You can tell a lot about people by how they take it when things don’t go their way. I’ve seen lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants act the fool after an adverse ruling or verdict. For example:
1) A business owner I had a case against busted his fist on the courtroom door after we got a pretty good verdict against him.
2) A lawyer who accused a judge of not knowing how to read the law slammed the door on the courtroom after the judge made him read that particular statute out loud in a crowded courtroom and humiliate himself – “Let’s just see who can and cannot read the plain language of the statute, shall we, counsellor?”. The judge could have found him in contempt of court and let him have a taste of the county jail, but she figured he had already been sufficiently humiliated by being such a sore loser in front of so many colleagues.
3) A considerable minority of Americans citizens believe the 2020 election was stolen, and some of those believe the former President is still the President … because, how could their chosen candidate/savior possibly lose? He said he won, therefore he MUST have won. Since he won, he didn’t lose. Therefore, violence is justified and even necessary because Trump is still the legal POTUS and the other guy is a pawn, a puppet, and an illegitimate cheat.
It certainly gives one the perspective that maybe there are alternative universes, at least two of them and maybe an infinity, all occurring at the same time.
You can see it in sports, bigly. YUGEly. Even in pickup recreational games, people don’t know how to lose. If you measure your happiness in playing a game ONLY by whether you win or lose, it takes all the fun out of the game, for you AND for others who are trying to get in some great exercise and have a little fun.
Why is this a problem? You are going to “lose” every once in a while so please don’t let it ruin your whole minute, your whole day, your whole life. If you define your life and identity by whether you “win” or “lose”, you can’t accept losing. Inability to accept losing leads to reality distortion, including the delusion that you won, and were cheated by the “other side”. Life is a binary event: you win, you lose, you really won but were cheated by the referees — or the election officials, or somebody you were in business with, or the judge who “can’t read the law”.
When I postulate that we as a culture have forgotten how to lose, I suppose we should consider the possibility that we never really practiced dignity in defeat as a culture. For example, we used to say that “America won all her wars”, but what about the War of 1812? James Madison and company got themselves in the middle of a war for global domination between Britain and France. We got our capitol burned, lost a small army to defeat in Canada, agreed to a peace treaty with Britain, and could only claim “victory” because Andy Jackson clobbered the British at New Orleans AFTER the war was over. I fail to see how that was a big win, but in order to be a part of a nation that “wins all her wars” we re-defined a big nothing into a wonderful victorious “Battle of New Orleans” and adopted a bastardized drinking song as our new national anthem.
Capitalism and democracy work great together because they reward free thinking and productive economic activity. The down side is when there is a contest between Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk over who can be the richest man in the world, make the most off of their hourly-wage employees, and shoot their friends and themselves into space for a joyride firstest with the mostest. Why is that a problem? Because they “win” by getting unbelievably wealthy while their employees are wage slaved. Not slaves, but slaved, because they are nominally free, but stuck in low-paying jobs so the boss can get filthy rich.
Imagine being a trillionaire but thinking of yourself as a “loser” because another trillionaire has more trillions than you do. How depressing. If you’re not numero uno, you are just another also-ran … like the “loser” of the Super Bowl.
One of my high school friends denied, to the day he died, that he had COVID. But, he died of COVID. My buddy (we were college roomies, too) could not admit that he was wrong, that he had made the wrong calculation and believed the wrong information and trusted the inflamed fears over the proven data. He was a brilliant guy, loved by many. Since he denied he had the disease, he refused to get treatment for it. That would have been an admission that he was wrong, I think. Still, I wonder if honest confrontation and acceptance of the truth may have saved his life. Dammit.
Sometimes the refusal to lose, to be wrong, is beyond delusional. There’s the prophet/preacher on the street corner in sackcloth and ashes, revising ever forward into the future that imminent date before which we must repent in order to be saved. Some QAnons steadfastly kept vigil for the arrival of JFK, Jr. at Dealey Plaza long after he failed to show. This is pretty astonishing. These people had to actually believe that JFK, Jr. never died AND that the only reason he was late to the party was … his plane disappeared on the way or something? I have no doubt Elvis, Hitler, and JFK were hangin’ just around the corner and would have joined the part if only Junior would have shown up.
Socrates said “to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Not the end of wisdom, or complete wisdom, but rather the ability to seek truth. Self-examination after adverse events can help us to evaluate and become better, but only if we face and confront reality rather than the distortion we may have created in order to justify our “loss”. In order to do that, we need to recognize our own ideological and cultural biases: you can’t look at a picture through an unfiltered lens, unless you acknowledge and remove the filter of your own limitations and prejudices.
My sister Nancy had the perfect response to losing an argument. When we were kids, after I’d logically and intelligently (in my own mind) shown her why she was wrong, she would just say: “Okay, Greg, have it your own wrong way.” End of argument. Done. That was infuriating. I not only didn’t know how to lose, but my sis had figured out how to make me feel like I had lost even though I knew I had won. It was like the old Italian geezer in Catch-22, explaining to Nately that it was Italy that won the war by adroitly switching sides:
“You put so much stock in winning wars,” the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. “The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we’ve done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn’t a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.”
Just like the old man, we can win by losing. It seems the problem with not knowing how to lose, is that we insist on binary outcomes; you either win, or you lose. If you lose you have to act like a sore loser and be all miserable, angry, and in denial instead of using it as an opportunity to grow and become better.
