What is the stumbling block for a world of "Alphas"? [closed]

Question

In 149597871's utopia, there will be no need for that as only a small minority of "alpha" males would be allowed to impregnate girls while the rest of the (beta) men will only support them financially and be there to help raise kids, etc

In a world where the best men (in terms of genes) with the best looks, height, intelligence and strength are breeders while the rest of the men are sexless and only exist to take care of children: What is the first thing that can go so wrong it will destroy this system?

More details:

• This is located on earth, actual present day.

• This is enforced, and supported by the scientific consensus of the world's health organization.

Before VTC

• This question is looking for a major loophole in a system not for plot points in a story.

• Whether this system is moral or not shouldn't matter, it is pretty mild and mostly amusing when compared to other dystopian questions.

Best Answer

The best answers should include pitfalls and holes in the system that can't be fixed without an enormous quantity of time/resources. Enormous quantity = anything that would bring a country to its knees.

Answer 1

I've decided to scrap my previous answer to make my ranting more structured. There are a number of issues with the system, including:

Origin

The system is quite different from what we have now. It would need some catastrophic/revolutionary changes to society. There will be no natural acceptance. 'Recommendations from the health specialists' isn't going to cut it. People now do not vaccinate their children, give birth at home and gleefully ignore lifestyle and dietary recommendations.

Will to participate

Simply said, it is unclear who will benefit from this system. It ignores the wishes and the will of women completely (the wish to select sex partners, to choose the farther for the child and to guarantee the future of the child), and severely restricts most of the men. Interestingly, the power and the benefits in this system are separated. The most power is in the hands of the gatekeepers - the people who decide, who will procreate and who will not. The benefit is that of the future 'alphas'. That's not how it works. The last Utopian attempt at society where benefit and power were so separated was the Soviet Union. There, 'the Party' was supposed to guide the society for the benefit of 'the workers'. Needless to say that quite soon the Party had become the ruling class that guaranteed its own benefit first.

Enforcement

That is the biggest and most glaring issue with the proposed system. It needs a lot of enforcement at a lot of levels of society. You are restricting the rights of about 90% of your population for the benefit of 10% in an issue as basic as reproduction. And those 10% do not seem to have any way to enforce their privileged position. Who controls the process of selection? How exactly is the sex and procreation prohibited? Is there an operation, chemical or surgical? Who does it then? What about the other countries? Is this system in one country only or a worldwide one? (Good luck having the whole world agree to something so inane) Who can prohibit a woman from going to a different country and getting pregnant there? Or giving birth there?

Even if you manage to get the system started, you still will have a lot of issues to deal with.

Gatekeeping and Corruption

I've touched on these points already, but it bears repeating. First, there is no 'scientifically best' genotype. There always is a vague societal consensus on quite self-contradicting and broad ideal. So, humans would need to implement the selection. And those humans have the most power in your world. They will be interested in playing the system for their own benefit - plain bribes or blackmail, the desire to make their own child 'privileged', the desire to hurt others, etc.

Toxic Levels of Competition

If selection is done later in life, not only on the basis of the genetic makeup, but using some sort of aptitude test, you can expect a surprise. The guys nearest to the society's ideal will always have stuff happening to them. Starting from small misfortunes to the possibility of being found dead just before the test.

Population Decline

Unless it is the real goal of your system, that is going to be a major side effect. With a huge part of your male population infertile/asexual, women have to jump through a lot of hoops to get pregnant. I even fail to imagine how this should be structured. Are alphas in effect male prostitutes, having no other job but to have sex? Or is it done as a medical procedure or artificial insemination? Even now in the western society a lot of women choose not to get pregnant, because pregnancy, childbirth and child care are major impositions. You are additionally complicating the 'getting pregnant' part on top of that.

So, in effect, such a society would be hard to create, hard to support, and even if you managed it, you'd get a rapidly ageing, genetically stagnating society, ruled by corrupt 'doctors'.

Answer 2

Rebellion:

Since when do people just follow something because the scientific consensus indicates an optimal course of action? They don't even do this when the scientific consensus says it's for their own, personal good, let alone when the scientific consensus acknowledges working against their personal interest.

Also, inbreeding.

