VIII - ALPHA

There are people who hold our attention. Their presence commands the surrounding space. We can get emotionally dazzled by them. You have seen such people. They seem to have more life force, more presence than most. When we think of people, we tend to think of members of this rather small subset of humanity rather than the great majority of ordinary folks. What is it about them that so holds our interest?

When we see a man or woman with this quality, what do we see that is different? Maybe it is good looks; he is handsome and well dressed; she is beautiful and stylish. Is there an energy about this person, a greater animation and expressiveness that liven up the situation? Or perhaps it is charm which engages us, or grace or a confident inner calmness, or great wisdom, or physical strength.

Sometimes it is power, the one who moves with the ease that comes with the ability to get things done. Maybe it is money; wealth can confer this property onto its owners. It might be fame; being well thought of by many reflects back into our personal expression.

All of these attributes are related to a common quality, which I will call alpha. Alpha is associated with leaders, but is not exclusive with them. Anyone can be alpha in the right situation, anyone can rise to the occasion. But some have it more consistently than others.

Alpha is not limited to people. Anything can have the quality, an object, an action, an idea, a character, a place, a time, a relationship, anything. Whoever or whatever we see as alpha holds our attention and seems more meaningful than anything else. We are drawn to the alphas.

Alpha is a big part of social rank. In “dressing up” or “moving up” the “up” is in the direction understood to be more alpha. People obsess about alpha. It is the central focus of most people’s lives. They will do anything to get it-spend all their money, work like crazy, ruin their health, throw away everything of worth in their lives, turn themselves inside out, even sacrifice their lives to get just a piece of it or the appearance of it, or to ally themselves with those that have it.

The Alpha Source

So what is it exactly, this quality called alpha, that dominates human life? The essential quality of alpha is not good looks, energy, charm, power, money, fame, or many other qualities we associate with it. These are secondary characteristics. The primary nature of alpha is being a mythic source. Alphas bring us myth, which organizes our lives and gives them meaning. The alpha person may set the myth, define the myth, demonstrate the myth, enact the myth, in some way bring the myth to life. He may embody mythic ideals or a moral the myth is demonstrating, or provide new story material for your stymied, stalled-out myth. He brings excitement, for in his presence your myth charges ahead. This is why someone may be very alpha to you but not to me—he does it for your myth but not mine, or your group’s myth but not mine.

Anything or anyone that is alpha to you is a mythic source for you, but not all mythic sources are alpha. If you come down with the mumps, your disease will be a mythic source for you. For longer than you would really prefer, it will do much to determine the course of your myth. But unless illness makes you feel enhanced, the mumps will not be alpha to you. We need to add to our definition of alpha. Something or someone is alpha to a person, a character, or a group because of the relationship between the two. Your alphas are mythic sources for your myth that you look to for mythic material which you willingly accept because the alphas embody, symbolize, or demonstrate morals relating to ideals of your myth.

A movie star, one of the prime alphas of our culture, is just a person with the job of actor. She is given a script with a part for her to play. She says her lines and does her moves, just doing her job. But for the audience, she is her performance, and her performance is story, very concentrated mythic material with relevance to their own moral progressions. They are moved by her performance. Moved where, one might ask. The answer is, moved forward on their myths. Life got going again. They were shown that certain moral qualities are indeed worthy of human effort towards demonstration. And for that, people will pay their time, money, attention, and admiration.

Successful movies are not random stories. They all contain moral demonstrations of our ideals, morals we favor, or else alter our feelings about and our relationship to those ideals. This is why such a great proportion of dramatic characters in entertainment are alphas and also why actors in performance seem dramatically larger than in life.

The Hero

One role universally seen as alpha is the hero. To be heroic is the surest path to alpha. A hero is looked up to. But what is heroism? Generally it is seen to be doing something admirable, in the course of which extraordinary risks were faced or obstacles overcome. Even a failed attempt can get you labeled a hero at your funeral. The hero has attempted or done what normally we could not under conditions that we would not.

He has enlarged our sense of what is humanly possible. He has stretched the bounds of our mythic reality upward, closer to our ideals. He is a little closer to the gods than the rest of us. He has shown us the way, and for that he is a mythic source and alpha for the direction he has given the focus of our myth.

The hero may have any number of motives for his actions—duty, compassion, anger, glory-seeking, risk enjoyment, honor, challenge, an instantaneous impulse to action, or many others. Heroism is how his actions relate to the myth.

A group will often have one or more heroes, who may or may not be members. If they are not, either by not belonging or by being safely dead, they are more immune to challenges. If they are thus inaccessible, the group has a freer hand in making their characters and stories fit its myth, making them larger than life. The hero legitimizes the group myth and inspires the members to play their characters to the fullest in the direction of mythic ideals. Individuals have heroes for similar reasons.
Altruism

The question often arises of why we are altruistic, sacrificing for others, even risking our own lives for the benefit of others. Why would we have evolved that way; why would it be genetically favorable? One answer is that altruism, especially extreme altruism, is seen as heroic and thus alpha, and people are drawn to do anything to be more alpha. As to why that would be genetically favorable, nothing attracts sex partners like being alpha. It is the greatest aphrodisiac.

Even minor altruism, beneath the level of heroics, is a widespread mythic ideal. Group myth supports the moral that the members should help each other; it helps the group survive and bonds the members to each other. The group myth says to honor and give alpha deference to people who demonstrate its ideals.

Altruism is more apt to be directed towards our near and dear, people to whom we are closely related, genetically or socially, members of some group with which we have strong affiliation.

But we are also altruistic toward strangers. Why would we go out of our way to help a non-member of our group? One answer is that most group myths support doing so. Anyone who helps all people will help group members. But there is another reason, one not based on the group myth’s telling us what to do. Helping a stranger is a way to be involved, to draw a new character into our myth and to be one in his. We form a new group. We are not alone, even if the other person is not aware of our kindness. It is also a benevolent form of dominance. Anything we do is an expression of our myth, and helping a stranger extends our myth into his, increasing our world and making us feel alpha.

We are also altruistic toward animals. Why? It is not genetics—we can’t interbreed. One reason is that it is social. We consider animals to be characters in our myth. Most dog and cat owners consider their pets to be members of the family group. The group myth support for altruism applies to pets, too.

But what about wild animals? I once freed a Least Bittern that was snagged on a barbed wire fence. I was alone. It wasn’t done for audience reaction. I did it for the bittern. I also did it for me. I gave the bittern a chance to live. Had it stayed snagged, probably that night the bird would have found itself helpless to resist a hungry raccoon. I have no grudge against raccoons; they are also part of nature and they need to eat, too. Death is part of the system. So why did I interfere?

I did it to change the world. Our world is made up of moral demonstrations. It can be a place of lonely downfall to distress or it can be a place of loving aid and kindness. Which world do you want to live in as you create and affirm it through the demonstrations of your myth? Freeing the Least Bittern moved the world towards where I want it to be.

