Sheesh, that's a pretty sad story. At least the part on how he lets himself get taken advantage of and walked all over.
And not to split hairs but your pops would have been an "Omega" male. Beta's are the 'second-in-command' to alpha's, and they are definitely not weak squeamish people (or wolves). I'd rather piss off an alpha male/female than a beta male/female.
Police and security guards are mostly made up of people who behave beta.
There are two completely different meanings to the words Alpha/Beta/Omega.
In Game Culture - aka modern anything goes western culture:
An Alpha is one who women choose to sleep with.
A Beta is someone who struggles but still gets his needs met.
An Omega is screwed.
In scientific circles, these terms relate to how men relate to each other. Mostly from studies of chimps.
An alpha is recognized as respected and dominant by other males. A beta is an ally of the alpha. Basically Alphas and Betas share the females amongst themselves.
What is an Omega then? An Omega is someone shunned or extremely low on the Male hierarchy. Basically if an Omega tries to get a woman, the Alphas and Betas will give him a sound thrashing.
Side note on cooperation. In lower chimps and most other animals... you just have an Alpha - hording all the women to himself, and the rest of the males form a bachelor herd. Only in the higher primates does this change - and the Alpha is not necessarily the strongest or biggest, but has the skills to maintain the allegiance of a lot of betas so it is hard to depose him.
The question arises, how does an Omega remain in the gene pool? Simple - seduction. What I suspect is a part of what you guys call confidence. The Omega has no allegiance to the Alphas and Betas so he doesnt care if he sleeps with their 'wives'.
An Omega appeals to the females need to spread her genes far and wide. He does this by convincing her that he is good at getting other women to sleep with him. This excites the female because inherently the Alphas and Betas strategy is more limited as they are 'sharing' the women meaning they are in a cooperative activity so any one of their gene sets (and ergo the woman's genes) is limited in the amount it can reproduce. For an Omega, not involved in such cooperative activity, the potential is unlimited.
One thing you'd notice of the Alpha/Beta strategy is control of the females reproductive capacity. You see this in ancient cultures a lot...
Matt Ridley's Red Queen said:
In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulate industry: The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women each of many "houses of virgins" throughout his kingdom. The were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor's concubines: Beneath him each rank of society afforded a h-arem of a particular legal size Great lords had h-arems of more than seven hundred women.
"Principal persons" were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nation thirty; heads of provinces of 1 00,000 people, twenty; leaders of I,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chief of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa 's women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.
Matt Ridley's Red Queen said:
The six independent "civilizations"of early history—Baby-on, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru—were emarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute. These men were despots, meaning they would kill their subjects without fear of retribution. Without exception, that vast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity. The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave "wives" at his command. The Egyptian
pharaoh Akhenaten procured 317 concubines and "droves"of con-orts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs: The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his h-arem. The Inca Atahualpa, as we have seen, kept virgins on tap throughout the
kingdom:
Not only did these six emperors, each typical of his predecessors and successors, have similarly large h-arems, but they employed similar techniques to fill and guard them. They recruited young (usually prepubertal) women, kept them in highly defensible
and escape-proof forts, guarded them with eunuchs, pampered them, and expected them to breed the emperor's children. Measures to enhance the fertility of the h-arems were common. Wet nurses, who allow women to resume ovulation by cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B:C.; they were sung about in Sumerian lullabies.
Note the point: Men are choosing the h-arems.
Now modern western culture is different. Women have all the power in regards to their sexuality - soft h-arems still form - but women are the ones choosing the h-arem to belong in. (And yes, not all of them - many are in LTRs and serially and/or completely monogamous by their own choice etc). This is a diametrically opposite situation.
The question of course arises: How do women choose?
Well basically thats what this whole thread is about. With lots of different opinions.
I dont have the answer, however to see how much things have changed...
Consider the commander of the Battle of the Phillippine Sea (also known as the Great Mariana's Turkey shoot). He wrote letters to his future wife. Then he met her and married her after the war (sorry cannot find a link, I read this long ago). Could someone meet his wife that way today?
And if not, is there not a differential gene selection for such types of men? And perhaps for Betas and Alphas in the scientific sense, over Omegas?
Edit:
Why is h-arem an edited word?