Post #21: Nobody Loves a Winner

21 May 2023

In the Dominion north of Niagara Falls, Leonard Cohen established in 1966, with a cult novel published before he became world-famous as a musician, that losers can be beautiful (no very surprising discovery, as a Canadian friend just pointed out to me, given the role of losing parties in the country’s history, from the natives to the Arcadians and the Quebecois, from the Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution to the more recent immigrants escaping defeat elsewhere). Meanwhile in the super-powered Republic to the south, it is a truth held to be self-evident that nobody loves them. Whether we really love the winners, however, has not been settled on either side of the border, nor much discussed elsewhere.

The big prizes in life, we should be under no illusions, certainly do tend to go so reliably to a lucky and competent few in all human societies that social science's “winner-take-all,” though almost never literally true, has become practically a household term. Wherever humans compete over things we value, we establish hierarchies around the contest, and to the extent that these competitions have recognized and reasonably even-handed rules, the winners may even be said to have earned their exalted positions. (Whether such contests are or ever can be genuinely fair—leaving the winners deserving their prizes in addition to earning them—is a very fraught matter that goes much beyond my purposes here, and my capacities of judgment in general.)

We respect winners, no doubt about that, and we often admire them too; but that still leaves a question unanswered that should perhaps be asked a little more often, if only for balance. Does that mean we love them too? I’m not so sure, and I have folk wisdom on my side when it tells us that if you want to lose your friends, you should seek to outdo them; but if you want more of them or more sincere ones, to let them outdo you instead! We are all driven to succeed, I think, by some unspoken expectation that our perfections will endear us to others, or even earn their love. It may work that way sometimes, but is it really the human rule, or not rather the exception? “We are not perfect,” said the Germans before the First World War, “but we are working on it.” Meanwhile in Austria the famous quip by Karl Kraus held that the situation in the Dual Monarchy was forever “hopeless but not serious.” Who got more love then, and who gets more in retrospect: the convoluted and lackadaisical Vienna of Freud and Zweig, or the Kaiser’s hard-driven Berlin, for all its Prussian virtues?

Audiences may love super-heroes, but is that not precisely because they are not human? When it comes to real human beings, do we not love anti-heroes much better, underdogs and harmless fools, and all manner of clowns, sad or silly? A hero may be good to have beside you in the trenches, but do you really want one for a neighbor or a friend, reminding you by his very existence of how small and weak you look by comparison? Such reminders, however true, do not inspire love in most of us. We like to feel important above all else, and consequently we like those best who make us feel that way, not greatness that makes us shrink as we gaze upon it.

Not that I would recommend a strategy that aims at losing in life. I belong to the tragic camp (or tragicomic perhaps, in the eyes of some), where we really do believe in the beauty of perfection and wish with all our hearts that we could get closer to it and perhaps one day, or at least one moment, attain full communion with it. I am emphatically not trying to make myself look like a loser in a bid to be more likeable; I profess very openly that I would much rather be a roaring success and a shining model to all in everything I do, if only that were within my power, which of course it isn’t. I don't mean to fall short, I just do.

Given the grave implications for survival, mating, and all manner of other measures of thriving that go with the human tendency towards social positioning that I mentioned above, it would be sheer folly to set yourself up for losing deliberately. The bottom of the barrel is never a good place to be; if you don’t get drowned there, you can be sure of living among the sediments of life, which is not to be glamorized by anyone with good judgment and a clear conscience. The saurian chicken are too primitive to make for fitting analogies, so to speak of a “pecking order” is very crude, however often it is done. The packs that dogs run in make for a much better comparison: the top dogs get the good stuff, the laggards get eaten by the wolves.

So nobody is saying that you should aim for anything other than success, within the constraints of your abilities and circumstances. There are always possibilities for moving ahead a little, even if they can be hard to see and even harder to seize, and that movement is crucial to human life, whether we like it or not. What I mean to say is not a celebration so much as a consolation: nobody gets everything, even the most shining winners. And the compensation for the respectable finishers who do not come in first—to be found more likable and lovable by others, not always, but very often—is no mere consolation prize, but something so precious that it may even, in the end, outshine the glittering trophies, who knows. But that is not a promise or guarantee, obviously, just food for thought about the strange beauty, alongside the evident ugliness and horror, of the fallen world we live in. Whether love conquers all, as faith alleges, may be doubted; but without it, what good is conquest? Which is not to say that triumph can never make you loved (my title is not meant to be taken literally), only that it will not do so as a matter of course, and that it can easily do the opposite.