I’ve talked about the men’s Red Pill movement and mentioned Gamma Boys a few times. Gammas are the guys with significant intelligence and talent, but raised poorly so that they feel entitled. They are socially damaged; they have a very poor connection with reality. They can do very useful stuff, but they can’t understand the world of people around them. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about such things, nor do I expend that many electrons posting about it. I embrace the whole concept as a partial reflection of Biblical Law, but God has other things for me to focus on.
However, I have recently run into some Gamma Boys of the mainstream churches. Not so much in personal encounters, but guys trying to persuade me to feature their ideas on my blog. And their ideas have nothing to do with Red Pill stuff, but religion itself. A primary annoyance has been the vast walls of text they try to post in my comments.
Keep in mind that “walls of text” is a specific term referring to vast wads of verbiage meant to convince, to sell something. Even when well written, you can tell someone is trying to push something down your throat. It uses some standard advertising verbal manipulation techniques (AKA propaganda). For heart-led people especially, you get alarm bells ringing when you start the read this stuff, for the underhanded approach, if not for the content.
It’s one thing to hold out an invitation for someone to explore ideas you are sharing. Radix Fidem is a path, not a destination. It’s another thing entirely to aim at trapping people by seeking to close off mental escape routes. Gammas routinely communicate in walls of text; they have no concept of cutting to the chase. Their whole game is not actual communications, but manipulation. They cannot imagine asking sharp questions to get people thinking. They don’t want you to think; they want control. They believe they are entitled to it, commissioned by God to seize it.
Their ideas aren’t from the heart, but from their own reasoning. Gammas tend to be spiteful and arrogant, as you would expect from mere intellect, but it seldom shows until you reject their overtures. They take it personally, as if you are rejecting them. They are all messiahs in their own minds. The mark of a mature spiritual person is not taking themselves too seriously, and handling with equanimity the interactions where their ideas aren’t received well.
While Gamma Boys will always manage to grab a few minds here and there, they never succeed at entering the mainstream. Thus, they run around trying to promote their ideas by posting big walls of text in the comments section of blogs and similar sites. They imagine their verbiage is somehow persuasive, or that at least it ought to be, because it was so enervating when they first dreamed it up in their own minds. They imagine that they are supreme debaters, vanquishing all resistance by the power of their minds, and you must be a loser if you can’t admire it.
There was a time I might have tried engaging them by answering their nonsense. You have to be discerning about such things. Not all of them start off with a huge long comment. I try to answer with, “This is what my convictions say.” If that gets a bad reaction, betraying a sense of entitlement, I cut them off, marking them in my minds as confirmed Gamma Boys. I pray for them, but delete any future comments without response, unless they start to turn in a good direction — it does happen with some. I know this because I was once one of them. But I’ve cut off quite a few over the past couple of years because they are too locked into their castles to listen.
This problem appears on a spectrum of disorder. It’s a tendency, not a single defined issue. There are lots of smart people out there seizing on some special logical angle, and with varying degrees of charisma, they can be persuasive. Maybe they attract a small crowd who become enthralled with their notions. We have a lot of deception out there that sprouts up like this. To heart-led people, it is clearly based merely on human talent, not the moral truth woven into the the fabric of Creation.
