The following is a post from Perry Marshall. It outlines how the Bet Male schmuck is the world’s ass, bearing the load and doing everyone’s work.

The Go-To Guy Gets Educated:

How Business Really Works on Planet Earth

Start with about 300 million people in the United States . Consider that half of ‘em are retired or in school or on welfare, a fourth of ‘em are taking care of the retired ones and the ones in school, you’ve got 75 million left. But 29 million work for the Federal Government which means there’s only 46 million left to bring home the bacon.

Ah, but then there’s the 15 million who work for the local government, so they’re only marginally more worthwhile than the feds. We’re down to 31 million now. 80% of the 31 million are either lazy, apathetic and mostly unproductive, or they’re busy undoing the damage done by the dufuses every day. So in fact there’s only six million people doing real, actual, productive, innovative hard work.

Those 6 million people are not only feeding 300 million, but providing them with warm homes in the winter and quality television programming. The comfort food and Seinfeld reruns keep the unproductive, roiling masses from rioting.

(Karl Marx was wrong: Religion is not the opiate of the people, television is.)

That explains why you feel like, in any room full of 20 people, you’re the only one getting anything done. It’s because you ARE the only one getting anything done. The rest are mostly dead weight, playing a zero sum game.

That’s a fact. Get used to it. Always been that way, always will be that way. What matters is that you understand this is your role as an actually productive person in the world.

But there’s still another part of this that most people don’t perceive.

Of the six million people who do the actual work, one million are company presidents and big-time managers. The other 5 million are the Worker Bees.

Most company presidents and big-time managers, truth be told, are pretty productive people. They are worker-bees too. But the biggest part of their job is to keep the other worker-bees with heads down, working. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground. (Uncomfortable position, that.) The stability of the modern world rests on the loyalty and commitment of those 5 million worker-bees. They need to not look up.

I’m wicked serious. You take a company like General Motors, with hundreds of thousands of employees, all that company’s real productivity and competitive edge rests on the shoulders of about 5% of them, people who take complete ownership of their jobs. They come early, stay late, skip lunch when necessary (about half the time). They know the answers to important questions. They know how things work.

They know the password to the server. They happen to have a backup copy when the hard drive crashes – yes, it’s three weeks old and unfortunately not all the data is recovered. But they happened to make a backup one day… well, just in case, and… because they want to make sure the machine stays running. They were too smart to count on the IT guy. Sometimes they spend their own money and/or take personal vacation days to go get edumacated about something.

They know how many hubcaps were made on the last shift. They know Karen at the chrome supplier who can occasionally work a miracle if FEDEX loses a shipment.

They take everything about their jobs they very, very personally. Very seriously.

Everybody else is interchangeable. But not them. If all those people suddenly left, GM would be in big, big trouble. The whole company would tank and the stock market and the prognosticators wouldn’t have the slightest clue why.

These people are the Go-To guys (and gals). The real ones.

Company presidents and shareholders, consciously or unconsciously, must keep the Go-To guys from ever discovering their own value, their importance, their true levels of talent. The Go-To guys must stay muzzled. Because losing a Go-To guy is very, very costly. Genuine Go-To guys are exceedingly difficult to replace.

Corporate America ’s formula for getting and keeping Go-To guys:

• It’s almost impossible to identify them before you hire them, and HR departments usually screen them out. It takes a Go-To guy to know a Go-To guy, and Go-To guys rarely work in HR departments.

• You find them by accident, and when you discover them, you give them more and more work to do, supplemented with dainty morsels of guilt. Every time something is amiss, like sales are a bit off this month or the excel spreadsheet forecast was done sloppily on Friday, you call him at home on Sunday afternoon and express to him how concerned you are about his performance lately. You explain that you’re afraid he’s not keeping the eye on the ball and you don’t want this to ever happen again.

