Beta by Design
The myth was born in a cage. And now it's caging men.
August 8, 2025
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
— Aristotle
THE PERFORMANCE BEGINS
I used to practice alpha in the mirror when I was fifteen.
Shoulders back. Voice deeper. The particular swagger I'd seen on other Black men who never had to worry about seeming too soft, too available, too much like what I actually was.
This was 2004. Gay was still an insult. Black was already dangerous. Alpha was the only masculinity that might keep me alive—if I could learn to perform it well enough to pass.
I never saw a wolf. But I had seen what happened to Black boys who couldn't convince the world they were something to fear rather than something to destroy.
The myth was born in a cage. And now it's caging men. But first, it tried to save me.
Twenty-one years later, I watch grown men spend thousands of dollars to learn what I was practicing for free in my childhood bedroom: how to perform dominance so convincingly that everyone, including yourself, forgets it's a performance. How to wear aggression like armor. How to mistake intimidation for influence.
They call it self-improvement. I call it what I knew it was then: survival strategy mistaken for identity.
The man who calls himself alpha never leads. He mimics. He studies other men's shoulders, other men's silences, other men's ways of taking up space, and he practices until the mimicry becomes muscle memory. Until he can't remember what he felt like before he learned to feel nothing at all.
“The man who calls himself alpha never leads. He mimics.”
You've seen him. In boardrooms, at bars, in comment sections. The one who has to prove his worth by diminishing someone else's. The one whose confidence depends entirely on your insecurity. The one who learned that masculinity meant never asking for help, never admitting uncertainty, never revealing the soft animal of his actual self.
He is not what nature made. He is what captivity taught.
THE CAGE CAME FIRST
In 1947, a Swiss animal behaviorist named Rudolph Schenkel published a study that would cage generations of men in a lie about their own nature.
Schenkel observed wolves in captivity—zoo wolves, stressed wolves, wolves torn from their families and forced into artificial packs with strangers. He watched them fight for resources, establish dominance through aggression, maintain hierarchy through violence. He called the winners "alphas" and the losers "betas," and he published his findings as if he had discovered something fundamental about wolf nature.
What he had actually discovered was what happens when you trap social animals in cages too small for their spirits and force them to compete for resources that should be abundant. He had documented the pathology of captivity and called it natural law.
For fifty-two years, his study became gospel. The alpha male became shorthand for biological destiny, evolutionary imperative, the way men were supposed to be.
Then, in 1999, a researcher named David Mech—who had spent decades studying wolves in the wild—published a correction that should have ended the myth forever.1
Wild wolves don't have alphas. They have parents.2
The "dominant" behaviors Schenkel observed in captivity were stress responses, not natural hierarchies. In the wild, wolf packs are families. The leaders aren't the most aggressive—they're the most experienced. They don't maintain power through violence—they maintain it through care, protection, guidance. They don't dominate other wolves; they nurture them.
The alpha wolf never existed. It was a trauma response mistaken for nature.
But the myth had already escaped the cage. By 1999, it was too profitable to kill.
ALPHA GOES VIRAL
Something in us should have recognized how quickly the debunked wolf study found new hosts. How seamlessly it migrated from animal behavior to human behavior, from scientific observation to cultural prescription.
The 2000s: Pick-Up Artistry as Alpha Theology
The first viral spreaders called themselves pickup artists, and they understood something profound about male loneliness: men who felt powerless would pay anything to feel dominant. They took Schenkel's caged-wolf hierarchy and repackaged it as dating strategy. Alpha males get women. Beta males get rejected. Simple. Binary. False.
They taught men to practice dominance like I had practiced straightness—as a performance that might protect them from the humiliation of being seen as weak, unworthy, undesirable. They turned vulnerability into enemy and called emotional availability "beta behavior."