Social media gives us all kinds of great opportunities to be kind or abusive, intelligent and informing, or uncritical spreaders of lies created by haters and promulgated by bots. Marshall McCluhan wrote that “the medium is the massage”. Every new medium of communication has the potential for both instigation and resolution of conflict. The invention of the printing press triggered ignition and persistence of the Thirty Years War, an ideological conflict between devout Christians who claimed to all pray to the same One God and waged Bloody Hell on each other over the issue of whether man could achieve individual salvation vs. whether it was necessary to have the medium of a Priest to guide you on the way. The printing press spread the ideologies of both sides; the printing press also spread the word and distributed the agreements of the Peace of Westphalia, which established the concept of the nation-state, borders, and the international legal principal that nations do not interfere with each other within their established borders. Along the way, the formerly illiterate masses learned to read, which was probably what the Popes, Kings, and Queens who claimed Divine Right to rule by the Grace of God, were afraid of the whole time.
Likewise social media. You can use it to learn, and to distribute valid data and opinions; or you can use it to inflame anger and hatred. The personal computer puts “power in the hands of the villager” (McLuhan again). Social media and the “global village” were never envisioned by McCluhan to lead to “one mind” or tranquil unanimity. Rather, he correctly foresaw that social media and computer networks would lead to conflict precisely because they would promote diversity of opinion.
Then the question becomes: in order to “win”, do you have to prove you are “right”? If so, in order to be “right”, do you need to ignore, discount, or discredit facts because they don’t fit your subjective constructs or beliefs? If you’ve read this far, I’m pretty sure you don’t believe the vaccine contains a United Nations/Soros/Communist/Fascist-devised mind control chip that till turn you into a remote-control drone-bot programmed to install 1984 in the United States in 2022. But, some people do – because JFK, Jr. is coming back and also because libruls are stoopid.
Arguing about gun control is a totally ideological issue that should be totally factual, scientific, and objective – and take into account that the Constitution’s “flexibility” left the limits and constraints on “fundamental rights” like religion, speech, press, guns, and peaceable assembly. People who think ownership of any size, shape, caliber, or state of automated weaponry is a God-given right argue with a reasonable factual basis that the authors of the Bill of Rights intended to bestow a right of gun ownership on our populace in order to have the power to rise up in violent revolution against a government which was oppressive. People who think gun ownership may be regulated by government can also argue with a reasonable factual basis that the “forefathers” put in place elections so we could “throw the bums out” peacefully, and the “right” of gun ownership served the purposes of personal self-defense and readiness to be called up for military service (“well-regulated militia”). Both are searching for historical hints and clues. The historical record does not provide a clear answer. Unfortunately, ambiguity and nuance in such discussions do not fit well with that pre-conceived certainty which engenders ideologically righteous indignation.
Hence arises radicalism born of proclaimed ideological purity.
Now, I hate to break it to you but the 2020 election was not rigged by Chinese hackers who installed USB/Bluetooth remote control thermostats in the Dominion voting machines used in many states. Also it’s not true that Caesar Chavez implanted Democrat-favoring software that switched votes in order to steal the 2020 election from Trump and other Republicans.
Unless, that is, Chavez is getting ready to show up at Dealey Plaza along with JFK, JFK Jr, Hitler, and Elvis and help teach the faithful how to stop the Democrats from eating babies.
In every other Presidential election since James Polk or Garfield or Lincoln, the losers have accepted their loss and attempted to contribute to the subsequent welfare of the nation (and their own personal finances). Presidents and presidential candidates, defeated at the polls, have accepted the result and put the nation ahead of themselves. Gore shut down Democrats attempting to contest his loss to Bush, and certified Bush’s razor-thin electoral win. G.W.H. Bush conceded graciously to Clinton. After he and Jimmy Carter lost to Reagan, Walter Mondale said simply: “We obeyed the law, we kept the nation out of war, and we told the truth.”
Truman lost, but is now thought of as one of our GREAT Presidents. Carter lost, but is now thought of as one of our great ex-Presidents. Teddy Roosevelt lost, but is on Mt. Rushmore along with Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson. Reaching farther back, John Q. Adams lost, but then was elected to Congress and became the public conscience of the nation regarding slavery.
We would learn nothing if we won all the time and all successes came easy. I’ve had sufficient experience at “winning” and “losing” in the courtroom to know that the losses have generally taught me more about lawyering than the wins. My personal favorite law school teacher, Professor Harold Young, offered this wisdom: “A lawyer who says they’ve never lost a case is either lying, or has only tried one case.”
So honestly, what does it mean or matter to say that ours is the “Greatest nation in the history of the world”, or to define our personal, national, or cultural ethos by whether we are the #1 economy, the best at everything, the winner of all wars and all conflicts, and defining our history as one glorious triumphant march from the Pilgrims to the launch of Bezos into a few minutes of weightlessness ecstasy? If that’s the only story we know, we’ve left out so much truth that our conception of our nation and ourselves is an utter fabricated fantasy.
Having the most toys may feel like winning, but if we win by using others as rungs to climb over on our way to the top, I don’t call that winning. Love, and life, are not zero-sum games. You can lose a pickup basketball game and still have a really good time playing, and get the full benefit of exercise, fun, friendship, and competitive sport.
As long as you don’t ruin your own day by only being happy if you beat somebody else.