You could argue that what I did alone in that marsh with a bird has no effect on the probability that some stranger may or may not help me in the future. I would disagree. Everything we do comes out of myth and has mythic consequences. What people do with each other is determined by the interactions of their myths, so what I did that day with the bittern affects how I treat people today. It changed the characters I play, so other people now react to me a little differently.

There is also another reason I unhooked the bittern from the fence. I like Least Bitterns. They are beautiful, the smallest of our herons, brown, white, buff and black. It is a joy to see them. I always wish there were more. I didn’t want to lose one.

To me they are mythically significant, symbolic of the magic and mystery of the marsh. Sometimes life offers you an experience that may never come again. On that one day I held a live Least Bittern in my hand.

The Alpha Life
In the public eye, all good things flow to the alphas. They are showered with love, money, and devotion. They walk through life unimpeded. Their fame precedes their every step. They have no worries, but live charmed, perfect lives, for they are the embodiment of ideal myth. Or so we would like to imagine. We would like a life like that, too. We need to see the alpha in a better light than we see ourselves. Otherwise, why would our ideals make sense?

Alphas do have their fun, but they also have their share of troubles. To achieve and maintain his alpha position, the alpha probably had to work harder than you. He cannot freely express personal myth, cannot be himself around most people but instead must confine himself to behavior perceived as alpha. He must guard his privacy because people want to be around alphas, interact with them and take up their time. He must stay on the leading edge of the group myth, because if the alpha does not deliver as a mythic source, he will lose his following. His authority may be challenged at any time. Therefore, most alphas make known their cultural legitimacy to be authorities right away. They flash their degrees, licenses, titles, authority role positions, symbols of power, before making their pitch. They often try to trump each other’s authority and take over another’s following. This is alpha jockeying, which we will discuss a bit later.

Storytelling
A major reason we want to be alpha is to have a willing audience for the stories we would tell. We need to hear stories as part of our mythic confirmation and progression. We also need to tell our stories to others to confirm our own alpha feelings and the validity of our myth. Much of the fear of abandonment is a fear of not being heard, being ignored, mythically irrelevant and thus worthless.

When we tell stories, we get the reactions of the audience. First in the audience is our own self. A story brings its moral into focus. How do we feel about it? Do we agree with it? Does the telling moves us forward? Does it confirm our situation or our fears? We see a story as a view of the world, and the telling, for us, makes it so. Our belief in our stories rivals our belief in our experiences. The stories we tell are simplified analogs of reality. Telling stories pulls our myth together and makes it coherent, giving us a handle on the world.

We tell stories to ourselves, but more we want to tell them to others. We want their reaction and we want it to confirm the roles we wish to play. The stories we tell others are by no means all we could tell, but are chosen for desired impact. Typically we want to be seen as within the group myth, not bound by its present form, but on the ascending side, the side of the mythic sources, and thus worthy of the attention of others. We want those parts of personal myth we reveal to be confirmed as valid in the group. And we want to have an effect on the audience. We want them to be moved, their personal myths shifted for having heard our story, so that our world becomes part of theirs and we are not alone. We are social animals and are not given to having autonomous minds. We have an easier time knowing we are right when someone else agrees. We seek to have our thoughts interweave with the thoughts of others, preferably on our own terms. We need to tell the stories that make that happen.

Groups also need to tell stories. Every group has stories the members tell each other that confirm the group myth and make its direction and morals clear. Groups also have stories they tell outsiders, not always the same ones the members tell each other.

The outsider stories serve to influence, usually heighten, the alpha status of the group to nonmembers and to advance the group myth in the outside world.

The stories the members tell each other serve other purposes. Some show how alpha the group is and therefore how alpha the members are for being in it. Other stories clarify the group roles and each member’s place in the hierarchy. Each role has its own stories because each has its own point of view and agenda. The rebel will not tell the same stories as the lieutenant, nor will the stories told by the fool be mistaken for those of the fanatic.

But no group’s stories cover its entire myth, just as no person’s stories reveal his complete individual myth. Some parts of the myth we don’t want to reveal. Other parts we don’t even want to recognize. Beyond that lies a huge amount of myth we have no awareness of at all.

The stories that last, that become widely known, that are told and retold, at first glance seem to be of every imaginable variety. But on closer inspection they all share a particular moral. They all demonstrate that the individual should be part of a group and work for its benefit. One should conform to the group’s standards, breaking them only when necessary to further advance the group, and one should be willing to sacrifice his own betterment for the group’s good.

Why would this be? Why would this same moral be repeated endlessly in story after story throughout history? First, until relatively recently, for nearly everyone basic survival was difficult. There was not the excess of means of support that surrounds us today. The group could get you through, but there wasn’t much slack for lifestyle experiments outside the herd, so everybody needed to pull together so they might all make it.

Second, literacy was limited and books were expensive, so most of the stories people told (outside of everyday gossip) were stories they had heard, not read, stories that had been told and retold for generations. Retold stories get a history of either being encouraged by alphas (the sponsors of performances) or told by alphas (leaders to groups, mothers to children, teachers to students, etc.) so they repeatedly are filtered through alpha minds and thus come to reflect the morals of the alphas, who draw their power from the group and need the audience to serve the group and thus its alphas.

More recently, increasing wealth and literacy along with modern information media have tipped the balance towards stories in their original version from the author. We now see a greater variety of morals demonstrated in stories as now the individual is sometimes portrayed as furthering his own agenda irrespective of the group’s. Contemporary society continues to deal with the consequences of this shift in mythic direction.

Mythic Shortage
If the alpha is a mythic source for the group, then following the alpha, patterning one’s myth by his leadership, will maintain one’s bond to the group. To take mythic direction from another source is to risk drifting away from the group myth and consequent abandonment. One is discouraged from learning from a wide variety of sources. One becomes afraid to be much of a mythic source for oneself. Those that are self sources are usually not strongly group-oriented people. We call them inner-directed. Those that draw their myth mostly from the group are outer-directed.

If you have ever tried to write a story, or especially a play, you have discovered just how much dramatic material a good plot needs to hold the audience’s attention. Most people’s lives contain a much lower concentration of story material, and much of that is very repetitive. This makes for a myth that is not an engaging story, one that does not have a satisfying sense of forward progression. Such a myth may go in loops, cycling through the same or similar material, round and round, the same moral point endlessly demonstrated. Sometimes, the story just grinds to a halt, stalled out. Either situation causes a stress, boredom, which most people will do almost anything to alleviate if they can.

Boredom is alleviated by an influx of new dramatic material to shift the myth to forward motion. This can be new characters, actions, or situations introduced to the plot or new morals to be demonstrated. The characters, actions, situations, or morals may force themselves into one’s life on their own, or they may be sought out.

The seeking out of new mythic material is related to curiosity, our desire to learn, and the process of learning. As we acquire knowledge that we consider mythically relevant, we encounter obstacles previously unknown to us. Our myth engages new questions with unknown answers and moral demonstrations and therefore holds our attention. The relevance comes from a mix of needing the answers and moral demonstrations for our mythic progression and enjoying an increased alpha position resulting from our greater knowledge and experience.