The 2010s: Manosphere Theology
The pickup artists passed the myth to men's rights activists, who passed it to incels, who passed it to red-pillers, who passed it to anyone willing to believe that male suffering was women's fault. The alpha mythology provided perfect theological cover: if hierarchy is natural, then men's pain must be everyone else's responsibility to fix.
They built entire online ecosystems around the premise that some men are biologically designed to dominate and others to submit. They created detailed taxonomies—alpha, beta, sigma, gamma—as if these were scientific categories rather than elaborate horoscopes for men afraid of their own complexity.3
The 2020s: Mainstream Algorithms
Then social media found the myth, and the myth found its perfect distribution system. Podcast bros with millions of followers started teaching alpha masculinity like gospel. Influencers began selling courses on "high-value male behavior." The mythology migrated from fringe communities to mainstream culture, carried by algorithms that profit from male insecurity.
Young men who had never heard of Rudolph Schenkel started speaking his language. They began dividing themselves and each other into hierarchies based on a study that was not only wrong but had been publicly corrected for over two decades.
The beautiful, terrible irony: the myth survived because it served capitalism and patriarchy perfectly.4 Hierarchical men don't organize. They compete. Insecure men buy products. Isolated men don't build community—they build brands.
WHO HOLDS THE LADDER
You know how the ladder works, even if you've never named it.
But I need to tell you something about ladders that most discussions of alpha masculinity never touch: when you're Black, the ladder is always on fire.
“When you're Black, the ladder is always on fire.”
In 2004, when I was fifteen and practicing alpha in the mirror, I wasn't just learning masculinity. I was learning the specific kind of hypermasculinity that might keep a Black boy alive in a world that shoots first and asks questions later. Don't be soft—they'll call you weak and destroy you. Don't be too hard—they'll call you threatening and destroy you anyway.
The impossible mathematics of Black male alpha performance: be dominant enough to earn respect from other men, but not so dominant that white people see you as dangerous. Be strong enough to survive, but not so strong that you become a target. Be alpha enough to protect yourself from other Black men who might test you, but beta enough to navigate white spaces that fund your future.
I learned to code-switch my masculinity like I code-switched my voice. Different performances for different audiences, all of them exhausting, none of them true.
What nobody talks about is the interior experience of living on a ladder that never stops moving.
I remember the texture of it: walking into a room and immediately calculating hierarchy. Who's holding the measuring stick? What version of alpha do they respect? How much of myself do I need to hide to qualify for safety here?
In high school: Alpha meant silent rage and athletic performance. Don't be too smart, don't be too sensitive, definitely don't be too gay. Measure your words, moderate your enthusiasm, make sure your interests never revealed too much about who you actually were inside.
In college: Alpha meant intellectual dominance and social positioning. Now you could be smart, but only in ways that intimidated rather than invited. You could have opinions, but only ones that established your superiority over classmates still figuring out who they wanted to become.
In corporate spaces: Alpha meant financial success and emotional unavailability. You could be ambitious, but never vulnerable. You could be powerful, but never uncertain. You could lead, but only if you never admitted you were still learning how.
In Black spaces: Alpha meant cultural authenticity and protective aggression. You had to be Black enough to belong but not so Black that you threatened anyone's comfort. You had to be hard enough to be respected but not so hard that you became what they expected you to be.
In gay spaces: Alpha meant...what? The script broke down here. The traditional markers didn't translate. But the anxiety remained: How do you perform dominance in communities that have been dominated? How do you be alpha when alpha was always designed to exclude you?
Watch what happens when you realize the ladder is always burning:
The white finance bro who's alpha in his Manhattan office becomes beta the moment he's around Black men who measure strength by what you've survived, not what you've accumulated.
The gym alpha who measures worth in deadlift numbers becomes beta around intellectuals who measure worth in what you've read, not what you've lifted.
The academic alpha who dominates with vocabulary becomes beta around street-smart men who measure worth by how you navigate conflict, not how you avoid it.
