Occasionally, people recommend I check out Rollo Tomassi’s popular blog “The Rational Male”. I skimmed a few posts. Personally, it’s not for me as his writing is incredibly meandering and very fluffy. I also noticed that he’s been teaming up with a bunch of dubious characters in the commercial PUA industry but, hey, the man’s gotta eat.
In particular, one reader asked me what I thought of Rollo Tomassi’s statement,
“Alpha is a state of mind, not a demographic.”
Do you want to know what I think of it? It’s complete horse shit! If it’s not immediately obvious, I’ll elaborate. For that reason, let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s compare guy A and guy B.
Here is guy A:
– white male
– 6’3″ tall
– decent shape
– great hair
– graduated from a name-brand university
– $250k liquid in the bank, zero debt
– great career with a great company in a great city
– super-hot girlfriend who is smart and kind and educated, too
– excellent health
– yuge cock
– nice pad
– conservative
While all the losers on seduction forums love to wax lyrical about how “game” is about your “attitude”, it’s complete nonsense. If your life is going great, and I mean great instead of “I can spin it in a way that may sound impressive if nobody asks probing questions”, you’ll likely feel great, or let’s say that it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll feel depressed. About what? Your job is challenging, but just challenging enough, so you get to exercise your brain, and you don’t need to decompress in front of the TV afterwards. Besides, dinner is ready, but your girlfriend wants to feel your huge cock again. Sweet life, innit?
In contrast, here’s guy B:
– shit genes
– short
– fat
– bald
– dropped out from a shit-tier university
– $100k student loan, lives paycheck to paycheck
– zero marketable skills, thus he flips burgers in a shit town
– doesn’t get laid, but is big into hentai
– looks 10 years older than he is
– lives in mom’s basement
– puny pen0r
– smokes a lot of weed
– has a sick kill/death ratio in Call of Duty
– lefty
Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter how “alpha” guy B thinks he is. Fact of the matter is that he is a loser and reality will catch up with him. Maybe he’ll feel good for a moment or two, but wait until he realizes that he’s got a shit job in a shit town and still lives at home. That’ll bring every alpha down. He shouldn’t feel good about himself, and if he had half a brain left, he’d figure out that he has to get his life together, or he has a future as a meth addict ahead of him.
If you want to feel great, you better get your life in order because in the real world losers feel like losers because they are losers; nobody gives a shit about how “alpha” you feel as women just aren’t going to flock to you, or certainly no quality women. Losers fucking top-shelf women just isn’t going to happen, no matter how many instances of “that one guy” you fantasize about who bang supermodels despite all their shortcoming.
If you’re guy A, you only have to show up and women will make it very easy for you. No, this doesn’t mean that you can afford to be a complete social retard, but that’s about as rare as being an admirer of both Hitler and Hillary Clinton. In a nutshell, Rollo Tomassi’s dictum is a variation of “Looks don’t matter” or, more precisely, “Only game matters”. Yet, in the real world, if you want to get anywhere, the way forward doesn’t consist of changing your mindset but working on yourself. Maximize your looks, get some marketable skills so that you can support yourself, and get your own place. Then we can talk about getting women. It is next to impossible to feel good about yourself if your life is in utter disarray. Similarly, it is next to impossible to feel down if your life is genuinely going great. However, let’s not scare of those losers who believe that supermodels would come knocking at their door if they only managed to fix their “state of mind”.
I reviewed Rollo’s book on Goodreads and made a lot of the same comments. I even quoted you indirectly. 🙂
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18634307-the-rational-male?from_search=true
It is kind of sad that Rollo views it as a badge of honour with the other two “R”s – Roosh and Roissy.
I think he does say the three basic elements to attracting a girl are ‘looks, money and game’. Having two of the three is OK but having all three is ideal.
Just like your posts, I’ve read Rollo’s stuff although not in detail since they are dense.
Still like you, his writings do pontificate on ‘red pill’ observations. The quote you cited about alpha being a state of mind…It requires some context. Rollo would probably agree with your POV that having a mindset of ‘alpha’ doesn’t make you a ’10’ any more than a fat guy self-decribing as ‘fit’ makes him fit.
But I took his quote to mean that you need that strong inner mindset to go along with your money, looks and game.
I don’t think his posts are dense at all. He’s waffling like there is no tomorrow. Further, look up how that quote is used in the “manosphere”. You’d be surprised.
The problem with alpha is that too much people project too much thing in it and it become meaningless. At the basic alpha was just the way to describe the animal at the top of the hierarchy in pack animal like wolf or chimpanzee. People are projecting what they want in it because it feel good. Sometime they mean confident, sometime they mean high status, sometime they mean get laid alot, beeing dominant, etc… The quote above just seem ridiculous. That would be like indentifying as alpha the way a tranny indentify as a woman.
