Let me start by saying this: I'm not fan of "evolutionary psychology" in general because I consider that if people were to take seriously, in any way, the blueprint it gives for normative human behaviour, then we would do better to commit mass suicide than proceed along that path. After all, who wants to be treated like among one's hidden motivations were a drive towards pink and compulsive shopping? The patterns of one's individual behaviour should tell enough about what sort of person one is. Positing hidden motivations, based on gender, makes a mockery of actual human lives.

Sometimes, however, one simply runs into some useful terminology as I did recently. Then there's nothing for it but to let it rip.
I refer to the term "alpha behaviour". Immediately, I will clarify that in my experience alpha behaviour -- especially as it is defined in the link, is not limited to males alone. Indeed, in Rhodesian civil society women very often maintained that kind of power. But let me proceed by way of a tangent.

In Nietzsche's GAY SCIENCE, he speaks of the nature of power and how it can be mishandled. His example is that of Luther and the Church. Luther, according to Nietzsche, wanted to save the Church from the impending secularism of its evolution towards the Enlightenment. That religious power should find the maturity of its ultimate expression in secular enlightenment was beyond Luther's power to see. He rushed to "save" the Church, by "reforming" it, and thus undermined its authority in the broader scope of life. After Luther's intervention, the influence of the Church became narrower; its authority diminished. Nietzche effectively chastises Protestant reformer Martin Luther for being of the lower classes and hence not understanding how power actually worked. By virtue of his lack of knowledge and experience of power, he achieved the opposite to that which he had set out to achieve.

One way of looking at Luther and his intervention is that Luther was a "Beta" male. He didn't understand that power, in order to maintain itself as genuine authority, has to exert itself with in subtle ways. Luther's efforts therefore made the Church's influence appear cruder and more harshly defined. This was the means by which he stripped the Church of power -- by defining power too narrowly, and by not understanding that authority can only develop as a feature of power over a long time. Instead, Luther only understood power much as a "Beta" male understands it according to my link above. That is, as something to be grabbed at, and imposed by force, rather than as something that gradually develops, along with the relationships that allow it to justify itself.

Which brings me back to my main point: Beta males, to the extent that I have encountered them, appear to lack any but the crudest conceptions of power. For this reason, they undo themselves. They do not seem to understand, either, that almost anyone can be an Alpha, so long as they adopt the attitudes and behaviour of one. They tend to believe that power must be something necessarily obvious and in your face and not something as intangible as "authority". When those who think this way reveal their lack of knowledge about the role of authority in establishing power, they represent themselves most patently as "Betas". (The fact that they don't ever recognise that they are doing this, but in fact believe themselves to be establishing their Alpha credibility, is a significant and defining part of their problem in terms of working out why power so easily slips through their fingers even when they have it in their grasp.)

Another observation about Beta males: They think that women do not like them, and that it is imperative to remedy this by controlling women by sheer force. (One of the most common ways of doing this is by trying to assure, by means of law, that women will have no choice but to accept one of them as a mate -- not only that, but to stick with him, whether she wants to or not.)

Betas, it would seem from my experience, are not quite heterosexual -- or if they are, they do not believe in natural powers of attraction. (To accept that such a force like genuine attraction even exists would be like accepting the existence of "authority" -- being the hidden means by which power legitimates itself. Betas however, act as if their rights are assured to them only be means of overt force.)

A Beta male, when asked for assistance by a female, will often turn on her, revealing huges waves of pent up aggression, intending to cover for that fact that he feels himself genuinely powerless to act within the world at large. By means of such an disproportionate reaction, he reveals that his relationship to power was merely a bluff.

I think we need to claim Nietzsche as one of ours, a fearless liberal. His idea of the superman is of someone who dares to think for himself. He hated the right-wing anti-Semites of his sister’s circle, which is why he broke with Wagner; it was quite an unusual attitude for his time.

Well, he wasn’t a liberal as such either, and clearly says so. That is, he wasn’t much for the improvement of society by trying to introduce more equitable laws. What he was for is the exploration and investigation of “natural laws”. Unfortunately, natural laws are by their nature not easy to pin down with the intellect. We tend to oversimplify and thereby draw wrong and damaging conclusions on the basis of our logic. One erroneous conclusion that many draw from Nietzsche is that he favoured (and so what if he did?) the existing social elite—the moneyed uppercrust. They are at the top because they deserve to be, according to many Nietzsche supporters. But the error is to transport a moralising point of view into an otherwise more naturalistic (Nietzschean) paradigm. Those who make this error are inclined to presume that the de facto elite are our MORAL superiors, when they are just de facto superiors based upon some largely unknown (and unknowable, in total) principles of natural law.

As I said, the main error that Nietzsche’s followers make is in believing that these principles of natural law are in principle knowable in whole, or that they can be harnessed by those who get inside knowledge by reading Nietzsche. This turns Nietzsche’s ideas into the basis for a cult mentality. It also gives conscious knowledge the exact inverted status to that which Nietzsche gives it. (To Nietzsche, consciousness is a limitation, an inclination towards illness, not the basis for asserting one’s superiority.) But the authoritarian Nietzscheans nonetheless have Nietzsche exactly upside down—and they will rail at you for not submitting to the authority of your “superiors” or not obeying narrow gender role parameters, and so on. This means that they are still reading Nietzsche in a moralistic way, and not understanding that the whole point of Nietzsche was to question these moralistic strictures, and try to understand how reality actually functions—according to natural laws.

Ugh, scratchy888. That sort of “natural law” sounds a bit like EvPsych. (My acquaintance with Nietzsche is rather shallow.) Your account of his critique of liberalism reminds me of much of radical ideology, the idea that there’s no point in ameliorating present conditions since the inevitable revolution will resolve everything. I accept that much of my activity is more or less predetermined, but I still have to decide everyday what I’ll have for lunch, therefore I still have to send checks to Democrats in election years,

Jennifer:No, no, no, Bad Jim! But your misreading is precisely the misreading that is most common with regard to Nietzsche. No, the natural laws are not known. They belong to the unconscious and its states. What evolutionary psychology does is to try to make out that these laws are knowable and positivistic, and that they have certain logical parameters. But Nietzschean “law” simply says that how things are, and how they appear to be to our moral sensibilities are two entirely different things. How things actually are is determined by natural law. How things appear to be is determined by human consciousness (and, I would add, such things as wish fulfilment, self-deception, wilful superficiality, unfounded optimism, and so on). What you really have to do is get away from thinking of Nietzsche’s writings as providing moral and intellectual parameters for certain kinds of behaviour as the Ev Psych’s do when they try to normalise gender roles. Nietzsche’s writing does exactly the opposite to this. What is “natural”, according to Nietzsche is not necessarily useful to humanity, or on the side of its development, nor does this notion of natural give us parameters that we ought to stick within, (as in serving for instance, our own moral edification). The exact opposite is rather true. Nietzschean thinking is not prescriptive.

Jennifer: Also, natural law pervades everything in an active way. We do not passively submit to it and decide “there is no point in ameliorating anything”. Rather, if we do in fact decide that there is a point in ameliorating something we are enacting this natural law on one particular level. The point is that reality is more complicated than moral precepts or logical precepts can account for. That is why I have suggested this broader concept—which I believe to be Nietzsche’s own—of a kind of natural system of laws.