But here's what I learned that took me twenty years to name: the Black man performing alpha becomes beta the moment he enters any space where being Black is already marked as inferior. No amount of performance can overcome a hierarchy that places your entire identity in the subordinate category.
The ladder isn't just shifting—it's rigged. And every man climbing it is climbing toward a position that can be revoked the moment someone with more power decides you don't belong.
Here's what costs everything to say: I performed alpha masculinity for fifteen years, and it never protected me from the things I was actually afraid of.
It didn't protect me from racism. It didn't protect me from homophobia. It didn't protect me from the particular vulnerability of being someone whose full humanity was always up for debate.
What it did was exhaust me. Hollow me out. Turn me into a stranger to my own heart. Make me complicit in systems that hurt other people who reminded me too much of who I actually was underneath the performance.
The particular devastation of discovering you've been climbing a ladder that leads nowhere: not just the wasted energy, but the recognition that every rung you climbed was built on someone else's back. That your performance of strength required other people to perform weakness. That your alpha was always someone else's beta.
The boys watching us now—Black boys, gay boys, sensitive boys, all the boys who don't fit the narrow script—they need to see men who stopped climbing the burning ladder and started building something else. Men who learned that real power comes from knowing yourself so completely that you stop needing anyone else to be smaller for you to feel significant.
They need to see that the cage door was never locked. That the performance was always optional. That the ladder was always on fire, and the only way to win was to stop playing the game.
The choice is ours. The boys are watching.
THE COST OF COSPLAY
I need to tell you about the specific loneliness of successful alpha performance.
It's 2009. I'm twenty, finally convinced I've mastered the swagger. I can walk into any room and perform dominance so convincingly that other men defer, women notice, and nobody—including myself—remembers what I felt like before I learned to feel nothing at all.
I am surrounded by people who admire my performance and completely alone.
Because here's what the alpha mythology never mentions: the better you get at the performance, the more isolated you become from your actual self. The more convincing your dominance, the more desperate your heart becomes for someone to see through it.
“The more convincing your dominance, the more desperate your heart becomes for someone to see through it.”
I remember lying in bed after parties where everyone told me how confident I seemed, how together I had it all figured out, and feeling like I was suffocating behind a mask I could no longer remove. I had become so skilled at performing strength that I had forgotten how to ask for help. So practiced at emotional unavailability that I had lost access to my own feelings.
The cruelest mathematics of alpha performance: the more successfully you embody it, the more you disappear.
The body keeps the score of performance:
My shoulders stayed locked in position even when I was alone. My jaw ached from being clenched. My voice stayed pitched lower than its natural register until I couldn't remember what I actually sounded like when no one was listening.
I developed what I now recognize as performance fatigue: the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from being "on" every moment because relaxing felt like dying. Because the moment you stop performing dominance, everyone sees that you're just a person who needs things, wants things, fears things like everyone else.
And in 2009, that felt like a death sentence.
The interior devastation the statistics can't capture:
Men dying not just from suicide, but from the slow death of never being known. Partners who love someone who only exists behind a performance. Children who inherit emotional unavailability as family legacy and think that's what fathers are supposed to provide.
The particular grief of men in their forties realizing they've spent decades being someone they never chose to be, wearing armor that protected them from intimacy they actually craved.
Friends who can't comfort each other because comfort was marked as weakness. Brothers who can't be honest about their struggles because honesty was marked as failure. Fathers who can't model emotional vocabulary because they amputated their own feelings twenty years ago and never learned how to grow them back.
The generational transmission:
I’ve witnessed my younger cousin, sixteen, practicing the same performance I mastered at their age. Different metrics—Instagram followers instead of physical dominance, intellectual superiority instead of emotional unavailability—but the same underlying terror of being seen as insufficient.
They've inherited the anxiety without inheriting the context. They don't know why they're performing; they just know that not performing feels dangerous. They don't know what they're protecting themselves from; they just know that vulnerability feels like suicide.