Some subjects are irresistible because knowledge of them is central to the proper playing of our present roles or those we would like to move into. Other knowledge we will resist because we see it as useless and irrelevant, nothing but mental clutter and a waste of our time, an impediment to the mythic progression we desire. Learning may also be resisted to avoid the demonstration of morals we wish to deny or to keep our distance from knowledge associated with roles we do not want. Beyond that, knowledge outside the group myth can get you in trouble with the other members because you have strayed beyond the limits of the group.

Any basic mythic shift is a threat to one’s group identity and thus opens one to abandonment. Thus there is a strong inducement to stick with the same mythic pattern, which risks boredom. A stalled out myth is next to no myth at all, and a person with no myth has no identity, for who we are is the mix of mythic characters we play, our roles. Without a myth, how could we take action? So here we have a basic dilemma—if our group does not feed us sufficient new mythic material, we risk abandonment trying to get it elsewhere or boredom and oblivion without it.

Mostly we hover in between, in a state of mythic shortage. We seek to fulfill this shortage, but only from credible mythic sources, that is, sources that are credible in terms of our own personal and group myths.

What makes a mythic source credible? You might think it would be based on the quality of the material provided. For instance, is it true, helpful, and productive? You might think wrong. Credibility is almost never given according to the quality of the information, but to the social status, the dominance, and the alpha of the source in the group myth.

Most people, before they try to persuade you of anything, will first make some effort to establish their credentials as an authority that you should accept in the matter at hand. This may be done with a display of credentials, either specifically, or indirectly, through use of costume, setting, authoritative expression, or a show of dominance. We give credence to people with credentials. We would rather hear it from Who’s Who than Who’s That.

There are other strategies to get an alpha relationship. One is an exchange—you alter your myth to accommodate mine and you will get some kind of payoff. It can be physical—perhaps, do this for me and I will do something for you, or emotional, such as do this for me and you will feel good all day, or spiritual, do this for me and you will be rewarded in heaven. So to some extent, an alpha relationship can be bought. But the alpha is not pure—you go along with me largely for the payoff, not because you accept my authority and believe my myth superior to your own.

Perhaps the state of mythic shortage is necessary for society as we know it to function. If everyone had an optimum myth, richly rewarding, would people still put up with being dominated and exploited? Would the unpleasant work everyone would like someone else to do ever get done? More to the point, would people believe in enough of the culture’s myth for the society to function; would different individuals share enough mythic material for the social mechanisms of a culture to function at all? For most people, what the culture hands out is not all that great; it could certainly be better—or could it?

On a personal level, there is a way out of this dilemma. Face down your fear of abandonment. Develop wisdom and responsibility that allow a constructive life with you as the alpha authority, the prime source for your myth. We are social beings, so you need to learn how to pass as a group member, how to play the game while still remembering it is only a game. Ultimately the group’s myth is never enough. You become your own mythic source and create an engaging, fulfilling myth to live in. Read Appendix C, Original Thought, to help you learn how. I call this strategy growing up, where you take responsibility for your myth and your actions and your life. No more excuses. But it yields a better life.

Alpha Jockeying
Of course, there are the obviously mythically rich slots in the culture, but way too few to go around. People will do anything to get one. They are the culture’s nominally alpha positions, and obtaining one is generally understood to be the finest thing one can do in life. Being there is good, but not as good as it looks from the outside. Because thousands of people would like to be the one who replaces you, you must conform to all the many demands of the position, whether they suit you or not, or the society will find someone who will.

Alpha is central to our attention. We are always aware of it. Our relation to alpha is always changing. Do we have it or not, how much, in what context, with whom and about what? Any alpha shift, where someone’s alpha is about to change or is already going up or down, will reliably hold our attention if the alpha mythic source position at stake has any relevance to our myth.

People try to get more alpha, either directly, or by alliance with the alphas. Significant purely personal internal alpha is largely out of the question for most people (too much fear of straying too far from the group myth). Therefore, personal alpha advancement is seen in terms of advancement in being the alpha of the group. If you are your group’s alpha source, you can shape the group myth to best support your own and have your myth be congruent with the group’s, a very secure mythic position. It becomes win-win for you, but not so good for everyone else, so they covet your position. If the alpha position seems too precarious, another strategy is to form an alliance with the alpha, so the alpha is dependent on you. You then have leverage to get the group myth set more your way, not just the alpha’s. The alliance strategy is also useful if the alpha is too powerful or well entrenched for you to try a direct challenge to his position, so this strategy is very common.

But alpha is not just the top versus everyone else. There is a full range of alpha positions, from near zero at the bottom to dominant at the top, and there is constant jockeying up and down the scale all the time by just about everybody. The human alpha struggle is worldwide and eternal.

Most of the action in stories is about dominance struggles, who gets to choose the music and who has to dance to it, who gives and who follows the orders, whose morals get demonstrated and whose do not, who wins, who loses, whose myth becomes the group’s. We are led to believe the winner is alpha and the loser is not, the winner is right and the loser is wrong. “You can’t argue with success” and “History is written by the victors.” We are obsessed with alpha jockeying; it dependably captures and holds our attention, if one or more of the participants has a myth similar to ours.

Naturally, most alphas try to maintain their position, in spite of the many pretenders to the throne. Few alphas relish the prospect of endless serious challenges to their status, so various status-stabilizing strategies have evolved. One is to have embedded in the group myth the belief that certain people have a categorical right to be alpha to others. I am of race, ethnic group, nationality, religion, etc. A, and you are of B. I have royal blood and you do not. I have the license, title, Ph.D., and you do not. I am smarter, richer, stronger, older, holier than you. I got here first. I own it and you do not. I’m the parent and you are the child. I am the teacher, policeman, preacher, expert and you are not. They all serve as alpha preservation strategies. They all say “The group myth says I have a right to be the alpha and you do not. If you try to take over my position, you are morally out of line, for you are going against the group myth. Therefore, I am morally right and obligated to defeat you, and the group will support me and not you. If you were to dominate me, you would be outside the group myth and we would have to abandon you or overthrow you.” This is a powerful threat and does much to keep the underlings at bay.

But it does not do it all. The alpha position has a weakness; all roles do. The alpha person needs ongoing confirmation from the group that he is, in fact, a major mythic source for the group and that they recognize his status. Myth arises from many sources, and alphas are always in danger of being marginalized.

Hazing
The alpha wants to know he is valued by the group above all others, that the group will not support a rebellion but will take, incorporate, and live his mythic leadership. He wants his leadership valued, and he wants demonstrable proof of it. A classic action indicating worth of something received is to give up something else for it, to make an exchange. The alpha expects something in return for mythic material: money, help, love, attention, publicity, support, symbolic submissive gestures or something else. If these are steadily flowing in from the group, the alpha can feel secure in his position.

