatever we say about alpha males, they are winners.
Now, MGTOWs and Incels and these other wannabe geniuses, they equate winning, like Donald Trump, they equate winning with being a psychopath. They equate winning with grandiosity. They equate winning with trampling over others with a lack of empathy or suspending empathy.
That's not true. The greatest winners are coalition builders. They are team workers. They introduce harmony and positive emotionality into their environment. They are not the abrasive, antisocial, impulsive, reckless nutcases that psychopaths are. They are not the grandiose, over-winning, domineering, life suppressing entities that narcissists are. They are the exact opposite, the exact opposite.
The child is giving information about himself and also about the external world. This information can be factually correct or incorrect. The good parent encourages the child to use this information in order to decide on a life plan, on how to live, on a modus operandi, method of operation and goal orientation. It imbues life with meaning, purpose and direction.
So, the script is the meaning of life and a good parent encourages the child to offer his or her own script.
When the parent supplants, replaces, substitutes, the parental script and imposes it on the child, replaces the child's script with the parental script. That's when narcissists and psychopaths are born.
Ironically, because narcissists don't have an ego, don't have a self, they can't have a script. Their script is imported from the outside, initially from the parents and later on via narcissistic supply from the human environment.
They can never, narcissists can never be alpha males because they don't exist and they are a pathetic, pathetic collage or kaleidoscope of numerous external influences.
They're utterly shapeshifted by the environment. They are partying, they're raw material, they're the opposite.
If I were to say, what's the opposite of alpha male? Narcissists and psychopaths, of course, they are the opposites.
Bern defined the winner. He said a winner is defined as a person who fulfills his contract with the world, fulfills his contract with himself.
The object of psychotherapy, suggested Bern, is to break up the scripts and make losers into non-winners, which is a progress, and make non-winners into winners.
And so, he and others said, in my experience, is that most people with a loser's script can change this into a winner's script. That's not entirely true, but okay.
So, we're beginning to see that alpha male is a role, self-allocated role, via early childhood script, which is a life plan, and it involves actually a contractual approach, a transactional approach to life, give and take, compromise, negotiation, harmony, empathy, working together, teamwork.
Bern argued in some of his best chapters, where he quotes Freud and Jung and Joseph Campbell, this book by Joseph Campbell, titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Bern argued like Battleheim, he argued that fairy tales, legends, mythology and drama are the early tools of mankind to distill and record the more only and recognizable patterns of human living, and they still provide keys for the framework of a contemporary life script.
Jordan Peterson has the same approach, at a much lower level of intellectual rigor and knowledge.
So, this is the script.
Later scholars, like, for example, Fanita English, they argued that the idea of scripts is associated too much with the idea of pathologies. It is an epi-script which is harmful.
Actually, that's not fair, because Bern himself described something that he called over-script. English says that the epi-script, it is possible for a donor to epi-script a vulnerable recipient into taking on a harmful life task, such as murder or suicide. And so epi-scripts are scripts of other people which we import, and these scripts dominate us with submissive.
So, narcissists are 100% dominated by epi-scripts, by external scripts.
Is this an alpha male? That's the lowest of the lowest, not of the beta male, but the omega male, you know. It's a non-male, in effect.
Same with the psychopath. The psychopath thinks that he's defying society, defying authority, doing whatever he wants, is reckless, is daring, adventurous.
But the narcissist, the psychopath, I'm sorry, is just reactive. He defies because there's an authority figure there. He's totally reactive to the environment. He's molded 100,000% by the environment. He's a pathetic, reactive echo, and not a very faithful or good one, efficient one.
There's no self-efficacy in narcissism and psychopathy. That's why it's utterly ridiculous to suggest that narcissists and psychopaths could be good chief executive officers, presidents, surgeons, military commanders, or anything for that matter. They're self-defeating, and they're self-destructive because there's no self there. Everything they import from the outside, and then it's filtered. It's filtered through fantasy, through range, through negative emotionality, and it's a mess. It's a total mess.
Richard Erskine had come up with what he called integrative psychotherapy. It's based on the developmental path, personal growth, and relationships.
Together with Marlene Salkman, he developed a theory of racket analysis.
He suggests that these episcribes lead to the kind of behaviors that characterize, for example, criminals and others.
So this is script analysis.
Now, to distinguish the alpha male from the a-hole or obnoxious jerk, because as far as Miktows and incels and Jordan Peterson fans and what have you, they're indistinguishable. You don't have to be a jerk or an a-hole to be On the very contrary, they're mutually exclusive propositions.
