Gamma Culture

Before my brother died, he tried at one point to get me to listen to one of his favorite bands, Linkin Park. I agreed those boys had some talent, but I didn’t care for what they were saying. I didn’t remember much about it, so I listened to one of their songs on YouTube yesterday: “Numb.” Then I remembered why I didn’t like them. Whining about teen angst does not impress me. And yes, my brother wasn’t a really well adjusted happy camper, either. Substance abuse played a major role in his early demise.

He was 15 years younger than me, and had been very early to embrace the likes of Linkin Park and similar bands. He was on the leading edge of the generation behind me. I’ve noticed over the years that a significant portion of them were much more nerdy, in the sense of clustering around the Gamma Male scale of social development. Gammas tend to be sensitive, seeing abuse when it isn’t there, and refusing to let things go when they are offended. If Linkin Park’s guys were real men, they wouldn’t waste much time complaining about maltreatment. Instead, they would sing about their victories, or at the very least how noble it was to face difficult odds and not give up. The songs wouldn’t end in angst, but on some note of triumph.

What it tells me is that there is now a very high Gamma Male factor in the US. Not that nobody has noticed before, but this is particularly offensive to our brand of faith. It leads to a kind of blaming God for not making things better than they are, so that we have at best a bad view of Him, and at worst a nearly uniform rejection of divine revelation. It is the epitome of abusing human reason as an excuse to reject religion itself. It’s one more way the Devil seeks to keep souls captive through delusion.