"The Myth of the Middle-Class Alpha"

"There’s a strong odor of beta braggadocio in the conquest tales of many self-considered alphas." - Joey Giraud

The site The Rawness actually understands narcissism, unlike the Wimpy Frauds of the Manosphere who praise it ("the Dark Triad") because they do not know what it is and how it manifests itself in reality.

Here the Rawness writes extensively about something I've noticed: there are no middle-class "Alphas." They're all bluff and mouth.

I was raised in a pretty violent environment. It was supposedly middle-class but I encountered an awful lot of lower-class people. It was a horror.

In fact, I am far, far more familiar with no-class/lower-class "Alphas" than any other and if you think you can stand up to them you'd better be prepared to kill them.

I've pointed out before the very rich and poor are parasites. The only class that matters - because it sustains civilization - is the middle-class. And the men in it are, at their best, a combination of "Alpha/Beta" (what I've heard called Renaissance Man).

The article below is a six-part series. I will only post the first two parts and give a link at the bottom.

"Last summer I was in Jaco, Costa Rica. It was one hell of a poor and cutthroat place. It was very much a crime and vice-infested town with a Wild West, anything goes feel and where the cops were basically a joke, except when it comes to harassing drunk tourists. It was incredibly grimy and bleak. I spent most of the vacation sitting by a pool in our house getting twisted and barbecuing.

"There was a lot of petty crime and vice going on in Jaco. Drugs and other vices were everywhere out in the open, in daylight and nighttime. Lots of hustlers and crumbsnatchers. It was touristy in some densely trafficked areas but there were a lot of isolated spots where you could get got if you weren’t careful. But for the most part it wasn’t dangerous if you had even a hint of street smarts.

"Most of the criminals I saw were local crash test dummies. Little dirt-poor young knucklehead locals who seemed influenced by too many gangsta rap images from America and too much reggaeton and ended up dressing and acting like bad parodies of a hip-hop stereotype. Punks trying to look hard and practice their ice grills, but as I said earlier nothing to worry about if you had even a hint of common sense or street smarts. But if you were careless and gave them an opening, they’d rob you blind.

"At one nightclub we went to, I saw one girl who had to be the most beautiful creature I saw in my whole time down there. She was head and shoulders above every woman I had seen in the town. She had this style of dress that I can only describe as a modern haute couture/old world gypsy/bohemian/WWII European refugee chic/space age futuristic Paris runway mashup with lots of costume jewelry and gaudy accessories that she played straight yet managed to pull off without looking camp, kitschy, she somehow got all those disparate elements to blend together seamlessly and become more than the sum of their parts. For physical appearance picture Ava Gardner in Barefoot Contessa meets Shakira meets Dorothy Dandrige in Carmen Jones meets Jessica Alba…but with just a light sprinkling of light brown freckles on the olive skin of the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks, almost unnoticeable on first glance. The kind of appearance that’s so subtly exotic that she could conceivably belong to every race on the planet. And finally, she had a very seductive but classy body language that worked to maximum effect but without looking at all try-hard or desperate for attention. Ultrasexual but not slutty. Restrained but not prudish or icy. Great poise, posture and movement. Yet the final coup de grace was that despite all of this…she looked friendly, interesting and approachable. She somehow managed not to be intimidating at all, and didn’t put out the bitch shield unapproachable vibe that a comparatively hot women would if she were in America. My friend had a conversation with her and found her very pleasant and charming.

"She wasn’t just hot by the relative standards of the uninspiring local talent. She would turn heads in the trendiest bar in Hollywood filled with aspiring starlets and models. It was the combination of her physical assets, her unique and well-conceived fashion style and her demeanor that would make her stand out in any room in any country in the world.

"She was on the balcony of the club standing next to me, and I thought to myself In a third world shithole like this, who does this chick fuck with? See, in a Vegas, Los Angeles or a New York, a chick with looks and game like this girl would be fucking with straight moguls. She could golddig with the best of them if she wanted, without much effort. I’m not talking the glorified groupie chicks who mistakenly call themselves golddiggers and waste their time being jumpoffs for athletes and rappers and B-list actors for occasional shopping spree money or a free bottle here and there in a nightclub. I’m talking the type of chick who skips all the bullshit athletes, rappers and actors and gets wifed up by the team owner, the record label owner or entertainment mogul. The kind of chick dudes would be courting not with expensive dinners, vacations and jewels but by buying her a home, a car or a business. She’d get a new promise to make her famous every day. I totally would know her story and her type in the type of urban metropolis I’m from. But here, in Jaco, Costa Rica, in this almost primal, dog-eat-dog grimy town that is dirt poor and virtually lawless, who does an alpha female like this fuck with?

