Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky spent decades studying baboons, researching the psychological effects of their testosterone-driven hierarchical societies. What he found seems in hindsight pretty obvious. It's great to be an alpha, and it sucks to be a beta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY&list=PLYSlHIqOxY0mb842WtYW9dt2j-_8Wc7DG&index=63&ab_channel=TheSymposionNights

If you're a dominant male, you can expect your stress hormones to be low, and if you're submissive, much higher... low rankers had increased heart rates and higher blood pressure "you have an immune system that doesn't work as well, you have brain chemistry similar to that of depressed humans

Sapolsky then made an insight after an unexpected plague killed off all the alpha males. Rather than revert to the habits of the alpha males, the surviving betas restructured society in a manner that benefited everyone.

Every alpha male was gone... there were twice as many females as males, and the males that were remaining, just to use scientific jargon, were good guys, they were not jerks, they were very nice to the females, very socially affiliative Baboons in this troop now have very low levels of aggression, very high levels of social affiliation Do these guys have the same problems with high blood pressure? Nope. Do these guys have the same problems with brain chemistry? Not at all.

Most successful human societies are beta societies. They primarily reward compassion, industriousness, contentiousness, apparent moral virtue, and wisdom. Alpha societies are very very good for the alpha males, but extremely bad for everyone else. They do not reward hard work, and thus hard work rarely gets done. They do not reward compassion, and as a result individuals are rarely compassionate. They do not reward exclusive monogamy, thus exclusive monogamy is rarely practiced.

Do I think Tinder, Onlyfans, etc are transforming our society from beta back to alpha? No, but I do believe many of the psychological problems today arising in young men are due to similar forces to what made the Baboon's original hierarchal alpha society so hazardous.

While there were of course the many covert trysts, affairs, and scandals, sexual relations before the 21st century were generally very strictly regulated. Women and men were held to standards of conduct that effectively stifled promiscuity and rewarded beta behaviors, such as appealing to the parents of a woman before marrying her, or pursuing a comfortable long-term job.

Nowadays the ease through which individuals may pursue their sexual destiny has shattered much of the inertia of those conventions, leading to far more severe hierarchies forming between competing men. The prototypical alpha males receive a vast majority of sexual attention, leaving the remainder in anxiety-inducing competition for the remains. Those at the bottom, naturally, receive nothing or far less than would justify effort. Men today are riddled with anxiety, depressed, aimless, and prone to extremist tendencies far more than any other time in history.

Classically beta traits like compassion and "niceness" no longer offer any reproductive advantage. Beta males are now forced to reconcile with the fact that their behavior, which would be a virtue in any other society, leave them completely sexless.