In addition, paying a price makes the group members value what they have received. They feel assured that what they got was worth price paid. If it were not, they would have to see themselves as suckers, which people are loathe to do, so they defend what they have sacrificed to obtain.

An alpha will often place more importance on the members paying than on his collecting. He will like to see the members sacrifice for the sake of his myth. If they are willing to do so, then they must value it as true and him as alpha. If the members value the myth, then they will want to stay in the good graces of the alpha. They try to please him with gifts and deferential actions.

They will undergo pain on his behalf. This leads to the phenomenon of hazing—the gratuitous handing out of pain by alphas to maintain the deference of the group. The pain may be physical but usually it is not. More commonly the pain is psychological such as insecurity, anxiety, shame, embarrassment, or humiliation, or social, such as loss of privileges, territory, property, or status. Hazing sloppily done or overdone will cause the group to rebel, as the pain involved will either undermine the rationale of the group myth, or the suffering involved will outweigh the group’s commitment to the alpha’s mythic material, which will be seen as not worth following.

However, hazing skillfully done will stabilize a group. It creates a history of small dominance conflicts won by the alpha that create a mythic momentum that he can’t be defeated and therefore must be right. This discourages rebellion in the ranks and challenges to his position. People accept his mythic material more readily and believe in it more deeply.

Those that allow pain to be dealt to themselves will rationalize that they were right to do so, that their pain was just and deserved. Because their suffering demonstrated the validity of their group myth, they will come to the defense of the source of their pain, their leader, the alpha, the mythic source. They see themselves as exemplars within the myth, therefore more alpha, because they have suffered. The leader depends on this and will play to it. He will always have some moral justification for his hazing. “I’m going to teach him a lesson.” “I’m only doing this for your own good.” “She is way out of line.” “You force me to do this.” It is often not so blatant—just a string of little slights. The most effective hazing is that which the recipient believes is justified by his failure to demonstrate the morals of the myth.

The net effect is to bind members to the group. The hazing is never handed out uniformly, but is nominally tied to some sort of rational framework. If you do well, you will not be hazed, but rewarded. You keep getting hazed while trying to win as you invest more and more in the group myth.

But the game is rigged. Hazing and reward are not handed out fairly, or according to the stated rules, but to divide and conquer opposition. Group members are set up in competition with each other, which people accept easily, given the natural tendency to alpha jockeying. The individual group members or subgroups within the group can be made to strive to outdo each other in furthering the group myth, currying favor with the leader, and enduring pain for the sake of the group myth, and become very excited and enthusiastic at the prospect of doing so.

There are the nominal rules of the game, which bear some degree of connection to what is actually happening, or they would not be credible. Then there are the real rules to the game, of which the alpha may or may not be consciously aware, but by which the game is run nonetheless. If the real rules, divide and conquer, were known by all the participants, chances are the game would not hold; most people would refuse to play, because the game would then produce a moral demonstration at odds with the group myth.

The nominal rules, the fakes, cause a player to blame his suffering on straying from his proper mythic role, losing sight of the myth’s ideals, a lack of alpha within himself. A striving for a sense of worth keeps him in the group’s alpha jockey game, for within the group myth, the game is the only measure of a player’s having an adequate moral package. A group myth may, of course, have more than one version of the game, but the group myth will imply that the proper morals can only be demonstrated through itself. So long as one believes in and is committed to the group myth, one cannot leave the group or the game and they go on forever.

Hazing seems close to universal. I wish it were not. I am no friend of hazing. Do I do it myself? Yes, some. I wish I did not; it is hard to avoid being swept up in universal behavior patterns. In an ideal world hazing would not be productive and would not exist. Hazing is rooted in the unceasing human alpha anxiety. In an ideal world there would be enough alpha to go around. People would sense this abundance and not be alpha-starved and crazy about it.

Hazing Prevention
Unfortunately the world is not ideal and hazing abounds. What can you do when someone you know who is nominally friendly keeps giving you a hard time without just cause? Here is my method for making the hazer stop. First, analyze the situation and confirm that you are being hazed and not justifiably criticized. Be careful. The hazer will often wrap his actions in some plausible rationalization. Try to see beyond it to the truth. Second, commit yourself to the position that the hazing is going to stop. Third, become ready to go the distance, ready to do what it takes, to stop the hazing and its dominance payoff that is the hazer’s reward.

Get ready by developing the right attitude and the right strategy. Be clear on your goal, which is the absence of hazing. Don’t muddy that agenda with revenge, retribution, dominance, martyrdom, heroics, or other ego expressions. Be clear within yourself that the only thing you are after is no more hazing. Nothing else. To do just that you don’t need much, just a few well chosen words and the right attitude. What should the words be? They will arise as you compare your myth, the hazer’s myth, and the group myth and their respective moral packages. Visualize encounters with the hazer in which he hazes you and you reply. Refine your strategy until it works in every scenario you can imagine and you can take full confidence in it.

Thus prepared, you are calm. You are focused. You are watching. You are not afraid. You are not angry. You are ready. If you are hazed, you will see it for what it is and take appropriate action. You may be tempted to provoke the hazing so you can employ your wonderful strategy. Resist this temptation. Remember, your goal is the absence of hazing, so don’t try to bring it on. Just be ready.

Does this really work? What happens when you use this method? For me and everyone I know who has used it, the outcome is always the same. The hazing was gone. It simply didn’t happen. Usually it was permanently gone, but if it came back I knew what to do. I never had to say anything. I never had to do anything. But I had to be ready, as if I would have to respond.

Why does this method work? By being ready you have changed your role with the hazer. The hazer sees you in the altered role, one in which bothering you is not a good idea. He most likely will have no idea anything at all happened because his actions will be governed on an intuitive level beneath his conscious awareness. Now it simply won’t occur to him to take the dominating negative actions toward you that were his usual behavior.

This is the change you wanted. After it happens, don’t muddy the situation. Don’t say anything about it, don’t haze him back in revenge. Act as if the hazing never happened. If it comes back, you will get ready. Meanwhile, relax and enjoy your improved life.

Alpha Measurement
Alpha is centrally important to us. Our lives, our place in human society, and our self-image revolve around it. Yet we go through life without a clear concept of what alpha is and whether or not we have enough. The problem is that alpha is not a static quantity that can be definitely known and measured. Alpha is a relationship, that of a mythic source based on mythic ideals and a recipient, and human relationships are hard to accurately know or measure. For example, just exactly in what way and how much do you love someone?

Yet we need answers to quiet our insecurities. What to do? Moral demonstration to the rescue. We set up a test we take on faith to be valid. If he brings me flowers, he loves me.

The test makes love easy to detect and measure. Did he bring me flowers, how many, what kind, and on what occasion? Some insecurity remains. All tests, all measurements are inherently inaccurate. Besides, those are yesterday’s flowers. What about today? And beyond the flowers, beyond the test, do I feel loved? Do I feel the effects in my life, in my myth, in myself that I expect love to produce?