"I was about to find out.

"The nightclub we were at was on the second floor of the building, with different landings in multiple directions that allowed you to lean on a railing and look downward at people entering from the ground floor and heading upstairs. I was spending my time at the club people watching rather than actively socializing. As I saw one unremarkable person after another enter, my eyes began to glaze over with boredom. I was just counting down the hours, no minutes, before I’d be heading home.

"Suddenly my vision sharpened. I saw a man enter that caught my attention. Let’s call him "CR Alpha." On the surface there was nothing really impressive about him. He wasn’t remarkably fit. He wasn’t remarkably unfit. He was slim but not muscular. He wasn’t tall but wasn’t particularly short either. He wasn’t incredibly handsome although he wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t especially well dressed. He definitely wasn’t peacocking. He just had a basketball jersey, some track pants and some sneakers. He had a slight swagger but it was understated and not a godzilla-stomping-out-tokyo badass strut or anything like that; he had no chip on his shoulder or attitude that he was looking for trouble. He had some tattoos, but not the outrageous amount guys get when they’re blatantly overselling the bad boy image. But I could tell there was something about him. He exuded maximum confidence and control of his domain with a bare minimum of cocky displays or overt exertion.

"As I described before, the streets of Jaco were filled with a lot of crash test dummy criminal types. The kind of petty crooks who would try to sell you drugs or steal your stuff in a heartbeat if you left it unattended. They walked around trying to look as grimy and hard as possible all the time. I classified them immediately as opportunist punks, dangerous in that if they saw a moment of weakness, like you were drunk and outnumbered and a herb, they may try something, but if you were street smart and willing to show some heart they wouldn’t consider you worth the trouble of bothering. But this guy was different. I immediately identified him as a different class of criminal: a player.

I tapped my partner in crime Beethoven and pointed at the dude with my chin. 'This fucking guy.'

"Beethoven took notice and immediately knew who I was talking about. 'Yeah, I see him. He’s all business. He carries it.'

“'Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like if anything goes down, he’ll have the last word. But he’s not obnoxious about it. Like he’ll never go looking for trouble or causing unnecessary shit. Like he’s just chill as shit unless you come at him sideways. And then that’s that. No extra talk, no prolonged 'man dance” where you argue and puff your chest out for 45 minutes straight but no one makes a move. He just handles his shit.'

"Beethoven’s eyes stuck with the guy. 'Yeah, yeah that sounds about right.'

"The guy makes his way upstairs. We forget about him for a while. When I look at the beautiful girl from part 1 of this tale again, she is with him. Until he arrived, she was aloof and her expression was somewhat blank. She wasn’t acting stuck up or standoffish anything, just not particularly emotional one way or the other. But now that he was here, she was smiling, gregarious and warmer. She and her friend were only talking to him. But more important was the body language between him, the girl and her friend, who was also female. He would smile approvingly whenever they addressed him, speak a few words, but otherwise just lean back against the railing and stare at an undetermined spot in the room rather than at them. He wasn’t hugged up on the girl and she wasn’t attached at his hip. She and her friend would dance in his vicinity, almost for his benefit, but rarely directly in his line of sight. More like within his peripheral vision, so that he could keep his eye on them without having to look preoccupied with them. It was almost like there was an invisible semicircle area of personal space around him, a force field of unspoken protection, and they happily occupied the area within it, never going beyond the outer perimeter, held within his orbit by the invisible gravity of his quiet charisma much like a moon predictably orbits a planet and is content to never go beyond that orbit. He just leaned back, surveyed his domain and held these two girls in his sway with minimal maintenance.