• It’s vitally important that your Go-To guy have between $25,000 and $65,000 of student loans. It also helps if he has two car payments and a balloon mortgage on his house that’s really a bit rich for his income. That way he’s freakin’ terrified of missing even one paycheck. He knows that a layoff or firing would bring certain financial doom. That fear never vacates the back of his worried mind.

• His compensation for the 55 hour work weeks, the unceasing stress, the lack of appreciation, the complete absence of opportunities to influence really important strategic decisions, the vacations interrupted by cell phone calls and impromptu meetings, is those two cars and the house that’s a bit rich for his income. During your fireside chats, you counsel him that he deserves these things because he works so hard, and maybe he should even treat himself to a boat. Aunt Visa and Uncle Mastercard and Madison Avenue do their part to reinforce this, ensuring that he never has enough money to take any business risks, ever.

• Stroke his ego with things that cost the company very little. Plastic plants, corner offices, fancy titles (“Vice President of Manufacturing Technology” is a good one), and when you’re together at client meetings, whisper to the client, just loud enough for Go-To guy to overhear, that Go-To Guy graduated from MIT with a 3.6 GPA. Maintain a big long list of things Go-To guy can’t take to the bank, but which still make him feel proud of his accomplishments.

• You pilfer money from his 401K program and limit it to extraordinarily conservative investments (while talking about the 401K program in such delightful, embellished terms that he never visits a financial planner and considers saving up his own nest egg) so your Go-To guy will actually never have enough money to retire. He’ll still be your Go-To guy when he’s 83 and has a colostomy bag strapped to his leg.

• If you don’t want to keep him until 83, fire him four months before his 20 year company anniversary, just before his pension vests. Oh yeah, and if you really want to stick the knife in deep, fire him on his wedding anniversary. Send him home to his sweetheart in tears and shame. It’ll sweeten their weekend, the one with the steak dinner and red roses at the Radisson. Oh, and whenever you bump into him around town, tell him to be sure and tell her ‘hi’ for you.

• Tell the Board Of Directors meeting that the company lost the 3½ million dollar account with Starbucks because of Go-To guy’s inattention to detail and lack of maturity. Tell them you’d already been concerned about his performance for quite some time, and you solemnly accept a share of the blame for not dismissing him as soon as you saw the warning signs. This will ensure that they never suspect it was actually your fault – you hacked off their purchasing manager for trying to cut your own distributor’s throat to keep some more margin. He knew right then you were a blood sucker and he nixed the deal.

Now you know why you always hated corporate politics, eh?

A key element here that goes unmentioned is that the enslaved go-to guy is married. Between marriage and debt, he must constantly work his ass off in order to stay afloat.

I should also add that these dynamics at the workplace occur at the church, too. Most people are casual attenders. Those at the top, the Rick Warrens and his associate pastors, get the money and the prestige. The church depends on the go-to guys, the “5% Chumps,” who are constantly to the heavy lifting while receiving very little in return. They are constantly manipulated by guilt and a sense of duty.

“The Porpoise Driven Life” is my satirical take on Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

While I have have fun ridiculing the book, I am not saying that Rick is a scammer, a hatemonger, narrow minded, and so on. Homosexuals and liberals may want to paint Rick as an extremist, a whacko on the the fringes of society, but the reality is that Rick is relentlessly mainstream.

Warren is the embodiment of mainstream, middle class Christianity, which explains why he has thousands of members in his church (22,000, to be exact!) and has appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Regardless of Warren’s flaws or limitations, he must be given credit for his masterful handling of the presidential candidates’ forum he hosted. In that forum he showed that he is intelligent, articulate, and hardly some Bible thumping, mouth breathing hick pastor. The Purpose Driven life has sold more than 25 million copies, and according to his website, “is the best-selling hardback book in American history, according to Publisher’s Weekly.”

But I have to wonder why the book sold at all, let alone became such a mammoth blockbuster. Here are my objections to the book, and I’ve included a link where you can download the first seven chapters to read it yourself.

