The Tension Between Winners and Losers in Life

Why some uncool losers are quarantined to perpetuate mainstream frauds

Are you a winner or a loser in life? Best of all, you might be a cool winner or even a cool loser.

Not everyone’s success or failure is politically correct. Bankers, lawyers, and politicians are often roundly condemned even when they’re living the good life. Famous actors and tenured academics are winners in a material sense, but they, too, are excoriated in certain circles for being “effete liberal elites.”

Coolness comes and goes in fads. In the twenty-first century it’s cool in developed societies to be gay, as in homosexual, and other minorities may strive to make it cool to belong to their ethnicity or orientation. Yet historically, these groups were often losers in life, meaning that they were ostracized or even battered and enslaved. Fads rest on fickleness, and even as we write laws to codify our civil rights, fads change, and laws can be rewritten.

In any case, besides relatively cool losers, such as those who have their fifteen minutes of fame, there are also the more thoroughgoing losers, the true outcasts, black sheep, and pariahs who are decidedly uncool in their failures. These include the criminal class, whose members are either rotting in jail or who live on the outskirts, and who are typically hampered by poverty, a lack of education, or mental illness.

Not all uncool failures, though, result in criminality. Some oversensitive, lazy, inquisitive, or melancholy personalities have a harder time fitting into societies that are driven by frauds and mass delusions. Sometimes these uncool personalities, too, are weighed down further by mental illness.

Due, then, to the psychological basis of this loser class, we can expect the clash between winners and uncool losers to have been longstanding, and indeed that’s what we find in history. The rivalry between the reflective and oversensitive outsiders and the duped, “well-adjusted” masses is as old as shamans, philosophers, ascetics, prophets, monks, and artists.

This struggle is perpetuated by the same social mechanisms that keep foreign tribes at bay. We tell stories about others to feel better about ourselves. Think of the unkind words, not to mention the systemic abuse that aristocrats have heaped on their vulgar inferiors. Mass society demonizes outsiders to justify civilized endeavours.

The problem is that these outsiders often pose explicit or implicit challenges to mainstream practices. Living on the outskirts gives you time to think and a fresh perspective, so the true loser (in conventional, material terms) may lose faith in society’s gods and games. Rather than answering these challenges directly and in good faith, the less reflective folks are bound to dismiss the challenge as arising out of resentment or as a symptom of illness and defeat.

You can almost hear how the winners would dismiss these outsiders: “How helpless these losers — these prophets, philosophers, saints, introverts, artists, and brooders — must be to have proved unable to hold down a job, to find a mate, to have many friends, to have made a mark on the world! What, these impoverished nobodies deign to speak against the masses who plainly triumph over them?”

Indeed, how could the middle class, let alone aristocrats, celebrities, and tyrants take seriously the challenge of that class conflict?

The uncool losers, namely those who fail to adjust to society’s expectations are beneath the winner’s contempt. These losers will seem helpless and pitiful for all that they lack. Unable to negotiate the public spaces, unable to share in mainstream joys, haunted by pointless questioning and by seemingly mad, abstract preoccupations, these losers are like mere pests to the well-adjusted.

How could it be otherwise when to empathize with a loser is already to begin to lose in life? This kind of social and material loss is contagious, which is why losers are held at bay as pariahs in virtual quarantine.

What’s the essence of these losers? Setting aside the particularities of their antisociality, what’s their unforgivable sin, as it were? Perhaps the quintessential loser is the one who can’t adapt to society because she’s come deliberately to reject mass expectations, including the imperatives of having a career, a family, or a friendly persona.

Again, some such challenges are easily dismissed, namely the overtly criminal ones. But the losers who live in peace, bearing the cross of Christ, as it were, even if they’re atheists; those who are “poor in spirit” because they’ve been at least inspired by their marginalization, if not fully enlightened; those who are disposed to feel too strongly, to reckon with existential problems because their severe introversion or mental imbalance leaves them no choice — these “losers” are pariahs, in part, because they’re dangerous.

Objectivity, skepticism, and creativity have always been perilous human advantages. We turned these tools against the wilderness and became the most dangerous species on Earth. But the reviled losers are poised to turn these tools against themselves and against the presumptions of mass society, and that’s the appalling, often unstated threat at issue: our species threatens to destroy itself not just with technological ingenuity but with philosophical insight.

That’s what the masses resist most in despising antisocial (yet subcriminal) losers, namely the possibility that civilization carries the seeds of its destruction, that if the mainstream winners should see life the way losers do, civilized progress would come to a standstill.

For all the scorn the winners heap on the dangerous losers in life, winners should suspect that the feeling is mutual. After all, the leaders of these losers are among the most venerated elitists, from Socrates to Jesus to the Buddha, all of whom held out the possibility of enlightenment that requires the greatest of social deficiencies.

To “win” in life, from an enlightened standpoint is precisely to lose out in mainstream terms. To win in a higher sense — which seems to the well-adjusted masses like the lowest depth — is to see through the world itself as an illusion, as a trick of the ego, as a demonic prison for awakened consciousness, or as a confidence game that keeps afloat bloodlines of wealthy sociopaths.

If uncool losers are unconsciously or traditionally revered, winners must be loathed by comparison. The mainstream standards that make certain winners cool are themselves repudiated from the standpoint of our higher calling.

Thus, to entertain these pitiful, melancholy, counterproductive doubts, and to see the world from the “loser’s” perspective is precisely to wonder whether conventional winning is, after all, a sham. If these losers, then, must be quarantined as human viruses, how vain would the whole human project seem to a microscopic virus?