So it is with alpha. We set up tests to bring alpha into the open where we convince ourselves we can see it and measure it and compare our standing with that of others.

Many people use secondary alpha characteristics as the basis of the test. They believe that if they are just rich enough, thin enough, strong enough, smart enough, credentialed enough, powerful enough, stylish enough, or charming enough, that will do it. The test can also be based on any other difference between themselves and others that they can convince themselves makes them better. Do you have the biggest stamp collection or an unusually showy bed of nasturtiums? Can you play the trumpet or ride your bicycle backwards? No problem.

The test is an obstacle in your myth, one you endow with added meaning. To have that meaning, the test will be a significant obstacle whose conquest is not trivial. There must be a reasonable expectation that not everyone could prevail against it. Also, the test must have a credible, mythically logical connection to whatever moral ideal its results will be seen to demonstrate.

If you believe in the test and you pass the test, you can believe you are alpha, that you are now a somebody and no longer a nobody, that you are worthy of respect and admiration and attention. You will probably show or tell people your success in hope of collecting their recognition of your alpha status and confirmation of the validity of your alpha test.

But the test is a trap. The bait is that there is some truth in the test, not enough for the test to be reliable, just enough truth to get you in trouble. If you make more money, lose more weight, whatever the test requires, you will feel enhanced, dazzled by your apparent alpha progress. People around you may be momentarily impressed by your change. But soon the effects wear off as others get used to the new you and realize you are no more of a mythic source than you were before. Mythic shortage returns.

What can you do? You have been told your entire life that the test is how you know if you are alpha. You want to put the question of your alpha status and your anxiety about it to rest. The test offers a way out. Pass and you are now there, no more endless striving toward the mirage on the horizon. Yet the test never really works. For a little while after you pass the test, you feel alpha and others see you that way, just enough to keep you believing in the test, but soon the alpha fades away and you have to do it all again, usually a harder test. Is there any way out?

Being Alpha
If you want to feel alpha and not have to worry about it, the answer is to forget about the test and just be alpha, be a mythic source, for yourself and for others, leading the myth towards its ideals. The question now is how do you do it, how do you get to this position, this role everybody wants and hardly anybody gets?

Start with yourself, your own myth. Much of our desire for alpha is due to our own ongoing mythic starvation. We have a gut feeling that if only we had more control over our own situation, our lives would be fulfilling, exciting, and rewarding, free of the usual drudgery, disappointment, and boredom. We could control our myths and all live happily ever after.

So, in fact, if you become more alpha, will your life be perfect? No. No one, not even the most alpha person on earth, can control can control all the obstacles that show up in his myth. Ultimately we all die whether we want to or not. Before then, we all encounter disease, misfortune, bad luck, and other reverses. Some of these can be avoided, but not all. Still, if you are more alpha, you can do much to improve your myth and thus your life.

Start by taking stock of your present myths, your personal myths and any group myths you share. See Appendix A , Personal Myth Analysis, and Appendix B, Group Myth Analysis, for help in doing this.

Is your myth what you want it to be? If so, wonderful. Enjoy your exceptional life. If not, take action to fix it. What morals do you believe in? What morals are your ideals? Now compare those with the morals actually being demonstrated in your life. How similar are the latter to the former? If there is insufficient overlap between the two, you have a problem. You need to take action to change the situation, the obstacles, the characters (including yourself), and their actions to create a new set of story questions to yield the moral demonstrations you desire.

Am I saying that merely by changing your myth you can live in whatever fantasyland you want, one in which water flows uphill and money grows on trees? Of course not. There are constraints of reality we all have to deal with. But within them, we still have enormous latitude to shape our relationships to our surroundings, to other people, and to ourselves. We normally accept without question the current underlying morals of our group and personal myths, which demonstrate those morals over and over, until we assume they are obviously true, the only way the world could be. We lose sight of the semi-infinite number of possibilities available to each of us.

Being alpha consists of being open to a wider selection of mythic choices and having those you choose believed in and acted upon, by yourself or others. There are always better morals yet to be discovered and demonstrated. The alpha goes into the larger reality and brings back new mythic direction and material for his own use or to share with others. Successful personal use will make you feel alpha; successful use by others will make you perceived as alpha.

Obstacles to Alpha
Two questions arise. The first is how to get open to the wider selection. You need to be willing and wanting to do it and become more skilled through practice and experience, learning how. See Appendix C, Original Thought, for further help.

The second question is, given the stress of widespread mythic shortage, why don’t more people take the situation into their own hands and become more alpha? More to the point, what’s stopping you?

Maybe you are so close to being overwhelmed by your myth that you have no time, energy, resources, or mental space available for new mythic ventures. But usually the answer is fear, a variety of fears that are very real and based on some legitimate concerns.

One is fear of the unknown, a deep caution coming out of our need for survival. Another is fear of failure. What if you try something new and it doesn’t work? What if you waste time, money, energy, and resources on a bad idea? What if you get hurt?

There are risks to innovation. Turning a new idea into a successful result is rarely an efficient process. You will make some mistakes along the way as you learn more about what you are trying to do as you develop your initial vision into a workable reality. If you learn how to foresee and evaluate problems, you should be able to keep your risk at an acceptable level. Compare the costs and rewards of any action as you make your decisions.

But the most common fear is not that our ideas will fail but that we will fail, that we will look foolish to ourselves and to others. Why should we be so afraid of image? To most people the fear is so obvious, such an accepted part of life, that the question is never asked, for to ask the question itself seems foolish and is therefore to be avoided. But any aspect of human life that causes so much anxiety is a place we need to explore because that anxiety is a key to something important underneath.

What is it to be foolish? Most people would say being foolish is being unwise, stupid, silly, gullible, or wrong-headed. Foolish can be any of these, but there is more. To be foolish is to be as the fool. The fool is one of the roles in the group, the role played by that person least within the group myth.

The members accept the group myth as true and worth following or they wouldn’t be members. Their world is bounded by that myth and any others to which they subscribe. Anything else is suspect. The desire to stay within the group myth leads the members to reject the fool’s ideas and actions as not worthy of serious consideration, as foolish, implying that the fool is not to be taken seriously when he is outside the myth, that he is not to be followed there. If they did follow, his role would change from fool to leader. A leader’s new mythic material is accepted by the group. That of the fool is not. Leaders with ideas the group rejects seem foolish. Fools with ideas the group accepts show leadership.

Most members of a group have at least a little alpha in the group, some level of status with influence over the direction and content of the group myth. A small part of their role is leader, which they use to help make their corner of the group myth further their personal myth. This influence is a main defense against personal mythic shortage and is not given up lightly.

Winning Them Over
The safe strategy is to stay well within the current bounds of the group myth nearly all the time, only offering something new when it is arguably inside the myth and you have privately already obtained a favorable reaction to it from your closest and most trustworthy and supportive alpha allies in the group.