1) According to Rick, your purpose is to give your life to God. Let us say this is true. What is next? This still doesn’t answer the question of what to do with your life. What career should you choose? Whom should you marry? How do you find happiness?

Note how this leaves Rick unaccountable. He isn’t claiming to produce any tangible result in the reader’s life. By giving up your life, you’re giving up any right to concrete results. If you’ve surrendered your life to God then you shouldn’t be concerned with wealth, sex, entertainment, status, physical appearance and strength, etc.

Think about it: if you buy “Make Money in Real Estate,” you can judge the merits of the book according to whether or not you make money dealing in real estate. If you buy “The South Beach Diet,” you judge the book by whether or not you lose weight. But if you buy a book that tells you to give up any self-direction and the desire to get anything out of life, then how do you judge the book’s effectiveness?

If you say, “I tried Rick’s way, but I’m not happy,” the Christian response is, “Your life is not about your happiness. Don’t you see how selfish and self-centered you are, always thinking about your happiness?”

2) Why does God give you a life, but not want you to live it? God does not need you. As a human, I need worship in one form or another because I have doubts about myself. When someone praises me, it helps to assuage my insecurities. God, on the other hand, has no self-doubt and neither needs nor desires anyone to worship him.

It seems to me that the point in creating humans with minds and free will is to allow them to create and to choose.

3) The book is poorly written. Rick talks about “spiritual green cards.” This is where an editor should step in and say, “Hey, Rick, that’s a clunky metaphor. Drop it, okay?”

Rick repeatedly cites scripture, assuming that the reader accepts it as authoritative. This is like Christians who prove the Bible is true by quoting the Bible saying it’s true.

4) Rick stresses the unimportance of this life, which is nothing, compared to the next life, which is everything. Ultimately, this is a nihilistic view. If my desires are inconsequential (if not evil), and my life on this earth is inconsequential, then why does this life –and whether I live or die– matter? I know the response will be that the afterlife is what matters, but doesn’t that make this life meaningless? If the afterlife is what matters, why not just start with the afterlife?

Suppose you come to my house and I serve appetizers. You say, “Ugh, this tastes like cardboard.”

I say, “It is cardboard. It’s not real food.”

Then why in the hell did I serve it? If the main course is all that matters, why mess around?

Does there have to be a life on earth in order to determine who winds up in the afterlife? What is the point in a trial (i.e. being tested on earth) if God knows the outcome? Doesn’t it say in the Bible somewhere, “The Lord doth not dick around?”

There has recently been a flap over president-elect Obama inviting minister Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration.

In a recent interview, Ann Curry snarled at Rick, hurling the accusation of “homophobe.”

From the video:

ANN CURRY: Your position [on gay marriage] has raised the spectre that you are homophobic.

(Warren responds with a hearty laugh.)

CURRY: You laugh, but that is why gay people are angry.

RICK WARREN: Well, I could give you a hundred –

CURRY: Are you homophobic?

WARREN: I don’t know any church in America that’s done more to help the gay community, particularly with AIDS, than Saddleback. But the hate speech against me is incendiary.

CURRY: If science finds that this is biological, that people are born gay, would you change your position?

WARREN: No, and the reason why is because we all have biological predispositions. I’m naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

In defending himself, Rick resorts to typical Christian thought:

1)Humans are evil or sinful by nature

2)Humans have natural desires, whether a man desires to have sex with a beautiful woman or with another man

3)Since these desires are an expression of a sinful nature, they must be suppressed

The image created by Rick is of a man constantly at war with himself, following the seemingly arbitrary dictates of divine law. If you don’t accept scripture, then Rick has run out of arguments. The rationale for fighting human nature evaporates if you don’t accept the Bible as authoritative.

But there is another argument to be made, one that is supported by the Bible as well as reason. All living creatures have an incredible drive to reproduce. Animals such as salmon, preying mantises and black widow spiders will die to reproduce. According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, if any aspect of human behavior is inherited, it is mating and sexual behavior.