Answer 3

As regards a society entirely comprised of "Alphas"; from Brave New World

Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing."

"What was that?" asked the Savage.

Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebot- tling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricul- tural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders dis- obeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were per- petually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high- grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the govern- ment of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."

The problem with eugenics is that breeding for aesthetic purposes does not necessarily produce a population that is optimal for society. What about relentless endurance and willingness to work? What about being interested in kids and family? What about being immune to a virus? The point of Huxley in the above quote is that it takes all kinds, and your system yields one kind.

Answer 4

Lack of genetic diversity

The simplest issue is that since the gene set is so limited, a disease can rip through society with catastrophic effect. Yes, plagues in the past have killed up to a third of populations, but this will be even more devastating, because not only are you breeding from few men, you are deliberately choosing them to be similar.

Other problems are less direct, but "best" is situation dependent, and new situations arise all the time.

Answer 5

only a small minority of "alpha" males would be allowed to impregnate girls while the rest of the (beta) men will only support them financially and be there to help raise kids, etc

Lets flip this particular little fantasy upside-down.

Here's your problem: fertilising people the old fashioned way is kinda time consuming, and surprisingly unreliable, especially when women hit the ripe old age of their late twenties, and people are less inclined to have kids young these days.

With a small minority of fertile men, what you're going to get is a lower rate of births and regions where large numbers of children are step-siblings. Avoiding inbreeding is going to be challenging.

So what do you do? Why, you round up the "alphas", who are vastly outnumbered after all, and you lock them away somewhere nice and safe where they can't come to any harm. Then, much like modern race horses or bulls from valuable breeding stock, they will have the one valuable thing they produce mechanically extracted at regular intervals. Artificial insemination requires rather fewer sperm than the old-fashioned method, as it turns out, and so far more people are now able to have children given the same level of supply. This also means they generally won't be reproducing the old-fashioned way, because it would be wasteful of a valuable resource. Perhaps more importantly, it becomes relatively straightforward to freeze and distribute genetic material over long distances, vastly reducing the "small local gene pool" problem.

I posit that "alpha" is a poor choice of term, but instead that "stud", in the farming sense, might be more appropriate. "Alpha" has connotations of leadership or superiority, rather than "reduced to the status of livestock".

This is enforced, and supported by the scientific consensus of the world's health organization.

Where have you been for the last two years? scientific consensus and the opinions of the WHO count for nothing.

Answer 6

To understand my answer you first need to understand what "alpha male" truly means.

At some point a study was written about a variety of species, such as apes and wolves. This study coined the term alpha male and beta male. Some people who read it selectively took some parts out and then redefined what alpha male meant. To illustrate:

The alpha male of wolves determines when it is time to wake up. He determines where they will go and when they will hunt. Alpha males are usually the biggest and they get the first bite of any kill they make. This means they are the most dominant and have to fight the pack in order to remain the alpha!

However the truth is different. For example its very specific that the alpha male gets the first bite. The first to eat are the sick and the young. The reason the alpha gets to bite first is because the sick and the young might not be strong enough to break the skin enough to start eating. The alpha is also responsible for security of the pack, especially a safe space for the young. So if danger is detected the alpha is supposed to be the first to face it. If a fight breaks out between members of the pack the alpha is expected to stop the fight and ensure peace. The alpha is also responsible for food, and will gladly "listen" to any beta males who might have detected food when determining the direction they go to.

The point is that being the alpha is a responsibility and their privileges are given to them rather than taken. Alphas who use dominance to further their own goals are deposed and possibly exiled.

This leaves three scenarios:

1: the alphas will actually be alpha's and take responsibility for the group. The alphas will not agree to a system that only favors them and leaves the betas as slaves.

2: the alphas will be corrupted by the power they get and stop being alphas but slave masters. The decadent lifestyle that goes with this will devolve the alphas (part of genetics changes by the experiences in your life). In the meantime the beta males even in human society will revolt and depose the corrupt alphas if they can.

3: the most likely option: civil war. Some alphas will remain alphas and try to protect the group as a whole, other alphas will become various shades of corrupted and abuse their position. This leads to a divide and an attempt to get rid of the corrupt alphas.