Reminds me off the SJW’s it’s all a construct crap. It’s not really surprising. They need to make money off desperate insecure men. It’s simple, if you need a pua study to pick up women. You’re not alpha. If you want to know who’s alpha. Drop a group off people on a island. Come back a year later. The one’s leading the group or groups are alpha. The ones following someone are not. Alpha doesn’t follow others. He leads or he walks alone. If you’re following some pua instructor. You’re not alpha. Unless you’re there with the intention to take over the group. Alpha’s are natural conquerors. All pua’s do is copy behaviour that alpha’s display naturally. It’s make believe.
I agree with your sentiment here. However, do you think that studying psychology and mindset is a complete waste of time? What do you say about guys whose lives are objectively going well (essentially as in the “guy A” scenario you described above) but who behave as doormats when it comes to women? It’s not a sure thing at all that they are being satisfied sexually/romantically the way they’d prefer. My guess would put the overall fraction as perhaps a third of all men in the general Western population who fit the first description above, if not more.
I may have mentioned in an earlier comment that at Vox Day’s Alpha Game blog, there’s a more interesting breakdown of psychological archetypes than the usual alpha/beta:
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hierarchy.html
You, Aaron, in many situations probably identify with the “sigma” archetype he describes there.
Most interesting in my opinion is what he calls “gamma”, or “covert narcissist” in more conventional terms. There seems to be a large bias of this psychological type among guys who are obsessed with pickup/game.
There is great value in studying psychology. If you haven’t yet watched them, Jordan Peterson’s videos on YouTube are well worth anyone’s time who is interested in the subject.
My Guy A vs Guy B scenario is of course an exaggeration. Guy A is a top 0.1% guy, at the very least. Being 6’3″ puts you in the top 2% already. People in that category hardly ever end up as doormats. (That’s also part of getting an education at a name-brand school, by the way.)
However, between Guy A and Guy B there is a wide spectrum. It is certainly possible for a guy to do fairly okay, yet not be very confident. That normally sorts itself out. I’ve witnessed quite a few cases of introverted students with good academic track records. Once they established themselves and they realized that, compared to regular guys, they are “balling”, their confidence grew significantly.
A brief followup to this as I just remembered something related that’s quite insightful. Vox is (or was) apparently an aspiring science fiction author. He has a couple of posts on the topic of archetypes in science fiction (and their authors):
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2017/02/how-science-fiction-became-gamma.html
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-gammas-love-star-trek.html
These are very useful insights, in my opinion.
I think that many guys who are struggling with women and flock to mainstream PUA/game material (and even those who don’t, e.g. the “beta”-minded types who supplicate to women) would do well to recognize when they fit into one or the other of these psychological profiles. This goes along with the idea, “you can’t fix habits you’re not aware of” (something along those lines).
That’s an interesting classification. But it easily breaks down. Like…
According to this, I’m a sigma, but only if you watch me in those niches where I’ve built up status and value. I lord over those contexts, sigma style.
Heck depending on the occasion (and my bodyfat level) in some cases I would qualify as the alpha.
Put me in a club and there I am a gamma. But I’m the same person. So who’s the real me? Perhaps neither because these classifications are bullshit.
“Put me in a club and there I am a gamma. But I’m the same person. So who’s the real me? Perhaps neither because these classifications are bullshit.”
It’s not completely bulshit but they depend on social context. What people don’t understand is that your social status influence how you feel and how you act. An alpha is someone who is the highest status in a group or social context, not a personnality type. If you try to act like someone important when you are not it is perceived as arrogant, cringey, out of touch.
I understand what you mean perfectly when you say that you are different in different social niche because I’m like that too. If you are genuinely good and known in your local environnement and people look up to you for advice, confirmation, etc, it make you feel and act more confident and alpha. On the opposite when you are a newbie and someone who is not that great it is difficult to act confident and dominant.
If alpha was a personnality type or a charecter trait it would have spreaded through the population a long time ago and everybody would be alpha.
I occasionally peek into Rollo’s blog and I concur. He does raise some interesting points from time to time, but his writing is very meandering, repetitive, and he quotes himself too much. I think he gives tooo much weight to hypergamy as a driver of female behavior.
His earlier stuff is better.
I think you are a bit biased, not everybody who does well in live or is attractive feels like that. I have a friend who is like the type a guy you describe: tall, fit, looking like a CK model and working as a Consultant (basically a 9/10).
He has self worth issues and a pussy mindset. He had 2 girlfriends in his life. First one was a entitled 6 and the current one is a 7 looks wise but white trash otherwise. He is paying the bills while she sits at home doing nothing. She cheated on him twice already and he is still with her…
And I’ve seen this with a lot of introverted high achivers, a lot of them suffer from imposter syndrome. Funny enough this whole PUA Mindset thing helped me a lot to overcome my problems with women, because my mindset was the only thing holding me back. I taught I was not good enough although I was a decent guy already. Mindset training helped me to give myself “permission” because I really was “good enough”.
Well, sure… that is the one scenario where learning to assert yourself helps.
Problem is that scenario is like what, 0.001% of people who seek out dating advice?