"Now you can always tell a winner mentality from a loser mentality by how they react to viewing situational winners. Losers see winners in a situation and try to visualize either how it should be the losers winning instead or try to think about how the winner doesn’t really deserve to be winning and got his gains unfairly. A man with a winner mentality sees someone winning in a situation and thinks, 'Why is he a winner right now, and what can I learn from this?' That was my attitude when seeing this guy. I couldn’t hate, I had to congratulate. A lot of square guys, especially from developed Western nations, would have seen this dude and say “What does he have? Why is that chick with his third-world criminal thug ass and not a classy civilized nice guy like me? The world is unfair. After all, doesn’t she realize I’m smart, have a high IQ, am from the West, have American dollars, would treat her like a queen the way she deserves instead of ignoring her like this alpha thug does? She must be brainwashed or low IQ trash to be content with a third-world badboy asshole like him instead of jumping through hoops for a good guy going places like me.' Even worse is the guy who puts a chick like that on a pedestal and imagines how all she needs is his nice treatment and exposure to his worldly ways to see the errors of her dating choices. That’s sucka mentality.

"But there’s a saying in the hood, 'game recognizes game.' Any guy with real game, I’m talking truly internalized game that comes from years in the game and not a bunch of barely tested scripts and gimmicks, would recognize that this guy deserved what he got, because he was giving her what she needed in that harsh environment. He was an alpha in the purest sense, and in an environment like that pure alphaness mattered more than anything else. He was alpha in the way a middle class man could never be, especially in the West. The more primal and dog-eat-dog the environment, the scarcer the available resources for both the average man and woman, the harder the everyday grind, the weaker the property rights, the weaker the governmental representation, the more corrupt and powerless the police force and most importantly the more powerless and more nonexistent the middle class population, then the more women in said environment will select for pure, true alphas.

"Here in the modernized West where there is a strong middle class and the average woman has more and more self-reliance thanks to feminism and doesn’t need a man as much for survival, a woman doesn’t need to select for pure alphadom as much, and probably won’t. She may still be primally drawn to such alphas due to her genetic hard-wiring, a holdover from the more primal Pleistocene era, but she has enough counterprogramming from Western culture to ultimately balance it out. What women in our modernized western societies are screening for, contrary to popular belief, are not the most purely alpha men but the most relatively alpha men within reasonable limits, or what I dub the Renaissance Man (credit for originally coining the term though goes to Tariq Nasheed).

"To a chick surviving in the bleak, primal grind of a Jaco, Costa Rica, does she have time to seriously entertain this as an alpha male?

"Is that really the pure essence of an alpha male in traditional evolutionary terms? Or this frat guy?

"No offense to any of the guys up there (Mystery, Style, Tucker Max), but most middle class men that are successful with women aren’t true alphas in the historical evolutionary sense. They’re alphas in a relative sense, when compared to other middle-class men in their social circles. Not only are most middle-class men not alpha males in the pure sense, but it would be stupid for them to even aspire to true pure alphadom. Because true alphadom is a pointless goal for middle-class men in the West.

The successful middle-class alpha male is a mythical figure that can’t exist for any significant amount of time. Our society is specifically built to put most alpha behavior in check. The only types of men who can pull off any semblance of true alpha behavior in the West are men at the extreme lower end of the socioeconomic scale because they feel they have nothing to lose and men at the extremely high end of the socioeconomic scale because despite having something to lose they have more resources with which to get away with alpha behavior. This is a society that keeps the peace and maintains the status quo by keeping alpha behavior in check through various disincentives and punishments.

"Middle-class men in the West especially feel the pressure of these disincentives and punishments because on one hand they have enough resources and civility that they feel they have too much to lose by receiving these disincentives and punishment. They have enough property and status and career that it will hurt them to lose any of it. And if they end up in jail, they’re so civilized and genteel that they aren’t built for that setting the way a man from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale is. Yet on the flip side they don’t have so much resources that they can shield themselves from the consequences of alpha behavior either, either buy buying themselves out of punishment or getting afforded a cushy punishment in the form of a country club prison stretch the way a man from the higher end of the socioeconomic scale can. For these reasons lower class and upper class men have much more freedom to push the envelope in pure alpha male behavior than middle class men do. And even for these groups in America there are limits to how alpha they can be, for various reasons. I touched on limitations on the alpha status of the lower class already. One of these days I’ll do the Myth of the Upper-Class Alpha Male as well.