And to understand why we need to resort to alloplastic adaptation versus autoplastic adaptation. Alloplastic adaptation, allos in ancient Greek means the other.
So alloplastic adaptation is a formal adaptation where you attempt to change the environment when there's a problem.
So some people, when they have a problem, they try to change the environment. Other people, when they have a problem, try to change themselves.
Here's the thing. The various manifestations of alloplastic adaptation try to change the environment. Crime is an alloplastic adaptation. Mental illness is an alloplastic adaptation.
Some forms of mental illness are alloplastic adaptations, but also social justice activism.
No wonder we found in recent studies that mental illness, including psychopathy, including narcissism, including victimhood constructs, mental illnesses rampant among social justice activists.
Because the three go together. I would add to this list religion. These are all forms, essentially, of mentally, mentally pathological alloplastic adaptations.
The concept, of course, was developed by who else? Sigmund Freud, Shandor Ferranci and Franz Alexander. And they suggested at the time, they proposed that when an individual is presented with stress, with a stressor, he could react either by trying to change himself or change the situation. That's how it all started.
So in human evolution, human evolution today has a very powerful cultural and societal component. We are no longer evolving only along genetic lines. We are evolving in other ways.
And the new science of epigenetics tries to take into account these new vectors, new dimensions of human evolution.
Men's evolution by culture is through alloplastic experiments with subjects outside his own body.
Unlike alloplastic experiments, alloplastic ones are both replicable and reversible.
So we have advanced technological societies, and they are generally characterized by alloplastic relations with, for example, Earth, with the environment. We're trying to manipulate the environment of the natural environment itself, control and dominate it.
You can find echoes of this throughout history. Even in the Bible, men was given dominion over the animals by God himself.
This is an alloplastic adaptation. Autoplastic adaptation is exactly the opposite where you try to change yourself when you are faced with a conundrum, with a predicament.
And so hysterical individuals, the early psychoanalysts had written, hysterical individuals appear to be turned inward. Their symptoms, instead of presenting actions directed outward, alloplastic activities are mere internal innovations, autoplastic activities.
And Freud was again a pioneer in the sense that he had challenged Darwin. He was a Lamar East, actually. He believed that behind Lamarck's idea of need was the power of unconscious ideas over one's own body, of which we see remnants in hysteria, in short, the omnipotence of thought.
And as a result, insight into the regressive nature of the phenomenon of conversion may be taken as a starting point for speculation about the archaic origin of the capacity for autoplastic conversion, according to which evolution took place through the autoplastic adaptation of the body to the demands of the environment, and this was heritable.
So he anticipated epigenetics.
There is cross-cultural autoplasticity as well.
Cross-cultural helpers have debated what has been called the autoplastic-alloplastic dilemma. How much should clients be encouraged to adapt to a given situation and how much to change?
Most Western treatment or helping modalities have a strong autoplastic bias. Clients are encouraged to abandon traditional beliefs, to fit into a dominant society's mainstream.
It's the same in psychoanalysis. The two practitioners in treatment are engaged in an unending struggle between changing the other and affecting internal change, autoplastic and alloplastic.
So if we put everything we've just learned together, we can summarize by saying the alpha male is the opposite of the narcissist.
The alpha male is the absolute, diametrically opposite end of the spectrum of a psychopath. He is not a psychopath. He is never a narcissist.
He is, on the very contrary, a team player, empathic, harmonious character, and he brings this into his interactions with other people.
Alpha male is probably a learned capacity. It has nothing to do with body, muscles, anything. It's a learned capacity.
When one is subjected, when one is exposed to good parenting, his or her chances to become alpha are much higher actually, not much lower.
If you were to listen to the Manosphere, MGTOWs, and Instances, they tell you that beta males are empathic, feminine, feminine, etc. That's completely wrong. Alpha males are.
Alpha males are. Alpha males are. That's the science. That's the scholarship.
Alpha males are brought up with good enough parenting. They learn empathy. They learn harmony. They learn to negotiate and to compromise. They learn teamwork. They learn to collaborate and they bring these skills. They bring these learned capacities, acquired capacities into their adult lives later on.
So they are the exact opposite of narcissists, psychopaths, and the YouTube alpha male, as perpetual, the myth, the myth, nonsensical myth, perpetuated by numerous wannabe scholars and con artists, dating coaches, business coaches, and so on.
