Self-help guru Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, born Gavin Long, peddled a personal philosophy called “Alpha Preneurism” for years before he killed three Baton Rouge police officers on Sunday.  A “mental game coach” and “freedom strategist,” Long’s worldview privileged “alpha male” behavior and values.  Such fully mature and masculine men are not only dominant over women and “beta males”—the “Complainers-&-Blamers, Purposeless and P*ssy Whipped Men”—they were also the only fully humans, according to Long’s system, eligible for rights, capable of exercising freedom, and able to develop into spiritual beings who could exist beyond death.

Every man should own a suit, arugula enhances sexual performance, and beautiful women must be tamed in order to be conquered: Long’s writings and podcasts teach other men how to become “alpha minded, emotionally disciplined, and financially free   Yet beyond his advice on vegetarianism and detoxification, Long laid out a comprehensive “Alpha Code of Conduct,” rules for how to be and descriptions of the defining traits for an alpha male.

Characterized by action, initiative, independence, and logic, concerned with modelling behavior for others—for “future alphas and alphas in training”— alpha men are also, Long claims, spiritual beings, advanced in disciplined “detachment.”  Voicing a popular conception of self-help metaphysics, most notably associated with the New Thought movement, Long speaks of “the One within, what others call the One above.”  While he attributed to God the rights laid out in the Constitution, he was quick to point out that those rights only apply to people—to alphas—who earn them, by taking decisive action in the world.

Long’s worldview was divided along gendered lines.  Action was for alpha males; talk for females and betas. He characterized the recent protests over police shootings, as essentially feminine, emotional “whining.” “Alpha Preneurs don’t complain, we provide solutions,” he said.  “if you got a problem, you do something to fix it.”  In a now much-cited tweet, Long calls violence as “a answer,” rather than “the answer,” but in his writing and talk it is the answer that recurs.  For interpersonal problems—at least between males—fighting leads to resolution.  Long offers a mythic background for this stance: in ancient Africa, women would tell their men to either return home having killed their enemies or be brought back home dead.  Defeat in or backing down from a fight were not options.  Men “either fight or shut the f*ck up and go home.”  Yet “the alpha male isn’t confrontational, he is confident,” the difference being, in large part, this emphasis on rationality and the eschewal of emotion.  Alphas, Long writes chillingly, “assess the enemy and attack accordingly.”

Women’s “psyche” and “primal characteristics” are alien to the “higher level” which alpha males can achieve.  With rational thought rather than feeling, alpha males continually “improve… develop.”  As men advance along the alpha trajectory, they must practice disciplined detachment from this world.  Long recommends that all would-be alphas study a PBS documentary on the Buddha, and he speaks of his own “celibacy journey” of the last few years as the means by which he “took my spirituality to another level.”  Detachment, in his understanding, means disassociation with both emotions and perceptions: your physical senses are not who you are, he cautions, nor are you your body.

Seemingly preparing for his murderous rampage and death, Long posted videos disavowing any “affiliation” with other people, groups, or movements, and reiterating his belief that physical death was not the end of the “spiritual self.”  Framing his independence in terms at the core of his philosophy, he declared, “I thought my own thoughts.  I made my own decisions.  I’m the one.”  Indeed, spiritual vitality is equated, in his thought, with confidence and self-determination, an absolute lack of insecurity, with what he calls “holding ya nuts” or “manning up.”

In one of his more jarring podcasts, Long talks of the time when, as a Marine, he was told he would be deployed to Iraq earlier than he expected.  It was “a no-go,” that order, Meaning complying with it was not a possibility.  Instead, Long saw himself as having two options:  “refuse to deploy” or take his complaint “straight to the proverbial CEO…the Inspector General.”  Even in the Marines, we’re told, an alpha makes his own path, makes his own rules.  Indeed, to do anything else, in Long’s system, would be spiritual suicide, the surrender of alpha male standing and the metaphysical status than comes with it.  “I’m better off internally knowing that I stood on my righteousness,” Long said, with “righteousness” here defined as and by self-determination; to “stand for what’s mine.”

Despite disavowing all affiliations before his death, Long had filed legal paperwork in 2015—changing his name, reserving his sovereign rights, certifying “live birth” as an individual—using forms purchased from a business called United Washitaw, run by an individual affiliated with the fragmented Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah movement, the major claim of which is that ancient Africans were the first to settle the land that became the United States.  The attraction for Long to so-called “sovereign citizen” ideology seems obvious: he was obsessed with individualism, with freedom defined in terms of consent.  And as a true individualist, he espoused an elaborate philosophy that was distinctly his own.

Among the many tragedies in this case is that Long marketed his philosophy specifically to the young.  Returning again and again to his own childhood, in which he had no model of real masculinity, Long offers himself as an example for boys to follow.  Listening to his self-help routines now—his jokes about how to win the “competition” for the most and most beautiful women, his rules for how to be a “mac” as opposed to “losing your man card”—one cannot but be haunted by the horror he inflicted, for the city he traumatized, the children and families he left bereft.  Yet his philosophy deserves attention.  Masculinity characterized by violence and competition, a model of ego celebrating emotional detachment and self-determination: these are not fringe or niche-market ideas. Long’s personal philosophy emerged from the structure of and reflects norms from our larger society.

Resources

Dew, Spencer. "Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah: Counterfactual Religious Readings of the Law." Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 19 No. 2, November 2015. (Available for free online through September 1, 2016).

Long, Gavin. Conversations with Cosmo (website). http://convoswithcosmo.com/

Gavin Long says "I am NOT affiliated with Anyone!" ItsOndeck Mag. Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5MqCj-QLyQ

Image credit: "Downtown Baton Rouge Skyline" by Antrell Williams/ Flickr via Compfight / Creative Commons license.