Let me make a simple observation: Healthy orientations are those that lead to successful reproduction.

If a man is sexually attracted to plants, I can safely say that is not a normal or a healthy behavior. I don’t have to quote the Bible to prove my point, either. Now you can try to paint me as a hate mongering “botanophobe,” but nature itself makes the judgment. A man with an attraction to plants will not have offspring, and so the gene that causes his attraction will die out.

Homosexuals get upset that homosexual marriage is compared to incest and pedophilia, but deal with it, losers. Like homosexuality, incestuous relationships have been universally banned throughout human history. Child brides are the exception as well (Mohammed had one, for instance), occurring either ceremonially or when there is a shortage of more suitable women.

Given the standard, “What is a reproductively healthy orientation?” we can say the following are not healthy behaviors:

pedophilia
homosexuality
incest
attraction to a post-menopausal woman
attraction to an obese woman
bestiality
fetishism
transexualism

Some of these behaviors are more emotionally loaded (e.g., “They oughta kill those sick bastards!”) than others. In some cultures some of these behaviors are punishable by death.

This is the idea of tolerance. We no longer arrest or execute people for being gay. Just don’t ask me to pretend that you’re normal.

The gay movement goes ape feces whenever someone who was formerly gay announces that he has changed his sexual orientation. Gays want to pretend these people don’t exist, but they do. It makes sense that some sort of psychological disturbance causes a man to adopt behaviors that are counter-productive. Given the right support and the will to change, stronger, innate desires to reproduce will predominate.

But now we get to the other side of the equation: What is a healthy orientation? For men, a healthy sexual orientation means a desire to have sex with…

young women
curvaceous women
women who are not fat (i.e. do not have either a high BMI [body mass index] or a high hip-to-waist ratio)
women who are not too thin
multiple women, both one after another and at the same time (i.e., a threesome)
beautiful women

This is where Rick Warren is asleep at the wheel and headed off the cliff. Rick thinks that he’s supposed to give up on sex with attractive women because of scriptural reasons. But in the Old Testament, a married man having sex with a single woman or a prostitute was not adultery. When I first learned this I almost fell out of my chair. For years in Sunday school I read the old stories in which men had multiple wives, and concubines, yet I was brainwashed into thinking that the Old Testament standard for adultery included a married man having sex with other women.

That a married man was free to have sex with other women was the standard for ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome. That such a standard is now seen as immoral shows how far America is from a “patriarchy.” When there really was a patriarchy, men had multiple wives, concubines, visited prostitutes at will and divorce was not an option –for women, that is.

The “ideal” of a man having sex with a single woman until the day he dies (and he may find himself wishing that day would come sooner rather than later) is not a sexually healthy behavior. Yes, being in a committed, long-term relationship with a fertile woman is a healthy behavior, but nature defines “long-term” as several years, not a lifetime. It also is self-defeating for a man to pass up sexual opportunities.

Rick Warren and other Christians want to relegate sex with busty women, with young women, with curvaceous women, with multiple women, to a realm of sin and shame. This makes no more sense than accepting homosexuality as a normal behavior.

Hulk Hogan’s ex-wife is currently getting forty thousand dollars a month. And yet she claims to be broke!

We find out that $40,000 a month isn’t all Hulk Hogan is paying his ex, there are other expenses on top of that.

“Back in August, Hogan — in addition to the monthly alimony payments — agreed to pay some monthly costs, including repair and maintenance to their home. Bollea’s legal team claims that Hogan refuses to pay for cable, pest control, window washing and their security system.”

You’d think that with forty grand a month the corpulent skank could pay for her own damn cable. I manage to pay my cable bill, and I make considerably less than forty thousand a month.

If she can’t afford the window cleaning service, maybe she could wash the windows herself. Since she has no job, and never has, she’s got plenty of idle time. Besides, the exercise will help tone up her flabby arms.