The other thing we can say is that the alpha male creates a script early on in life founded upon his good upbringing, the good foundation, and that he would tend to be a combination, a healthy balance of autoplastic and alloplastic adaptation.
And I want to introduce you, those of you who don't know, want to introduce you to the Johari window.
The Johari window is a technique. It helps people understand their relationships with themselves and with other people. It was created by a psychologist, of course, Joseph Vaknin and Harrington, two psychologists, Joseph Vaknin and Harrington Ingham in 1955. And it is used very extensively in a variety of several groups, in corporate settings, and so on and so forth.
The name Johari is, of course, a combination of Joe, Joseph Luft and Harry, Harrington Ingham. So, Johari is a combination of the name.
Now, the Johari window, it looks like a window divided into four panes. There are four panes in the window. One pane is called arena, one is blind spot, one is facade, and one is unknown. And it goes like this. The arena is when you are known, when there's something, when you know yourself, and others know you as you know yourself. So arena represents total knowledge. You know yourself well and others know you as you know yourself. There's no contradiction between their knowledge of you and your knowledge of yourself.
The blind spot is that you are not known to yourself. There are things about you that you don't know. They're not aware, they're repressed, they're denied, they're unconscious, but others do know about you. This is very common in narcissism.
The narcissist doesn't know some things about himself, but others do. And when he's forced to confront these things, when he's forced to enter the blind spot and to convert from blind spot to arena, he goes through mortification. That's exactly the process of mortification.
So information not known to yourself, information known to others, that's a blind spot. Information known to yourself only and not known to other people. That's the facade, of course.
That pane in the window is called the facade. So facade is when you know something about yourself, but you don't let others innovate so they don't know that. It's privileged information that you keep to yourself.
And then there's the unknown. So the fourth pane in the four pane window, the fourth one is called the unknown. And that's when there's something that you don't know about and others don't know about, but it exists.
This is like the construct of the unknown thought by Bolas, which I had discussed in previous videos.
Bolas, BolasA-S, unknown.
So this is the technique. These are the panes in the window.
There's a list of adjectives, very long list of adjectives, and you apply these adjectives to describe yourself. And you also apply these adjectives to describe what you think others know about you. And then others apply these adjectives to you.
And so then you compare the lists. You compare your list of adjectives you had applied to yourself. And you compare it to the list of these adjectives as they had been applied to you.
If the two lists match to a large degree, you are in a good place. You are in the arena place.
If there's a mismatch, you're in one of the other three panes.
And Charles Handley, the philosopher, called it the Johari house with four rooms. Room one is the part of ourselves that we and others see. Room two contains aspects that other people see, but we are unaware of. Room three is the private space where we know something, but we hide it from other people. And room four is the unconscious part of us, that neither we know nor others.
And the four quadrants actually describe essentially traits. Yes, they describe traits.
So the list of adjectives is long, able, accepting, adoptable, bold, brave, calm, caring, cheerful, clever, complex, confident, dependable, dignified, empathetic, energetic, extroverted, friendly, giving, happy, helpful, idealistic, independent, ingenious, introverted, kind, knowledgeable, logical, loving, modest, nervous, observant, organized, patient, powerful, proud, quiet, reflective, relaxed, religious, responsive, searching, self-assertive, self-conscious, sensible, sentimental, shy, silly, smart, spontaneous, sympathetic, tense, trustworthy, warm, wise, and witty.
And of course you can add any number of adjectives. To this list, I would have doubled or tripled it in a jiffy. It's very easy to do. It's a very powerful technique, a very powerful tool because it exposes emotions and meta-emotions, emotions which pertain to emotions.
So you could feel sad and then you can ask yourself, how do I feel about being sad? And how do others feel about me being sad? And do they notice it at all?
So it reveals interpersonal dynamics and dynamics which are also between you and yourself.
And the idea is to expand the arena, the arena part, to take over the others because the arena part is the open quadrant. It represents total knowledge. It represents health.
And so it's a good idea to expand it.
Now the reason I brought the Johari window into this game because alpha males are concentrated exclusively in the arena part. They have good self-knowledge. They are totally self-aware and self-cognizant. And they share this knowledge openly, liberally, without fear, without anxiety, without inhibition, with others.
What you see is what you get. This creates a foundation of trust upon which cooperation and even empathy can be established, not to mention good long-term relationships of all kinds, romantic, workplace, anything.