Many people will not have an immediate opinion about your idea, innovation, or other mythic advance, because their opinions come from without rather than from within. They make up their minds in accordance with group consensus or the reactions of established alphas. Compatibility with the group myth is their standard of value and acceptability of anything new and they play it safe by not trusting their own judgment on such matters. Sometimes these people will have a stock noncommittal or negative reaction to anything new that will be quickly reversed if the tide goes the other way.

To win these people, they must see you as alpha, a leader, unless your contribution has the endorsement of the alphas or of that part of the group with which these people most closely identify.

Such people are easy to spot in meetings. Whenever there is a show of hands vote, they wait to see how the vote will go and then raise their hands with the majority.

The social reaction to a new idea is mostly determined by whether or not people perceive it to further the group myth and by what changes the acceptance of the idea might make in the alpha hierarchy and their place in it. The inherent quality of the idea is secondary.

A common strategy for deflecting challenges to one’s contributions is to hide behind the coattails of some unassailable alpha. If you can defend your ideas with quotes from or references to a generally recognized authority, then for someone to attack your idea puts him at odds with an accepted alpha. In that position he can be seen as outside the myth and therefore not credible, so he is apt to keep quiet to avoid looking foolish.

Another defense is to manipulate the situation to appear as alpha as possible, to use costume, props, setting, language, gesture, timing, and anything else you can think of that will bluff the opposition into seeing you as unassailably alpha.

You can also make clear that what you are proposing or doing, the direction you would move the group myth, demonstrates these morals the group honors, not those it opposes. Let them know how to interpret what they see. Tell them what it means in terms they will support. If you are both credible and fearless, you will probably succeed.

One general formula for doing this can be found in the way many magazine articles are written and public speeches given. They start with an emotionally moving story, then give information, then call for action. The story may make you sad, angry, afraid, or excited, or it may be a joke that makes you laugh. Jokes are more common in speeches than in articles. The point is to quickly get the audience moving in your mythic direction and shared emotion is key.

Because they are now following your mythic lead, you will be alpha to them. The common mythic ground of the story creates the context of credibility they need to incorporate your great ideas into their lives.

You then need to inspire them to take action, to do something which will demonstrate the truth of what you have been saying. Thus the morals you present will be accepted into their myths, which will then advance your own.

The thrust of all these strategies is to make your creation, your contribution, your inspiration, seem to be a logical forward projection of the existing group myth, consistent with how it should naturally evolve. Although what you present is new, it will be seen as within the ongoing group myth.

However, in your own process of creation, try to see beyond extrapolations of the group myth. See the problem, the challenge, for what it is and come up with an advantageous solution. If your mind refuses to step outside the group myth, you will have difficulty coming up with anything beyond minor variations on more of the same. If you want to think outside the box, keep in mind that its myth is the box in which the group lives.

Practice being alpha to yourself first and gain confidence and competence in your creation of personal myth. As you get better at it, you will be noticed and others will be attracted to you. Opportunities to lead various groups will arise, giving you openings to experience and practice guiding group myth. This is not the same as being in charge of your personal myth, but by intelligent action you will learn.

You can do it; you can become more alpha. You will need some time to cope with your fears and let the range of your thoughts, feelings, and actions expand. Problems and setbacks will appear, but they are also opportunities for original thought. Becoming alpha, to yourself as well as to others, will require some effort and willingness to change on your part, but it is not as hard as the world would have you believe. Most people are convinced that significant alpha is beyond their reach, but that belief is largely self-fulfilling. If you choose, you can take action to move beyond such beliefs. Most people don’t, but you can.

The Alpha Game
How most people cope with alpha anxiety is to play the alpha game. The object of the alpha game is to convince yourself and all who may be aware of your existence that you are alpha, without your actually being alpha. The appearance, the impression of alpha is what matters in the game rather than any reality of being a mythic source. Your image to others and yourself as an alpha becomes more important than the inherent quality of your life. The alpha pose becomes the one standard for judging the worth of who you are and what you do.

The standards for alpha appearance come from the group myth, the source of social agreement. Your status in the game is not absolute, but only relative to others, so comparative alpha appearance judgments must come from shared mythic material, group myth. As such, they are largely outside personal control.

Thus the game serves to bring individual myth in line with group myth, enhancing group stability. We all experience life differently, so individual myths drift apart from each other and the group myth. A life focused on living to group myth alpha specifications keeps you firmly tied to the group, as your identity and meaning are rooted in the group myth.

The game is centered around comparisons based on secondary alpha characteristics and any other alpha tests the players see as valid. Since the game is competitive, there are no absolute standards of alpha, only comparative ones. You are only beautiful if most people look worse than you. You are only tall if most people are shorter than you. You are only rich if most people have less money than you.

Every form of alpha competition in the game is one in which most people must lose or the standard of judgment would have no meaning. In order for the alpha tests to be credible, the game ensures that people will see their world as a place where there is never enough to go around. The result is that most people live in a world of perceived shortage in which they must compete for what little they can get.

In this context mythic shortage seems normal and helps people accept living within the limits of the game and their usually mediocre and always vulnerable position in it. Since the game is bounded by the group myth, the alpha game holds the members inside even as they struggle for supremacy over each other.

Another way the alpha game benefits the group is by making us hide and deny our fears. Alphas are not supposed to be afraid. Alphas are understood to be powerful enough and have a good enough myth that there is nothing to fear. In fact, alphas have their share of fear. But their public doesn’t want to think so. Who wants a myth from someone who can’t handle danger? We already have a myth like that; we don’t need another.

Since the object of the alpha game is to appear alpha, the players try hard to hide their fear. We hide it from others and we hide it from ourselves. The risks that are feared are losing the alpha game and subsequent dominance or abandonment by others. Actions we might take that would cause us to lose status in the game are so scary that our minds deny their existence, eliminating them as possible choices. All that is left are actions blessed by the group myth, so we stay safely within its boundaries. Also, since the alpha game makes us feel afraid outside the group myth but safe within it, the game makes the group myth look stronger than any other, so we are drawn to it and defend it.

The game is probably good for the group but not for the individual. The game is competitive and demands heavy sacrifice of time, effort, resources, and life options. Looking good is more important than being good. There is no time off while others are watching. Privacy becomes important as a relief from the stress of the game and as a moment to give to those parts of your myth not up to public scrutiny.

At any moment a little can be gained but all can be lost. One awful five minutes can undo a lifetime of careful image construction. Fear becomes your companion. Unnoticed and unfelt, it shapes every move.

The game promises positive rewards, the perquisites of alpha. Everyone will love you, pay attention to you, help you, defer to you, let you be dominant, all because you seem so wonderful, so ideal, so alpha. But there is a catch. To get the payoff you have to seem more alpha than others, a lot more alpha. If you seem just slightly more alpha, their best strategy is to pass you up, either by trying harder or by ignoring you or tearing you down. You are only safe if you can get so far ahead you look uncatchable. Then others may seek an alliance with you, supporting your status, as a way to get ahead of someone else. For you to make the jump to this level of alpha is difficult; many people work extremely hard for years to gain this position and the game’s promised rewards.