But think for a moment -What could you do with $40,000 a month?

Do you think you’d have any trouble finding female companionship if $40,000 a month were just part of your earnings?

Even if you got desperate and had to buy chicks, how much could you buy with forty grand a month?

(And before anyone gets all huffy about a man stooping to buying hookers, do you really doubt that Hogan’s ex is anything other than an outrageously expensive, less attractive whore? When Hulk was in pain, she was more preoccupied with her next shopping trip in a vain attempt to validate her empty life. She looks like a prune rolled in makeup foundation, and has the moral sensibilities to make a crack whore look like Florence Nightingale.)

So at what point did marriage ever make sense? What was the rationale? How many opportunities for love and sex did Hulk Hogan forgo because he was shackled to the Creature from the Black Lagoon and paying off her platinum card?

I just finished reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” by Gary Taubes, and it’s a mindblower.

The basic premise of the book is that many or most of the diseases that we experience today are due to a single cause –a diet high in refined carbohydrates (e.g., potatoes, beer, and sugar). This premise sounds implausible, especially since we’ve been lead to believe that high fat and artificial ingredients are responsible for heart attacks and cancer.

Every disease that we consider as an inevitable part of growing old, such as cancer, diabetes, coronary disease, were unknown in hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherers were slim, had good teeth, and rarely suffered from ailments like appendicitis and constipation. In case after case, Europeans in primitive societies observed that the natives weren’t fat, diabetic, and experienced little or no heart disease or cancer. When Albert Schweitzer first went to Africa, he treated Africans daily for thirty years and saw nothing in the way of cancer.

If the “fat is deadly” dogma were true, then many primitive cultures would have died out long ago. The Masai cattlemen lived on a diet that was very high in fat, living on meat, blood, and milk. (The Masai also had very low blood-cholesterol levels, despite a diet of 3,000 calories a day consisting mostly of saturated fat.)

The Eskimo lived exclusively on fish. Harvard anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote of living for years on nothing but fish. (Remember how we were told to avoid fatty fish like salmon, which was like a dietary Grim Reaper dressed in pale pink? Until it was discovered that fatty fish is heart-healthy.) When Stefansson was challenged , he underwent scientific test in which he was confined to a hospital and fed a diet consisting entirely of meat. He thrived.

The Tokelau Islanders lived on a diet consisting primarily of coconut. 50% of their calories were from fat, and 90% of those fat calories were from saturated fat! According to today’s anti-fat, high carb consensus, Tokelau Atoll should have resembled The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yet the Tokelau islanders were in excellent health.

It was not until Tokelau residents went to New Zealand and began eating a Western diet that they began to gain weight, get diabetes, and have high blood pressure. Yet the islanders in New Zealand ate less fat ans smoked fewer cigarettes, than those who had stayed behind on Tokelau.

The real culprit is the recently documented metabolic syndrome, which is also discussed in the South Beach Diet books. A high carbohydrate diet, especially one with refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour, leads to high insulin levels. Insulin signals the body to store fat. Increased insulin levels lead to diabetes and heart disease. While we tend to think of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as three separate diseases, they are really Siamese triplets born of the same underlying cause.

The most eye-opening revelation of the book is the link between high blood sugar and cancer. The link between the Western diet and cancer has always been assumed to be additives or impurities in food, like FDA Yellow #5 or MSG. The real problem is high levels of blood insulin levels. Insulin feeds tumors.

You can read Taubes’ New York Times article here.

40 year old Hugh Jackman was just named the “sexiest man alive” by People magazine.

What are the odds that a 40 year old will be named the sexiest woman alive? (Yes, 42 year old Halle Berry was named sexiest woman by Esquire magazine, but who really doubts that she was more attractive at 22?) Scarlett Johansen, at 23, is a much better pick.

This illustrates a simple concept: It is women, not men, who have a biological clock that is ticking like a time bomb. Women are fertile for a shorter period of their lives than men are.

