I’m all for sticking it to the chuddy guys who call themselves ‘alpha’ and behave accordingly. But there’s a bit more to it than “alpha wolves doesn’t real”.

The scientists who observed the ‘alpha wolf’ behavior were seeing something: wolves in captivity. Which is something that has an analogous human experience in prison.

But since there are an awful lot of these ‘alpha guys’ who have (somehow) never caught a charge, much less spent a stint in prison, maybe it says something about how, maybe, they feel imprisoned on the outside. Like maybe their school, work, home, or social life feels penned in in a way that is not healthy.

This line dropped as the second George W Bush term was getting underway. It felt super relevant then, too (I actually viewed him and Cheney as worse than Trump until he actively worsened COVID). But this term’s opening has been so bad so fast that the line really does hit different.