The Michael Knowles Show - The SIGMA Male Grindset | Explained.

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

Women want them, men want to be them, but what are they? SIGMA male videos have gone viral the past 2 years and what started as a TikTok trend has turned into an actual lifestyle with tenets and beliefs. Michael Knowles explains the origin and meaning of the SIGMA male. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm going to be your Alpha Chad guide into the grind. set and how you can become a based Sigma male. What does any of that mean? It's complicated. You've heard of an alpha male and a beta male. You've probably heard of an alpha male and a beta male because of a 1982 book about chimpanzee politics by a guy named Franz de Wall, based on earlier research from the 40s about how wolf packs operate. There is an alpha and then there are the betas who serve the alpha. Then you get the chimpanzees of the 80s, and then people start applying that to human society. In the mid-2000s, there was a pickup artist named Neil Strauss who applied it to dating. And he said, if you want to pick up chicks, you've got to be an alpha male, and that involves

performing all sorts of things and wearing all sorts of silly clothing. And then in 2010, the blogger Theodore Beal, who goes by the Nome de Plum Vox Day, greatly expanded this idea of the sociosexual hierarchy of men to include all sorts of other terms. The categories are alpha. We know what that is. That's the leader. That's the big, hot, cool guy who leads the organizations and gets all the chicks. Then we get betas in this new, more complex system of male categorization. The betas are the lieutenants. They might be good looking. They get a fair number of girls, but they don't lead the organizations. They attach themselves to an alpha, and then they execute on the alpha's desires. They're deeply loyal,

both to the alpha and to the organization as a whole. Then after that, you get the deltas, the worker bees. The deltas are the people who are very diligent about their tasks. They don't really lead anything. They're not necessarily all that loyal, but they do their job and they do it right. The gamas, according to this scheme, are the angry nerds, who might be more intelligent than average, might have more knowledge in a specific area than most other people, but they're kind of irritated about it. They don't like their place in the social pecking order, and so they can be resentful of the alphas and the other people in the line

who maybe get more girls and make more money and have more social success. After that, you get the omegas. The omegas are the losers. They're the school shooters. They are just so divorced from anything resembling normal society. They are completely outcast. And then you get the sigmas. The sigmas are the new object of desire.

Women want them. Men want to be them. The sigmas are outside of the hierarchy. So according to Beale, the sigmas are like the alphas in that they're courageous and they have vision and they're probably pretty hot

and women really like them. But whereas the alphas, Alpha is the head of the wolf pack. The sigmas are lone wolves. They don't have a pack. They don't care about the hierarchy. They want to go their own way. So the sigmas seem super cool.

And they're associated with all sorts of popular movie characters. It's the Han Solo type, the Clint Eastwood type. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Ed Norton in Fight Club. Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner, Ryan Gosling in Drive. What do all of these characters have in common? On the superficial level, they reject modern society. They think that this whole social structure that we have, it's all BS.

They think specifically in our modern culture that the wokeness, the lies, the consumerism, the shallow relationships, that it all seems sort of artificial. They want to break past it. They want to transcend it. They've been driven a little bit mad, or at the very least frustrated, by the pitfalls of our modern culture. We've all been raised on television

to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires in movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. We're slowly learning, that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. The other thing that all these characters have in common is that they are complete fantasies. But I mean,

even within the logic of these stories, these characters are delusional, especially the two most prominent ones. Patrick Bateman and American Psycho is delusional. By the end of the movie, you realize that Patrick Bateman hasn't actually done the things that you think that he has done. Ed Norton and Fight Club, by the end of the movie, you realize Ed Norton's a schizo. It's not real. So why is the Sigma male mindset so popular right now?

Why is it probably the biggest trend on TikTok, specifically with young men ages 17 into their early 20s? Now, two reasons. One, because society is so obviously corrupt. And as society breaks down and becomes more transparently corrupt, people are going to want to break away from that and go their own way. That is perfectly natural, totally understandable. The reason that this idea, though, is very popular among this particular group, men is because that is the time when life is least settled. That time in your late teens into your early 20s is when you have left the very well-defined social structure of school

where achievement is very easy to measure, but then you leave that, and none of that stuff matters anymore. But it's still before the time that you've ever actually accomplished anything in your career. And so what do you do? You fantasize. I don't have real accomplishments to my name exactly, but I know that I'm capable of them. People just don't understand it. I think this is why Sigma is so much more attractive to people than Alpha, because the Alpha male is measurable. He is the top of an organization. He has lots of people who are loyal to him. He can command respect when he walks into a room. The Sigma says that he is like the Alpha, but without any of the outward signs. So he doesn't have a wife. Well, that's okay. He doesn't want one.