According to nature, it is better for women to look screamingly hot (admittedly not a scientific term) for a short period of time, than to look good for a long period of time.

This leads me to the ripoff that is marriage. Men marry for sex with a young, beautiful woman, while women marry for access to a man’s resources. In the typical marriage-to-the-death scenario, the man loses out.

A 22 year old woman I know is engaged. She is very sexy, in large part just due to her age. At 22, her estrogen levels are at their peak, and estrogen is responsible for a great deal of feminine beauty, such as skin tone and hourglass shape. (For instance, menopausal women have lower levels of estrogen, and rapidly put on weight.)

As attractive as she is now, she is at her physical peak. She has a large curvy butt, which drives men (like me) crazy, but how sexy will she be at 40, when she’s put on weight on her butt and hips, and her skin is not so smooth or taut? She is on the downhill slope.

Her husband on the other hand, does not have such a short window of attractiveness. Furthermore, each year that works, his status and economic power increase.

So the man marries a woman who becomes less desirable each year, while a woman marries a man who becomes sexually more appealing as well as wealthier. Eventually a man reaches a point where he is fertile, but his wife is not. At a point in his life when he is capable of starting a new family, he is stuck in a marriage with an aging hag.

No one ever really thinks of it, but I have seen dumpy women with short hair that only accentuates their fatness and age. You would not screw one of these women at gunpoint, yet they are wearing expensive clothing and drive late model SUV’s. Now what sane guy would be these crones anything? These worn drabs are still cashing in on the fact that they were attractive, perhaps only marginally so, 20 nor 30 years ago, and some dumbass is still paying for it.

When you read all of the get-rich-quick books, all of the wealth books, all of the guys in tuxedos leaning on a Porsche selling “Make Money Like I Did” programs, they are all based on a single premise: The answer in your life comes from moving to the top of the pyramid.

The median American income in 2007 was $48,000. If you earn $48,000 dollars, half of Americans make less than you do, and the other half makes more. Only 19% of American households earn $100,000 or more.

Statistically, the odds are against you. Keep in mind, that if you’re moving up, and trying to move up, so is everyone else.

In the California Gold Rush, the real money wasn’t made by prospectors, but by those supplied prospectors. Levi Strauss, Girardelli chocolates, and Wells Fargo, are examples of companies that struck gold not by getting dirty, but by supplying those who were. The real money is in feeding gold fever, wherein a hardworking drudge will do anything to crawl his way up from the bottom of the pyramid.

And then as now, prostitutes (both sexual and moral whores) made a killing.

This is the appeal of Amway and multi-level marketing, as well Mammoth Widgets, Inc. –peons will work much harder when “the dream” is dangled in front of them, much harder than they will work for simple wages. It’s the concept of work as a 40 hour a week lottery ticket that just might pay off some day in untold riches.

Here’s an idea: What if the answer is NOT in moving to the top of the pyramid? What if you could earn a median income, but live like you’re filthy rich? For $48,000 a year, you could live like a king in the Philippines. You’d have a live-in maid and so many young women that you’d have to pop Viagra like Skittles just to keep up.

In fact, you could still live very well for $24,000 a year in the Philippines.

This idea of leveraging your earning power by automating your income and going overseas is the principal theme of The Four Hour Workweek.

On the face of it, it seems like a much more realistic approach to real wealth and happiness than trying to claw your way to the top of the pyramid.

Mexico City is going to start giving away free Viagra to elderly men. Are they on to something?

I have been reading “The Hardness Factor,” by Dr. Steven Lamm, in which he makes the case that the quality of a man’s erections (which we might refer to as “sexual health”) are directly related to a man’s overall physical health. Since an erection is a product of a man’s circulatory and nervous system, poor cardiovascular health and nerve damage that cause poor erections or an inability to get an erection are signs not of isolated sexual problems, but of much larger health problems.