The problem is that we are brought up to depend on reaction and other confirmations from others to know if we are alpha. In a direct competition, their best strategy is to withhold alpha confirmation unless it is in their interest to bestow it.

The rewards of the alpha game are mostly negative. The game tempts you into believing you can win, but soon you are trapped into playing not to lose. Since the game is competitive, a player who freely hands out the rewards to others stands to lose unless the recipients are so much more alpha appearing than he that alliance with them would be helpful. A player cannot acknowledge the alpha status of an equal without risking judgment as a subordinate. Part of the alpha bluff is to treat others as less alpha.

Thus the alpha game is a negative-sum game, much like casino gambling. Some people may appear to win, but the average player loses and everybody pays a heavy price. The game crowds out many wonderful parts of your myth, which are delayed and forgotten.

Happiness becomes difficult or impossible to maintain in a world where everything about you is never good enough. Most women are brought up with the beautiful appearance version of the alpha game as an immutable part of their lives. Am I Beautiful becomes a constant question in their lives and the answer is always Not Beautiful Enough. No matter what their faces or figures look like or what they wear, they can always find fault.

Men are less apt to be obsessed about their appearance but have a weakness for judging their apparent alpha standing, their idea of whether they are winning or losing in life, by how much money they can amass. The skillful ones obsessively pile up far more than they will ever need, with most of their expenditures being for fancy houses, cars, yachts, and other status symbols as proof to themselves and others of their success, despite being so trapped in making a living that they have no time for living.

But not just the rich fall into the trap of overconsumption. Possessions are easy to judge and alpha appeals are standard fare in advertisements. Whatever the alpha game test, someone promises you success if you will only buy his product. We fall for the pitch again and again, anything to make the fear and self-doubt shut up, at least for a little while.

There are as many ways to play the alpha game as there are alpha tests we can imagine. All of them share the same enslavement to the tyranny of endless anxiety that is life under the alpha game.

It’s a sucker game, yet nearly everybody plays. Why? Most people play because everyone they have ever known played. From childhood they were brought up as players and they use the game to organize their lives. They would be lost without it.

Also, the players put pressure on non-participants to join in. To play the game and pay its price you have to believe in the absolute truth of it, which is difficult to do if there are people around you who are outside the game and succeeding nonetheless.

The alpha game is a channel for the human desire for dominance. Play and you will get some. You will also be dominated. The game puts dominance desire where it can be dealt with within the group myth.

The game supplies a lot of mythic material and does much to alleviate mythic starvation even as the game also propagates it, so we become addicted. To play, you do not have to be alpha, so there is no danger of straying outside the group myth. You can maintain or even advance your status not by being a mythic source, but merely by impressing and intimidating others. The belief in the absolute validity of your group’s alpha standards also helps you feel superior to outsiders.

The game forces the players toward the group myth, bringing the group closer together. At the same time it forces the members of the group apart from each other emotionally. Emotional intimacy becomes more difficult, since showing your mythic individuality, the parts of your personal myth incongruent with the group myth, can be used against you in the game. The alpha game causes us to hide from each other behind a mask of generic normality.

The emotional alienation both stabilizes the group myth and binds us to it. We have more difficulty finding common mythic ground outside the group myth with other group members. Subgroups we might form that could challenge the larger group are less likely to happen. Our lack of connection to others makes us more dependent on the group myth as our source of new mythic material. The alpha game makes us help the group divide and conquer ourselves.

The alpha game is a raw deal. Wouldn’t you rather just be alpha?

Group Alpha Jockeying
Alpha jockeying is not done just by individuals, but by groups, one against the other. A formalized version of this is what the sports industry is all about. But it happens constantly all around us. Competition in business is not just about profit, but also dominance by one company (business group) over the others as a mythic source for the culture. Sales and profits, especially when they are increasing, are symbolic of mythic confirmation and dominance. The company is seen as alpha when its social and economic impact increases. Social classes, ethnic groups, geographical areas, religions, all manner of subcultures compete within the larger group. The cultural tide will flow to one, then another, as the changing actions and status of each group intersect with the mythic needs and momentum of the culture, as a whole or in part.

Groups within the culture strive to maintain their alpha position, through political or economic dominance, monopolizing alpha credentials, commandeering the terms of public debate, being noisier and rowdier, or anything else they can think of. The closer another group’s myth is to yours, the more you will be willing to allow them a legitimate place in the culture, unless they are close enough to your myth to be seen as a rival for the affiliation of the same members.

The grand arena of group alpha jockeying is politics, especially in a democracy. The whole idea of democracy is that there be certain ground rules allowing for fair play among the various myths vying to direct the culture, so that truth will win out and the culture may have the most effective myth to live by. That is how it is supposed to work. The process mostly involves endless tribal squabbling in the course of churning and oscillating around various ideals and hopefully moving forward, at least slowly.

Respect
Associated with alpha and dominance is the concept of respect. What does it mean to respect someone, or some thing, or some idea? If you respect, you see the other’s moral package as legitimate and allow it to be a mythic source for you. The moral package may be part of a myth if you respect a person or group. It may be inherent, as in an object or an idea. Respect a person and you support or at least allow a satisfactory forward progression of his myth and its effect on your own. Respect an object and you acknowledge its nature, its purpose, and the consequences of its involvement in your myth. You should treat firearms with respect. Guns, as inanimate objects, do not have myths or morals, but their use has mythic consequences and thus they symbolize certain morals. Respect an idea and you recognize the truth in it and the mythic implications of the morals it represents. I hope you respect the ideas in this book, even the ones you may disagree with. I hope you see them as worthy of a place in the eternal human discourse in search of greater understanding.

Respect for others is necessary for the functioning of society, but it is not boundless. Cultures differ in the amount of mythic variation that is respected. Conservative, tight groups allow little mythic variation among the members. Exceed the limit and respect turns into coercion, conflict or abandonment. Looser groups allow more variation, but no group allows complete freedom, or it would have no group myth and cease to exist. In the United States we have freedom of speech legally but not socially.

Alpha Avoidance
By this point it should be clear why a person might want to increase his alpha standing. Let us now explore why a person might choose not to. There are several rationales for shunning personal alpha. One is the avoidance of conflict—an alpha is an obvious target for challenges to power. Another is autonomy relative to the group—if your position is as a mythic source for the group, then to maintain that role, you must have and keep the group’s allegiance; you are dependent on the actions of others for the existence of your role. This creates a paradox—the one with the greatest power over the group myth has influence but very little personal control over the continuity of his role in relationship to the group; he has his role only so long as the other group members believe, say, and act accordingly. This dependency on others for one’s role in the group is true for all group roles, but the role of leader is the most precarious. In a group the role of inconspicuous member, a part of the blob in the middle, is more secure. If your power is social, you only have the power they give you.

Avoiding alpha also means you do not have to create mythic material. You are relieved of having to be the source. Someone else has to do the work.