The alpha myth doesn't just damage the men who believe it. It creates cultures where emotional labor becomes feminized, where care becomes weakness, where the work of building and maintaining relationships gets marked as something real men shouldn't have to do.
The relationship mathematics:
When you perform alpha successfully, you attract people who are drawn to the performance. When you inevitably need something real—comfort, understanding, help—you discover that the relationships you built can't hold the weight of your actual humanity.
I lost friendships because I couldn't admit I was struggling. I lost romantic relationships because I couldn't risk being seen without armor. I almost lost my relationship with myself because I had practiced being someone else for so long that I forgot who I was underneath the script.
The alpha mythology promises you'll never need anyone, and then delivers the kind of isolation that proves you need everyone. Promises you'll never feel weak, and then creates the kind of exhaustion that makes you too weak to maintain authentic connections.
It promises power and delivers the most profound powerlessness of all: the inability to be loved for who you actually are, because you've forgotten who that is.
THE ALPHA NEVER EXISTED
Here's the truth that will set you free and terrify you in equal measure:
There never was an alpha. There never was a beta. There was never a hierarchy that nature demanded you climb.
There were just wolves in cages, responding to captivity. There were just boys watching grown men perform scripts for masculinity that no one ever chose consciously. There were just generations of humans mistaking trauma responses for identity, survival strategies for authentic power.
What wild wolves actually teach us:
Leadership through experience, not dominance. Protection through care, not aggression. Strength that serves the pack, not the ego. Hierarchy that shifts based on need, not performance.
The wolves who lead do so because they understand the territory, not because they can intimidate others into following. They lead when leadership is needed and follow when following serves the group.
What this means for men:
Real strength is being yourself so completely that others feel safe being themselves around you. Real leadership is creating conditions where everyone's gifts can emerge, not just your own. Real masculinity is knowing yourself well enough to know what you have to offer beyond intimidation.
The men I know who carry actual authority—not performed dominance, but the kind of presence that makes rooms safer—they share something the alpha mythology can't teach: they know who they are when no one is watching. They've done the interior work that performance-based masculinity is designed to avoid.
They've learned emotional vocabulary. They practice accountability. They can apologize without losing themselves. They can be wrong without dying. They can need other people without disappearing.
They understand that masculinity is not a competition—it's a practice. And the practice is learning to be human in a male body without making that everyone else's problem.
The emergence models:
Watch the young men who never learned the alpha script. Twenty-year-olds who cry in public, who speak about their therapists like previous generations spoke about their gyms. Who measure worth by how well they love, not how much they dominate.
They're not beta. They're not alpha. They're practicing something the caged wolves couldn't teach us: how to be powerful without making others powerless. How to be strong enough to be soft. How to lead from service rather than fear.
WHO WILL TEACH THE BOYS SOMETHING ELSE?
The boys watching us right now will learn masculinity from whatever we do next.
They will learn it from our silences when other men cause harm. They will learn it from whether we choose performance or truth when the moment demands we pick one. They will learn it from our courage or our fear, our growth or our stagnation, our accountability or our excuses.
This is not self-improvement. This is moral obligation.
Here's what love demands:
Stop laughing at jokes that depend on someone else's humiliation. The boys are watching what you find funny, and they're learning what masculinity considers acceptable targets.
Interrupt conversations where men get reduced to archetypes. When someone calls another man "beta" or "simp" or any of the language designed to shame men back into performance, say something. The boys are listening to what you let stand.
Model emotional vocabulary in rooms where feelings are treated as weakness. Say "I'm scared" when you're scared. Say "I need help" when you need help. Say "I was wrong" when you were wrong. The boys need to see that none of these things kill you.
Choose accountability over agreement when men in your life cause harm. Don't protect other men from consequences to maintain group loyalty. The boys are learning whether masculinity means covering for each other or calling each other toward better.
Stop teaching the myth through silence.