According to a Canadian study, 90% of men with heart problems and erectile dysfunction experienced erection difficulties 3 years before they hard any symptoms of coronary disease. This is the main idea of The Hardness Factor –erection difficulties are signs of much larger health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease.

There is also the study that men with more frequent ejaculations are less likely to get prostate cancer.

It has become clear to me now that Christian way of thinking, in which sex is relegated to a separate world of sin and shame, is wrong. Christianity has the idea that you can be a normal, healthy person, with your sexuality in the permanent “off” mode.

When I was a teenage fundamentalist Christian, it was taught that smoking, drugs, and drinking alcohol were sinful because they harmed your body. But there were plenty of fat people in church, and a couple who were morbidly obese, but that was just fine. No problem here!

I work with a Christian man who—despite the fact that he’s a great guy– is obese and has diabetes, a condition that Lamm calls “diabesity.” Being diabetic and grossly overweight makes one a walking metabolic train wreck, and you’re waltzing with the Grim Reaper unawares. If you’re going to have to be buried in an oversized coffin, you’re likely to need that coffin sooner than later. Christianity is just fine with an obese, sloppy man, with diabetes, high blood pressure, and who couldn’t have sex if his life depended on it, which it does, in fact.

Viagra; Super Drug?

Rather than rush out and treat erectile difficulties with Viagra or other drugs, Dr. Lamm rightly points out that a guy should treat the underlying problem of increased weight, poor cardiovascular health, high LDL cholesterol levels, and a life on the couch, up to your elbows in a super size bag of Cheetos.

There is gathering evidence that Viagra and other sexual performance drugs may be life savers. Keep in mind that Viagra was developed as a heart medication, and its sexual effects were only accidentally discovered. Viagra is used to treat pregnant women with high blood pressure and to ward off jet lag. In one study, cyclists taking Viagra improved their performance by 40%!

For men with erectile dysfunction, one study showed that Viagra reduced the risk of heart attack by one third. Lamm says that evidence is beginning to show that sexual performance drugs have heart and circulatory benefits, and “will commonly be used in the near future as heart medicines.”

(Win32)”>

The problem with being at the bottom of the pyramid is that the lives of men at the top (the Alpha Males) is so drastically different from those at the bottom (the Beta Males.)

Let us consider a DUI arrest for both an Alpha and Beta Male.

The guy at the top of the pyramid has a lawyer who has evidence thrown out. The Alpha CEO knows an Alpha lawyer, who in turn knows the Alpha judge. In fact they’ve probably all met on the golf course. The CEO gets a fine, which he can pay easily, and performs “community service.”

If this sounds far fetched, my father was a California Highway Patrolman who investigated a case of a drunk driving fatality. A young man was driving drunk and wrecked his car, killing the passenger in the front passenger seat. It seems like an open and shut case, right? The driver is looking at prison for vehicular manslaughter.

Well the drunk driver is the son of wealthy parents, who hire a professor to testify in court. (Keep in mind that lawyer’s fees are so high that few people can afford to go to trial.) The professor argues that the wealthy survivor of the crash was not in fact the driver, but the passenger. He further contends that the impact of the collision caused the two bodies to be thrown around and to switch places!

The end result is that the wealthy young guy gets off scott free, when in similar circumstances you or I would have been in prison for years.

The differences between Alpha and Beta male are huge. Alpha males not only get preferential treatment, but all the “justice” money can buy, more money, better benefits, and all of the women worth having.

The irony is that all of the Beta Male’s efforts to improve his situation, whether working longer hours, putting in more time, becoming more of a “team player,” etc., merely solidify the Alpha Male status of those at the top.

The solution is: you must see the pyramid for what it is. Whether the pyramid is the corporation you work for, the church you belong to, the club or organization you belong to (e.g. Elks, Rotary, Habitat for Humanity, etc.), your efforts to work your way up to the top will not only never get you there, but they merely enrich those at the top.