one. And he doesn't have an organization that he leads. Well, that's fine. He doesn't want one. And he doesn't really get all of the accolades. Well, that's fine. He doesn't want those accolades. He doesn't care. The Sigma is holding Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. He's going to be authentic. He doesn't care about your social structures and all the rest of it. The Sigma male description is the most common feeling, especially for this group of young men. And I say this as a former young man myself. And I'm sure many people can identify with this. The irony is that, according to all the people who promote this idea of male society, the sigma is the rarest type of man. Oh, very, diamond in the rough. Very, very few people are really the sigmas. And yet, everybody who pays

attention to this stuff identifies as a sigma, or at the very least desires to be a sigma. So we admire the idea of the lone wolf, the man going his own way. But that isn't real because man is a social creature. Man is fundamentally a political creature and a coupling creature. Even in the movies, the man who goes his own way, he can't be held down, he won't be bound by any bonds of love or community. Han Solo is the archetypal version of this. And oh, but what happens? He ends up with Princess Leia. Of course, because that is a fantasy. And we might wish to deny that, but we can't We can't ultimately deny our own nature. We are made for society.

What do you get when you cross a mentally ill-loner with a society? The whole idea of the grind set. The grind set is this idea that you're going to ignore all these external distractions and you're just going to focus on what is important to better yourself is self-undermind. Because if you are spending your time worrying about whether you're an alpha or a beta or a sigma or a lambda or a whatever, you are manifestly not on your grind set. Because if you were in the correct grind set, you would be ignoring all of those distractions, including all of this focus on oneself and one's own personality, absent any accomplishment, absent any particular

practice of virtue, in trying to improve yourself strictly through your own will, a Nietzschean idea that in this chaotic, senseless society, we just have to exercise our own will to improve ourselves against all odds and become the Superman. You will fail. Your will is not sufficient for that. Your ability is not sufficient for that. This is a fallen world. And so if you set out trying to save yourself, you are going to fail. You're going to sin. You're going to flop. You're going to lose the girl, you're going to lose the job at some point, you're going to lose your strength at some point, and then you're going to die. I don't want to ruin your willpower.

I'm not very good at controlling it anyway. Sometimes you hear people say, reject modernity, embrace masculinity. It's fine to reject the evils of the modern world, all the porn and the selfishness and the wimpiness and all of that. But embracing masculinity is not sufficient. Even the phrase embrace tradition, that's a lot closer, but you've just got to go deeper. the appeal of this classification of men is that you're seeing past all the nonsense. Forget about all that idealistic mumbo-jumbo you ever heard about being a man. This is what

it's really about. That vision of man is no less artificial than the idealistic version of man, knights in shining armor and gallant courtly love and all the rest of it. I'm reminded of the first two stories of the Canterbury Tales by Jeffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales opens up with the knight's tale, which is about these two gallant knights who are fighting over this woman that they saw through a window and they both fell in love with her. And it's for the absolute highest ideals. And in the end, they sacrifice their own desires for their love for this woman and for honor and chivalry and all the rest of it. And then the next tale in Canterbury Tales is a retelling of that tale. It's the Miller's tale. But the retelling of that tale is the most disgusting,

vulgar, lewd kind of story you've ever read with all sorts of body parts and bodily functions and a bunch of cuckolding and deceit. It's just nasty and ugly. The way that these stories are often misinterpreted is that the former is the silly, preposterous, idealistic version, and the latter, that's the way human society really works. But no, they're both absurd. It's true that human society doesn't operate like a tale of courtly love from the Middle Ages, but likewise, it doesn't operate like a farce either. I mean, for that story to hold true, it would require such gullibility from everybody else that is not human. They're both caricatures of what really happens.

That's how it starts. The fever, the rage, the feeling. of powerlessness. The turn is good, man. True. If data management is slowing down your business, you need the Intuit ERP. If one entity is here, and one here, and one here, and one here,

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have this alpha, beta, gamma, sigma, Greek alphabet signifier stuff. It's basically the same thing, though. Ultimately, this is just horoscopes for men. You can read yourself into any of these. You might say, well, I've got certain attributes of the alpha male. Or you've got some aspects of the beta or the delta. Or even the gamma. Maybe you've got a nerdy kind of interest that you know a lot about some subject. One hopes you're not the Omega, which is the school shooter category. And you might say, well, I am like the Sigma.

