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What do secret societies, infectious diseases, and male dominance hierarchies have in common? They all make use of a symbol system that was first developed over 2,500 years ago. Since that time, it has been continually repurposed in all sorts of surprising ways. There may be no set of characters as widely deployed—or as adaptable—as the letters of the Greek alphabet.
This symbol system was standardized as a set of 24 letters—from alpha to omega—during the 4th century BC. Because a knowledge of ancient Greek was widely shared by members of Europe’s educated class, Greek letters were readily pressed into service for other purposes. Over time, they found employment as mathematical constants—such as pi (π)—and as variables in fields like engineering and physics.
Greek Letters for Greek Life
A very different application for Greek letters arose in early America. In December of 1776, a secret literary and philosophical society was established at Virginia’s College of William and Mary. Its organizers named it using the Greek-letter initialism of ΦΒΚ—Phi Beta Kappa—from the first letters of Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs, or “philosophy [is the] guide of life.”
Today, about 1,500 Greek letter fraternities and sororities can be found on hundreds of campuses across North America. The number of college students involved in panhellenic activities is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Going Greek to Track a Virus
During the Covid pandemic, researchers used Greek letters to identify new variants of the evolving virus. Scientists initially used lineage names to track these variants, but such designations quickly became cumbersome. In 2021, the World Health Organization began assigning Greek letters to “variants of interest” and “variants of concern.”
Two of these variants—delta and omicron—went on to cause major Covid outbreaks in 2021 and 2022, respectively. But by the end of 2023, the WHO ran out of letters and had to switch back to lineage names.
The Rise of the Alpha Myth
In 1947, the Swiss zoologist Rudolf Schenkel published a paper titled “Expression Studies on Wolves.” Based on an eight-year study of two captive wolf populations at the Basel Zoo, he concluded that each group had two dominant members—which he dubbed the “alpha male” and “alpha female”—to which other members of the pack were submissive.
This idea of a dominance hierarchy in wolves was popularized in a 1970 best-seller by American biologist David Mech. In The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, he echoed and promoted Schenkel’s ideas about dominant alphas.
Mech later repudiated his view of a rigid dominance hierarchy in a paper published in 1999. He found that earlier claims about the behavior of captive wolves didn’t comport with his own multi-year study of these animals in the wild, where he observed breeding pairs and their offspring living amicably in family units.
In 2022, Mech went so far as to ask his publisher to stop selling copies of The Wolf. But by then, ideas about dominance hierarchies had seeped into popular culture and were being applied to the behavior of other animals, such as dogs, and ultimately to human behavior.
Dominant Alphas, Submissive Betas?
The idea of an “alpha male” in human relations was promoted in a number of books whose authors uncritically accepted and championed this idea. These include psychotherapist Robert Glover’s No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex and Life (2003) and investigative reporter Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005). Strauss’s book also fleshed out the idea of the submissive, passive “beta male” who tends to be unsuccessful in his attempts to attract female attention.
The notion of men being either dominant “alphas” or acquiescent “betas” has permeated the so-called manosphere and “red pill” cultures online. These labels have been employed by the anonymous blogger Roissy and also by far-right figures like Gavin McInnes—a founder of the Proud Boys—and social media personalities like Andrew Tate and Mike Cernovich.
Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, Omegas, and Sigmas?
This “Greek alphabet” view of male dominance was greatly expanded through the musings of Theodore Beale, who is better known online as Vox Day.
In March of 2011, Beale published a blog post titled “The socio-sexual hierarchy.” In it, he proposed a masculine pecking order consisting of alphas (dominant and charismatic men) and betas (loyal friends of alphas), but also deltas (“normal guys” and “the great majority of men”), gammas (who are unattractive, introspective, and bitter), omegas (“social losers”), and sigmas (nonconforming outsiders).
Beale’s classification scheme became a meme that entrenched itself in many areas of the online world, and his terminology has entered common parlance. However, it’s important to note that these ideas are not grounded in mainstream psychological theory or empirical research on masculine psychology—they’re just the musings of an activist who Wikipedia refers to as “a far-right white supremacist, a misogynist, and part of the alt-right.”
Today, it is possible to take any number of online “male hierarchy” tests to “Discover your type.” Articles are published that claim “Scientists say all men fit into six categories” or “Psychologists say there are six core personalities.” But none of these notions are grounded in scientific research. In this case, the Greek letters supply only a thin veneer of respectability to a dubious typology with no empirical basis.