"Western middle class women are willing to enjoy these middle-class Western men because they have grown up conditioned to aspire to self-sufficient career woman status and expect to have two-income households when they marry. So they don’t have to select mates with enough extreme wealth that can support a family singlehandedly. Thanks to their own careers and middle-class status, they can still get a great quality of life from combining their own middle-class income with the income of a middle-class man, as opposed to the woman of the past with few big career opportunities who needed to rely totally on her prospective mate’s income and resources to improve her socioeconomic status. Also, because of the higher expectations of monogamy in the modern West, even if a bunch of Western women wanted to effectively share a powerhouse alpha’s resources, it would be logistically too hard to pull off. Rich men in America and the developed West are expected to be and actually are much more monogamous than rich men elsewhere in the world or throughout history because polygamy is very frowned upon here and the financial consequences to the rich man for engaging in it if caught can be very high. Not to mention the social shaming (ask Tiger Woods).

"Also, two more factors. Rich people have less leisure time than ever, which is an important part of philandering. They work more than ever nowadays, limiting the time they can spend on building and maintaining a harem. Second, the cost of a decent standard of living in urban environments and big cities, the places that offer the most opportunity for rising in socioeconomic class these days, becomes a natural obstacle in harem building as well. For a rich guy in a small town or the third world or a less expensive bygone era, maintaining a harem of extramarital women is a much less economically draining proposition than for a rich man in New York or Tokyo. That’s why in America it takes a man of Tiger Woods’s flexible schedule and exorbitant wealth to pull off a harem of 14 women (not all simultaneously) throughout the years while a successful businessman in some parts of the world can accomplish the same feat with ease.

"So rich men in America get monopolized by one lucky wife and may have one or two long-term mistresses with assorted quickies and escorts here and there. The most access the average lower and middle-class woman can get to one of these high powered alpha men is the parting gift of occasional fling or quickie, and not the first prize of marriage or second prize of kept mistress status. Societies like ours that strongly enforce monogamy shrink the supply of powerful alpha men women can choose from since they aren’t allowed to share these men amongst each other the way they could in a society that allows, explicitly or implicitly, long-term polygamous arrangements. But as I pointed out, this shortage of powerful rich men available for long-term pair bonding is irrelevant because Western women don’t need such men for their survival like women in the past did.

"In addition, thanks to a strong police force, strong property rights and strong paternalistic democratic government to offer physical protection and entitlement benefits if needed, thanks to feminism altering gender role expectations and giving women equal representational votes, thanks to a strong court system to provide retribution and justice if a man tries to violate them in any way, thanks to their own careers that allow them to be self-sufficient enough to provide their own sustenance and resources, thanks to birth control and abortions, thanks to the conveniences offered by appliance technology like washing machines, food processors, blenders and trash compactors, they are free to engage in sexual escapades and mating arrangements their female predecessors never dreamed of. Or as I like to call it, 'sport fucking' or 'fun fucking' whoever she wants, be it bad boy alphas, metrosexual artfag hipsters, starving artists, ad account executives, Starbucks employees, and all types of middle class and working class guys who would have normally died without reproducing in the old dog-eat-dog primal eras of the past. Choosing non-committing alpha males for flings or weak betas with little to moderate resources, while not the optimal choice of her genetic hard-wiring, doesn’t have the same dire consequences her in the Western world that it had for humans in the primal environments of the Pleistocene era or in modern third world hellholes.

"In the West, a powerful resource-rich alpha isn’t a necessity thanks to the factors I described above, and in addition such an alpha isn’t widely available thanks to strongly enforced monogamy (only one women for each man) keeping the supply low. This is why middle-class men are able to thrive in Western society. They are a luxury only Western women can afford. And the ideal middle class man is alpha enough to be a prize, but due to his circumstances there are natural ceilings to how alpha he can be. A middle-class alpha who aims to have any longevity and reproductive success can’t exercise pure alpha status. Sure he can work hard until he moves into a higher socioeconomic status and becomes rich, and at that point become more of a true, pure alpha, but so long as he remains in the middle-class status he won’t be able to pull off true, pure alpha status. It’s for these reasons I specifically called my self-improvement series "The Renaissance Man" series and not "The Alpha Male series." The choice of terms was very deliberate and the two concepts are not interchangeable. Because I think telling the average middle class man that alphadom is attainable or even desirable while remaining in middle class status is the biggest crock of shit going on today. The best thing for a middle-class man to be in today’s society is not a true, pure alpha but a blend of the best aspects of an alpha male and the best aspects of a beta male, with the trappings of neither. A Renaissance Man.