Why are you like the Sigma? Well, because I'm alone sometimes. It means you're lonely. It's true. People are lonely. Why is this cropping up now? Well, it's because the whole society feels alienated. Because over the recent decades, the structures that held us together as a society have broken down.

You see this in the collapse of family. You see this in the collapse of local community. You see this in the collapse of national loyalty. And you see this in the rise of technology, which divorces us from our real communities and encourages us to participate in virtual communities. It encourages us actually to deny the realities of the body and to live ever more in virtual reality. And so people spend more and more of their time online, but it doesn't satisfy us because we're not only disembodied spirits and minds. We're bodies as well. And so people can feel more and more isolated. You don't know your neighbors as well. You don't go out and see people. You don't touch people. We just went through a pandemic lockdown where you weren't allowed to hug people or really have any bodily contact whatsoever. That can be very alienating and it can make you feel like you're the lone wolf without a pack. No, you're just lonely. People are very, very lonely these days. and then you're constantly going down this rabbit hole of what is really authentic.

No, no, my true personality type, my true male category is not defined by the stuff I do in the real world. It's not defined by the wife that I do or do not have or the job that I do or do not perform. No, it's something deeper and more esoteric and more authentic. But the notion that identity is defined by authentic, fixed characteristics, divorce, worst from any expression in the real world is preposterous. Your identity is defined by what you worship, and then by your habits of virtue and vice that follow from the objects that you worship. My coat, my shoes, my spotless gloves, my face. Man is a memetic being. The word memetic relates to the word meme, like a meme. Actually,

this whole thing is a meme. The whole meme phenomenon of the Sigma males and the alpha and the beta and the omega totally underscores this point. The way that we take on our identities is through imitation. This is an insight that goes back to the ancient Greeks, re-articulated in recent years by René Girard, the philosopher. It's one that is even pushed forward by scientists like Richard Dawkins. One of the most famous lines in Fight Club is that everything's a copy of the... a copy of a copy. That's true. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. The fixed creator, the unmoved mover of everything that moves, creates the world after his own image, and specifically

creates man after his own image in likeness. This is why man is called the Imago Day, the image of God. So what should we be copying? Right now, a lot of people seem to think that we should be copying pick up artist con men or fiction. sociopaths from Hollywood movies. Probably not a good idea. Probably if you want to be the best man that you can be, which is really what everybody's after with all of these silly signifiers, then you should copy the ultimate good, which whether you consider yourself Christian or not, whether you consider yourself religious or not, I think you have to at least acknowledge that Christianity animated the whole civilization. If you value Western civilization at all, Western civilization

at its peak, you have to grant that that was a civilization modeled after Christianity, a civilization that was copying Christ. And Christ, Christians believe, embodies all the very best aspects of all the categories of men, all of the categories, not just the alpha or the sigma or the this or the that. He embodies the courage and vision and leadership of the alpha. He embodies the loyalty of the beta. He embodies the diligence of the delta. He embodies the expertise of the gamma. Even the suffering of the Omega, not the school shooting, but the suffering, Christ even imitates that. And then, of course, the going one's own way of the Sigma in as much as this is a fallen world, the devil is the prince of this world, and so one must contradict the

fashions of this world if one is to be truly good. You've never seen a mirror. When people talk about alphas, mostly they're just talking about people being big, aggressive bullies. So you'll notice, that's not actually how successful leaders lead, whether we're talking about chimpanzees or whether we're talking about human beings. What about the recognition that humility is a virtue? Prudence is a virtue.

Courage, prerequisite for all of the other virtues. We learn through imitation and what we do in the real world. It's not just divorced from our physical reality. It's performed. The more you perform virtues, the easier it will be to do those virtues, and the more virtuous you will become. The more you engage in vice, the easier it will be to engage in those vices, the harder it will be to stop engaging in those vices. This is the definition of an addiction. And the more vicious you will become. It's practiced. And that does change your identity. You can recognize, that the world is broken and that we shouldn't go along with the fashions of the day.

And maybe that gives us a sense of a kind of ironic kinship with Patrick Bateman or the Joker. But do we fall down the nihilistic, naval-gazing, narcissistic, self-obsessed loserdom of the people who think that the most important thing in the world is contained between their ears and from the top of their head to their toes? Or do we lift our heads up to the heavens and look something higher? And then model our behavior on that. It's the only way to become all that man is meant to be in all of his ultimate perfection.

Might not get it quite on this world, but at least gives us hope and a direction and a shot to become that man, if not here, then in the life of the world to come.