Knowing this, if you are in a pyramid, keep your investment to a minimum. While you go through the motions of being the ideal employee, you are not kidding yourself about reality. You are not volunteering for anything, unless it will benefit you at some point in the future. You are not going to run furiously on the treadmill because now they are dangling two peanuts instead of just one. You are not sucked in by the hype, the promise of future riches.

Start your own business and work part time on it. Moonlight doing something in your area of expertise. Start your own pyramid. Found your own church.

Suppose you are out on a date. Your expertise is web page design. At some point in the date you will inevitably, invariably, immutably get the Ambition Test if she is interested in you.

“So, Bob, where do you see yourself 5 years from now?” “Where are you at in your career?” “What are your goals?” “Where do you work?” This is a mine field, and for years I blew this, because like a dumbass I didn’t even realize I was being tested.

You can answer, “I’m a low-level schmuck at Big Biz Inc.”

Or you can answer, “I’ve started my own webpage design business, and someday I’ll be bigger than Big Biz Inc.”

Which answer is more likely to get you laid?

Breaking free of the pyramid means your freedom, the ability to set your own hours, to set your own rules, to get women, and to become rich. Even if you never become a megastar, at least your efforts will not be stripped from you to enrich someone else. You will be spared the agony of developing a crush on your young, hot coworker, deluding yourself into thinking she likes you, only to discover that she is screwing the boss even though he’s already married and is a callous, hard-charging bastard.

Are you a part of a pyramid scheme? Don’t be too sure you’re not.

One defense that multi-level marketers (e.g. the Amway zombies, etc.) will make is that “all corporations are pyramids.” This means there is a leader or leaders at the top, then a few more senior executives with less power at lower salaries, and underneath them are middle management, and so on, with the largest number of the lowest paid, most disempowered employees at the bottom.

This is true. Most corporations are pyramids, as are many churches. Think of it, there’s a pastor at the top, then an associate pastor or two, followed by elders, then deacons, and so on. At the very bottom of the pyramid is the single largest group, the chump churchgoer. If that sounds harsh, I’ve been the chump churchgoer, doing menial chores in the shadow of a celebrity pastor who was making more than twice my salary, tax free.

As I see it, these are the characteristics of the pyramid:

A single or handful of leaders are at the top of the organization.

A mass of followers and members are at the bottom of the organization.

There is a disparity in income, power, and status between top and bottom.

The efforts of those at the bottom benefit those at the top.

A person’s chances of moving from the bottom to the top are illusory. (The game is rigged.)

People work harder than they otherwise would (put in extra hours, volunteer work, pay for things out of their own pockets, give up weekends, take dangerous work,etc.) because they overestimate their ability to move upwards.

For a woman, being part of the pyramid is no problem. She can sleep or marry her way to the top (which is the same thing). Supported by a boyfriend, husband, or similar rube, she can work part-time, turn down the promotion or transfer, or use her sex appeal to have men do her work for her. She can marry and drop out of the pyramid, then re-enter as she sees fit.

For a man, to be a part of the pyramid is to volunteer for a lifetime of slavery, with no hope of Moses killing your Egyptian slave master. Remember the woman who coasts through her tenure at the pyramid? Coming and going as she pleases, taking assignments that suit her, dropping out and in, all the while benefiting because of her “minority” status? Some dumbass in the pyramid is going to pick up her tab, and return home from a hellish day hauling several ton blocks of stone up the pyramid, to find himself waving a palm frond to cool some spoiled would-be Cleopatra reclining on a couch and popping grapes into her mouth.

Our pyramid slave will spend his entire life working to build a tribute to another man, constructing a monument to cast a slavedriver and exploiter of the first order as a god. The pyramid slave will feel scars from the whip spread across his back, like vines on a crumbling rock. But he’ll go back, day after day, because someday he’ll sit in the shade and drink from the gold cup. In the end he has his tongue cut out and he’s buried alive with the pharaoh.

Oops. I spent my whole life on an illusion.

Next: The Way Out