Look at your hands. Tap your thumb against the tip of each finger. No animal can do that. Those hands were shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of men carving rocks, and every man alive descends from the ones who carved them best.
The stone-tool tournament
Picture men sitting in circles at set times of the year, competing over who could make the best blade. A sharp edge meant defence, hunting and territory, which meant the tribe survived. For a very long time the stones were rough and lopsided. But the winners of those contests reproduced, and their sons’ hands came out a little more controlled. Repeat that for long enough and you get hands that can play a piano, write in cursive or throw a football.
The biological game
Humans are a tournament species. Men compete, round after round and generation after generation, to secure space with whatever advantages they were born with. The contests were fighting, tool making and spear throwing. Through most of history men were mostly tournament males, and they are the reason female hypergamy exists at all. The winners shared twelve traits.
The first four
They master the technology of their era: stone tools, then the horse and bow, and today online business, internet brands and Bitcoin. They are physically dangerous, and a modern one keeps some avenue for it, whether lifting, fighting or owning a firearm to defend his territory. They are smart in the way that comes from being tested, adaptable and usually ahead of the culture. And they act while afraid. Most men can’t consider leaving a boring job; a tournament male knows abundance comes from skill and effort.
Options, the ultimate trait
The fifth may be the one the rest grow out of: they have options. They have mastered the tools of earning, and hypergamy rewards them, so they don’t negotiate from weakness. That is why they are hard to guilt or control, whether by a woman, a job or a culture, and why they won’t settle for poor treatment.
What grows out of it
From options come the next seven. They are generous, because men who succeed through effort don’t feel envy. They care about their bloodline and want their descendants to win. They are willing to lose, because a loss doesn’t lower their sense of their own worth. They see through propaganda, since guilt and shame don’t work on them. They understand brotherhood, because mastering a technology takes a group of men without resentment. They do what they want, and won’t trade their own life for someone else’s demands dressed up as selflessness. And they care how they look: the strongest warriors of the Plains tribes dressed to project power.
Culture can’t write over the design
Look at your hands again. Tournaments selected them, and the man who carries them. Culture writes over a great deal of a man’s behaviour, but never over the design. Today most men are raised as the other kind of male, the pairbonder, and he has thirteen traits of his own, each one a reason he struggles to get the life he wants.