If you are not trying to be personally alpha, you can more easily make alliances with those who are, since you will not be seen as a rival, but as a supporter in their striving upwards. You may be able to rise higher with less effort or risk as an ally than in a personal advance.

Yet another reason to avoid alpha is to have a more powerful myth relative to one’s own point of view. If I am my mythic source, then my myth is no more alpha or powerful than myself. But if my alpha source is much greater than myself, then I can more easily believe in the absolute validity and power of my myth, coming as it does from a seemingly omniscient and omnipotent alpha so much beyond me.

Such an alpha source has power so far beyond my own that it seems magical. Let us explore the relation of power and magic, the powerful magic of magical powers.

Power
Power and magic are both strong components of most myths. Let’s start with power. In physics, power is defined simply. Power is work per unit time, or energy per unit time. In human life, power is the ability to get things done. Power is the ability to have your agenda happen, your myth move forward, in a reasonable period of time.

Dominance is related to power, but dominance itself is not power. You can be dominant and still be incompetent. The world is full of such people. Increased competence can be had through increased knowledge. You have heard it said “knowledge is power.” This is not true. Knowledge can increase power, it can expand the scope of power, but it is not power. Saying “knowledge is power” is like saying “time is money.” Everyone has the same amount of time, twenty-four hours a day. But rich people have more money than poor people, and money will not save you from the day when your time is up.

Similarly, you can be smart and also powerless and incompetent. A contradictory myth makes for life incompetence, as you end up working against yourself, demonstrating competing morals that force you to destroy what you build, to head south while going north. Most myths contain some level of contradiction, but a clear order of moral priority can make a big improvement. Power can then be an effective forward mythic force.

Magic
Now let us have a look at magic, a large component of human life. What is magic? It is a little harder to define than power, but let’s have a go at it.

Magic is a description of certain forms of change, of action. The situation starts at A and how it gets to B is magical, but what is it? A key characteristic of what is magical to us is that we do not understand how it works. The causal sequence is unknown to us, or is at least very unclear. The magical is mostly something we cannot do for ourselves or by ourselves. Magic is usually infrequent, often coming as a surprise. If something magical starts happening all the time, we get used to it and it seems less noteworthy, for we integrate it into our myths. Myth makes great use of magic, but magic stands outside the myth. It is beyond us, yet magical actions strongly affect our myths, positively or negatively, good or bad.

What is my relation to magic? Magic is about actions that are important to my myth, therefore magic is also. But the cause of the actions is unknown, beyond my ability to control what, how, when, where, or why. The understanding of it is not within my myth and may even contradict it. Faced with magic I am helpless.

What this sounds like is the opposite of power. Granted, it is not the only opposite of power. Someone can overpower me for reasons I fully understand—he might simply be stronger. But often power is not so clear—how did that happen? I experienced magic; he experienced power. I saw the power of magic when he used his magical powers. When someone has what to me are magical powers, they are magical in terms of my myth. They might not be magical to you at all.

When you were very young, cars were magical. You got into a little room with lots of windows. Your mother or father got in too. The world whooshed by and you got to wonderful places you could never have gotten to on your own. All right, sometimes you went to the dentist or the barber or to see mean old Aunt Marge, but it was still magical.

Gradually you understood more about geography and cars and it seemed less magical. But there came a day when you learned to drive. You could operate the car. You could go anywhere you wanted. At that point, riding in the car as a passenger would never be the same again. You had gained the power to drive but you lost the magical experience of the pre-driving passenger. Life holds many similar transitions. You were read to before you learned to read. You learned to tell time, to do arithmetic. Music is different after you can make it happen. So is dance, or athletic skill, or anything else. When we don’t know, the one who does seems magical. Alpha people have a magical quality, as does creativity.

Most things in life we never come to the end of; we never gain total mastery, so some magic remains. What we don’t know and can’t do holds the magic. Much of the course of one’s life is transitions from magic to power. Knowledge is to power as ignorance is to magic. When the stage magician performs his tricks, the audience experiences magic and is dazzled. The magician himself does not experience magic. He knows exactly what he is doing. He does, however, experience power. He has the power to create illusions that will appear real to the audience. He gets to create an alternate reality and draw the audience into it.

Actors are in a similar position. Theater and movies are ultimately about magic—the creation of a world that did not exist before. In this world myth is made clear and progresses rapidly from beginning to conclusion. We are drawn in as audience over and over, because we have an obsessive need to believe in the reality of mythic progression. There is nothing more exciting to us than to see a myth, one with parallels to our own, progressing rapidly, with numerous alpha confrontations and reversals, with various morals contending for demonstration, all coming to a satisfying dramatic conclusion.

We are all engaged in magic as we create our myths out of our experiences and our minds’ internal adventures. Each myth has never existed before, will never come again, and is always transforming itself into the continually changing present moment. We create the myth, yet can never wholly know our own creation, even though it is central to our lives and is our constant companion, the source of all meaning and action.

Both magic and power are attractive to us. The appeal of power is obvious. If we can make more happen, we can take action to get where we want in life, to make our myths progress to our liking. The appeal of magic is not so straightforward, but for many people magic is preferable to power. Why would this be? Why would people want to be unknowing and unable?

If you can’t and don’t know how, you can play a role in which less is expected of you, so you have an excuse to avoid life’s difficult obstacles. Thus your chances of succeeding in the challenges you do face will be greater. If you shape your myth to contain only easy obstacles while giving them extra validity, you can feel like a winner.

The appeal of magic goes deeper than a desire to find an easy path through life. The less powerful we are, the more we can see groups and other people as greater than ourselves, able to support and protect us as we make our way through life. If we see them handle obstacles that we could not, we can take that as a moral demonstration that they have more power than we can ever hope to have and they can save us from anything. We come to feel that since their myth can do so many things ours cannot, it must be the ultimate truth and we can believe in it without question and follow it anywhere. That dependence and security justifies to us our alliances with these people and makes us support these relationships. Seeing the world in terms of magic helps us fit into the social fabric and unifies the group.

Magic is also appealing for its own sake. The existence of an ongoing unknown promises that there will always be room for mythic growth and questions that peer into the darkness. Unknowns help keep the story open and engaging.

Stories are about moral demonstration. Which moral comes out on top is usually determined by alpha dominance conflicts between characters representing those morals rather than by qualities inherent in the morals themselves. Nearly all the dramatic action in stories is alpha confrontation between characters. Who will prevail in this instance? This makes sense to us. Our myths are much more the result of internalization of quotes and behaviors of perceived alphas than of any rational logic. Life is largely modeled on a flawed premise: If it is from a perceived alpha, it must be true.

We see alphas as the source of truth, so they are who we look to for mythic direction. We are social creatures and need to interact. Myth is all we have. We must have mythic overlap with others, shared myth on which we can agree, from sources we believe in. We structure our society to create a sustainable fabric of interwoven myth, so alpha becomes the great organizing theme of social relationships. Attention to alpha is primary, for myth is the ground on which everything else happens.