When you don't interrupt the alpha performance, you endorse it. When you don't model emotional availability, you suggest it's unmanly. When you don't demonstrate accountability, you teach that real men don't answer for their harm.
The inheritance question:
What version of masculinity will you hand to the boys who are watching? Will it be the caged-wolf hierarchy that destroyed so many men before them? Will it be the performance-based identity that promises power and delivers isolation?
Or will it be something that actually serves them? Something that teaches them to know themselves, love themselves, be themselves so completely that they stop needing to dominate others to feel worthy of existing?
The cost of choosing truth:
This will lose you some friendships. Men who are still performing alpha will interpret your authenticity as criticism of their choices. They will call you soft, call you beta, use the language of the myth to shame you back into the cage.
Let them. The boys are watching what happens to men who choose truth over performance. They need to see that you survive it. They need to see that you become more yourself, not less, when you stop pretending to be someone else.
The promise:
The boys who learn masculinity from men who've done their own emotional work become men who don't need to break others to feel whole. Who don't need to perform power because they understand actual power. Who don't need to cage themselves because they were taught that freedom was always the goal.
They become men who can love and be loved. Who can fail without becoming failures. Who can need other people without losing themselves.
They become the men we needed when we were boys practicing alpha in mirrors, trying to learn how to be safe in a world that seemed determined to destroy anyone who dared to be tender.
THE DOOR WAS NEVER LOCKED
Twenty-one years after I first practiced alpha in my mother's mirror, I know this:
The cage door was never locked. The hierarchy was never real. The script was always optional.
What keeps men trapped isn't biological destiny or natural law—it's the fear that stepping out of performance means stepping into annihilation. The terror that being seen as you actually are means being rejected for who you actually are.
But here's what the wolves in the wild know that the wolves in captivity never learned: the pack survives through collaboration, not competition. Through care, not conquest. Through each member knowing their gifts and offering them freely, not through everyone fighting to be the only one who matters.
The alpha myth taught generations of men that they had to choose between being powerful and being human. That caring was weakness. That needing others was failure. That the only safety came from being someone everyone else was afraid to challenge.
It was always a lie. And the lie is finally dying.
The boys coming up now have chances we never had. They can see models of masculinity that don't require anyone else's submission. They can practice emotional vocabulary like we practiced swagger. They can learn that strength means being yourself so completely that others feel safe being themselves around you.
“Once you remember how to breathe without armor, you can teach other men how to breathe free.”
They can learn that the cage door was never locked. That the performance was always optional. That the power they were taught to chase was always powerlessness in disguise.
But only if we stop handing them the script. Only if we stop performing long enough to show them what's possible when men choose truth over territory, authenticity over alpha, love over the loneliness of being something they're not.
The myth was born in a cage, and it tried to cage us all. But cages can be opened from the inside. And once you remember how to breathe without armor, you can teach other men how to breathe free.
The boys are watching. The choice is ours.
Let that be enough—for now.
Footnotes
What many in positions of leadership fail to understand is that fear as a motivational tactic only works in the short term, and only if you want people to do the bare minimum. Those who are most effective as heads of organizations (regardless of gender) lead with compassion; people want to follow them and fear letting them down, rather than fearing the man himself.
Also - the research about the wolves was fascinating. Nicely done.
Brilliantly spelled out! I hadn’t heard about the wolf studies, but the connection between trauma responses and how they translate into personality and performance fascinates me.
As someone who came from childhood trauma who married a guy with his own childhood trauma, the resulting shitshow fits this alpha male dynamic you describe.
I thought I’d married a man who was vulnerable, who wanted to be in a partnership. It didn’t take long (the wedding night) for him to show he had to be dominant. And I didn’t have the wisdom to take that as a very large sign.
I ended up in a 37 1/2 year competition I wasn’t expecting, where I must always have less worth, less say, less power.
But I guess you can’t call me a quitter….🤔