"Back to the Costa Rican Alpha Female I described in Part 1. If you came up to her using some cheezy negs and magic tricks, she’d look at you like you were a joke. The first thing she’d think is, if some crazy dude came up to me and tried to attack me or force me into prostitution or some drunk tourist tried to rape me, this dancing monkey couldn’t do shit. Can he guarantee that I’ll never have to resort to prostituting myself to get big bucks or slaving away at a shitty service or hospitality job for peanuts just to barely keep above grinding poverty level and stay at the same class level? This middle-class guy with his check-to-check existence, his meager 401(k) plan, his Netflix queue that he updates religiously, his mirthless materialism that he uses to convince himself he has more status than he actually has ans he works like a dog to maintain, his DVD box sets and encyclopedic knowledge of sports stats trivia, fantasy basketball league and collection of Bill Simmons Sports Guy columns, his 367 facebook friends, his witty repartee of popular movie quotes, his blog following, his X-Box 360 or whatever other middle-class trappings he has? He’d be utterly useless to her.

“'Fun-fucking'” men like that for sport the way Western women can is a luxury not afforded to women who don’t come from the same environment. For these women, choosing the right man is a decision so critical that it means the difference between surviving and thriving or wasting away in poverty, shame and degradation. A woman like this may view such a middle class guy as as a trick or a simp and use him for some short term material gain like some free drinks or quick cash, but that’s it. She may maintain a correspondence with him in hopes he’s a Captain Save-A-Ho type so that she can hit him up later with some sob story about her sick babies and get him to wire money to her if he’s enough of a big-hearted sap to go for it. And if he’s a that type of jackpot middle-class sucker who can be used for a real long-term benefit like getting immigration to the West then she may really entertain him seriously, usually by playing to his emasculated Western male ego in a way American women would never do. This type of treatment usually blows the middle class Western man’s mind and he’s immediately sprung and wrapped around her finger. But she’ll never respect him fully due to the type of men she’s grown up exposed to and once she immigrates and gets a foothold in her new country to the point where she no longer needs him anymore, she’ll leave him and get with the type of alpha male she’s been conditioned to be turned on by. Oftentimes she’ll even cheat with such an alpha behind her beta husband’s back soon after arriving in her new country. Such stories are common.

"Most of the time, what the average woman in a primal dog-eat-dog environment need in their immediate future is a lower-class guy who is so badass he can physically protect her from the dangers of the ghetto, or a guy uber-rich and uber-powerful enough to immediately lift her far away from the ghetto, so far in fact that she feels she is never in danger of going back. In the specific case of Costa Rican Alpha Female, she is so top notch, even by the standards of the world stage, she can get the best of both worlds in Jaco: the guy who is both badass and tough enough to offer physical protection and powerful and rich enough to lift her far away from her poor beginnings. A guy like CR Alpha.

"So who exactly was CR Alpha?

"The next day I discussed this with our guide for the trip. This guy knew was a street-smart American expat who now lived in Costa Rica and functioned as both our concierge and tour guide. He had been there for years and knew the ins and outs very well, from the seedy underbelly to the well-to-do parts. We described the guy to him to see what he could tell us. He immediately knew who we were talking about. 'He’s a lieutenant for the Colombians here.' I can’t remember the full details because I was pretty wasted, but he was a ranking member of a Colombian organization known as either the White Colombians or the Black Colombians, I forget which. He was their representative and highest ranking member in CR. He ranked pretty high in the gang’s hierarchy, and of their members stationed in Costa Rica there was none higher. Our concierge also said things that echoed the speculations Beethoven and I made the night before. That he carried himself as a really cool guy and didn’t walk around acting like he had something to prove, but if there was ever a problem (which there rarely was because few were willing to cross him), he handled it in a definitive, unambiguous fashion. He was no joke, and our concierge said over the years he even used him to handle some of his own 'problems' that our concierge didn’t have the clout or muscle to handle on his own (presumably for a fee or in exchange for a favor, I didn’t ask for elaboration).

But that’s true alpha. Not a fuzzy hat and black nail polish. Not a cubicle job or middle management office. Not blog stardom. None of this shit is true alpha. And that’s fine. For reasons I’ll explain in the next installment."

Click HERE for Part III and the rest.