The secretive guy, the strong silent type, that's not an alpha male. That's someone with serious mental problems. He needs help. Sharing is indeed caring in this case. Communication, communication which is not intended to obfuscate, is not intended to eliminate or humiliate or compete or win. Communication that is intended to shockingly just communicate. That's the hallmark of the alpha male.
The alpha male is alpha because he combines the strengths, the skills, the capacities, the emotions, the thinking processes of multiple people. He is one person but he embodies and reifies hundreds, thousands, millions. And he doesn't do it via fear. He doesn't do it via inane and idiotic displays of super strength, perfection. He doesn't do it via self-destruction or stentatious self-destruction. He doesn't do it via recklessness. He doesn't do it via short-term strategies. These strategies work in the short-term but they end up in tears in theterm.
He doesn't use self-defeating strategies, short-term strategies. He has a horizon. He uses long-term strategies. These long-term strategies involve co-optation, cooperation, collaboration, resonance, empathy, holding hands, acting as one, merger in the good sense, fusion in the healthy sense, fusion, maintaining your autonomy and your independence but in some areas of life and in some instances becoming one with another in order to accomplish a common goal.
And this is the essence of a healthy relationship, not becoming one with your twin flame, whatever that means, but remaining separate and distinct, maintaining your autonomy, agency, and self-efficacy even as you have a common area like Venn diagrams. You have a common area within which you do become one, temporarily goal-oriented. You do become one to accomplish more because crowdsourcing gave us Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that is thousands of times bigger than Britannica and as accurate.
So these people, this power in multiplicity, when we join hands, when we collaborate as a species, it is then that we accomplish the greatest feats, monuments to our ingenuity. Cathedrals in Europe were built over hundreds of years, 100, 200 years sometimes. Generation after generation after generation had continued the work. They were not hell-bent on impressing anyone. The result didn't matter, the process did.
The process did and alpha males are focused on the process, not on the outcome. They are focused on the journey, not on the destination. They know if the process is right, if the path is well chosen, if the Tao is there, if the journey is well planned in advance, the destination and the goal are inevitable. They are accomplished automatically and this is the difference between alpha males and losers pretending to be winners. These very losers who are online in politics elsewhere pretending to be winners and all the losers who vote for them and all the losers who follow these gurus and coaches and what have you, they actually identify the loser in the men they follow or the women they follow. They resonate with the losing aspect and they tell themselves if this loser has made it, if he had become a business coach, if he succeeded to become the president, if this utter unmitigated failure of a wannabe man had made it, so can I.
It's reassuring to follow a loser, it's reassuring to follow a better male, it's very challenging to follow a true alpha male. The true alpha male is confident, calm, he is inner peace, he is composure, he is integrity, he has real empathy and you feel inferior in the presence of an alpha male if you don't have an inner core, if you are a narcissist, if you are a loser, if you are a psychopath, if you have mental problems, I mean you feel inferior.
Alpha males make the wrong kind of people feel inferior. So this kind of people, the riffraff, flotsam and jetsam of society, they prefer to follow losers because they can identify with these losers. They don't feel challenged, they don't feel inferior, no one feels inferior to a loser. Even when this loser happens to be your leader, your guru, your coach, you don't feel inferior, you feel you're in equal terms.
People want to feel unequal terms, now the alpha male gives you the feeling that you're in equal terms but maintains leadership and only healthy people can cope with this. Only healthy people don't feel undermined by the alpha male.
So you will never find alpha males surrounded by losers, mentally ill people, broken, damaged people, people who are aimless, people who are stupid, is it politically correct to say it on YouTube? You will never find these people around an alpha male. Never.
And this perhaps is the way to identify.
Look at his followers, look at his employees, look at his family. If these people are healthy, happy, work to collaborate, smiling, goal oriented, enjoy life, etc, and they are around the central figure, that central figure is the alpha male.
Okay, I hope I made my point. To remind you, these are university lectures. So you are welcome guests to listen, but you're not my main audience and not my main target.
So please, know your place.
And this is not a self-help community. So don't post personal stories and questions and so on. I will delete them.
This is an academic setting. You come here to learn. If you have questions about the content, if you want to make intelligent comments for a change about the content, you're welcome. And I welcome such contributions very much. I learn from them.
But if you're here with your sob story, with your inane narcissistic displays of grandiosity, I mean, go away. Simply go away. You're not welcome. Thank you.