An Egalitarian Competition

Watch this Ted Talk first:

Isn't it grand? Great teams collaborate with each other. They encourage each other, use everyone's ideas, let everyone have a say, and cannot even identify stars. Doesn't that sound like a great place to work?

A small tear came to my eyes, as I splashed this woman's utopian workplace against the backdrop of my favorite Spielberg mini-series:

Let's have a brief interlude for the moving soundtrack:


Finally, someone who gets it. Someone who understands the root of so many of our problems comes from the lack of respect as an individual, the lack of care for people as humans, the lack of inclusion, the lack of respect for the hard-work other people put in for the common good, the lack of...




Wait, stop a second. Where else have I seen Band of Brothers this week?

Right! When I caught up on my Manosphere reading, I glanced at Alpha Game, and saw Vox Day proclaim Band of Brothers the ultimate Delta Ideal:

Men of various strengths and weaknesses, from all walks of life are brought together to train, fight, and ultimately go back to whatever normalcy is possible after overseas combat in a horrific conflict. While it is fair to praise the show for the technical and artistic merits I believe the lasting appeal is that millions of regular guys can relate to the characters and know that they could have been right there with them.

 Goddam.

Just.

Goddam.

If you do not know why I curse this finding, here's a summary of Delta's where men struggle most, romantic relationships http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hierarchy.html:

Delta: The normal guy. Deltas are the great majority of men. They can't attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league... In a social setting, the deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming...Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly a little afraid of them.

This archtype holds no appeal at all for the majority of men. Men, the basic ordinary men, want to be something more like this:

Fast cards, hot women, great dress, no real work, lots of booze? Yeah, sign me up. Most young guys instinctively dig this lifestyle, and aspire to something like this. They might dig the espirt de corps over in Normandy, but when they come back to America, they want to live the Vin Diesel life.

Fortunately, the good Lord stacked the deck at birth, and those cards simply never come up for the majority of men. This probably is in no small part because a society of hormone-crazed, over-sexed men never would have the strength or will to construct this building:

Nor turn this harshest of landscapes into the breadbasket that feeds over a billion people:

 

No, incentives align like predestined stars, so that the average man can fulfill a role still needed. And, increasingly, the average woman.

There's really no problem with our idealistic Ted talk, except a question of implementation, particularly with respect to performance in romantic relationships.  Can you think of this applying to, say, OkCupid?

We're used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? ... when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity,I couldn't even see any superstars , because everybody there really mattered.

Obviously, this does not apply to OkCupid. We know that men in general really don't receive a lot of messages from women (even the stunningly attractive ones), we know that majority of women rate 80% of men as "below-average" in terms of attractiveness, we know that the few men who rate "above average" in women's eyes receive the lion's share of women's attention, we know that more attractive men have more sexual partners on average, etc.

Hypergamy doesn't care about egalitarianism. Hypergamy evolved to distinguish lesser men from greater men, and hypergamy does its job very well. That's how we emerged as the dominant species on the planet, after all.

I am happy that certain workplaces created flat hierarchies that encouraged growth and creativity, but expecting the entire world of men to sign up for something like that becomes a losing bargain in a world where open hypergamy runs wild. Sure, the working world is separate from the romantic world, to some extent, but our monkey-brains carry personalities and habits from one world into the other.

Look at it this way: It's not a major surprise that the world's most creative companies can create more egalitarian workplaces: everyone is a winner already, and those people tend to have greater degrees of trust and social capital built-in. They came from largely intact two-parent homes. They came from low-crime communities. They came from school systems where teachers did not molest students and did not fall asleep in classes.

Now imagine taking the Bloods and the Crips and throwing them together around a Google supercomputer. Ask them to create a flat hierarchy. They'll probably figure out how to run the super-computer first, because they have a lifetime of cultural learning that does NOT involve the kinds of high-trust, high-social-capital, high-egalitarian learning prized by yuppie kids that ride bicycles in San Francisco.

Speaking of which, how do Google employees get along with the rest of San Francisco anyways?

Looking at singular problems in isolation doesn't really do a damn lick of good. Here's a more realistic portrayal of how to build a functioning society:

That's how the US military structured nation-building in Afghanistan. Needless to say, didn't work out too well. But that's because nation-building is pain-staking, bottom-up work that people halfway across the world cannot impose in a matter of 10 years.

Similarly, if you want to create a more egalitarian society, you need to start seriously considering other people's perspectives, and pay attention to the numerous indicators that show men dropping out of society. Otherwise you'll find your service-and-tech economy plummeting through a gaping hole as an unserviced foundation cracks and yields all of human creation back to the soil from which we came.