Why A Strategy for Losers?
Most of us look for, and find, our place in the world through stories. These may be the stories in the Bible or the Koran or they may be the stories made in Hollywood. Stories tell us how people act when in difficulty and danger. They show us people struggling and arriving at the the end with the reward they have deserved. Or sometimes they seem to show us heroes and heroines who have an inevitably tragic destiny. People who are destined never to win.
Not everyone identifies with the promoted heroes. The nightmare of childhood abuse, neglect and bullying is often justified by the claim that you are no good. Then you may take the idea that you are no good inside yourself together with your own secret idea that everyone else are weak and inferior, "I may be no good, but I matter and you will not make me disappear. I will show you how tough I can be. It is weak people, those who do not endure, those who, even worse, bow their heads are contemptable and revolting. They deserve nothing. I at least will go out in a hail of bullets, helicopters hovering overhead, the subject of a prime time story in the national and international TV".
There are those who defiantly do what the nagging know it alls have told them not to. They do this because the know it alls have told them not to. The act of defiance might be to take the drugs that the know what's best for yous say that they should not.
But playing "doing the opposite" can keep you ensnared. In the case of drugs you keep the pushers in work and the police, the courts and the prison service while your rebellion is held in check. When they want to pacify the ghettoes the ideal strategy is to both sell drugs and send in the police. Weren't the CIA involved in drug running after all and didn't they sell in the ghettoes? A British TV programme called Panorama, reviewed the evidence for that. If they did it was a clever strategy. Even if there is no conspiracy positive change is held back. Because the drugs are illegal the prices are high so the barons make lots of money. The rebellious kids get hooked and spend their lives evading the police. The police,courts and the prison service stay in work. The angry discontent of young people is channeled into a revolving door relationship with the courts and prison service, the addiction, alcohol and mental health services, the homelessness hostels. Nothing changes - except the addicts - who eventually end up dying in their own vomit.
Of course the addicts do not see their degradation as ugly. They think it is beautiful. Losers frequently have ways of deluding themselves. Taking drugs, for example, may be thought of as a defiance of hypocritical parents, carers and a hypocritical society. It is your way of saying "I was never loved. I was never wanted, there is no hope. What you see as my degradation and despair was destined to happen to me. Look at me live out my life as a human scarecrow you hypocrites. In my in-your-face street theatre I can play my part to perfection".
In the narcissistic imagination of the dying addict to take the golden shot, the overdose of heroine which will leave them forgetting to breath, is a beautiful death. Like Mark Twain's character Tom Sawyer, they have a fantasy of the audience of their deaths - the now transformed relatives and false friends weaping bitter tears of regret for all the wrongs they have committed against the departed.
Is there another way? I do not know for sure but in this web site I am looking for one. This web site does not identify with winners. It is trying to go beyond life stories about winning or losing.
Most of us, most of the time, are losers. Most of us continue to identify with the winners because that is what we want to be ourselves and the winners want us to keep on playing in their game. They would, wouldn't they? The hope that we might become a winner one day seems to be the way out. It is the way we think life can be made better. Yet it is intrinsic to competition that there are losers and in the race to win most of us who are losers are starting from very far behind. We were born from abusive or neglecting parents and in our daily turmoil saw school as irrelevant, we live in the wrong places, far from the centres and institutions where the big decisions are made, or in areas that have been left behind, rent by division or wracked by war; we are of the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong language and culture, the wrong class or caste; the winners inherited property while the losers inherit debts.
However you measure it - most of us are handicapped right from the start. This is the bitter and sobering truth.. We are not going to win - or the chances are so small that it doesn't make much sense to keep on trying. In America they have this thing called "The American Dream" - a land of opportunities where, through hard work, you will make it and get your just reward. It is supposed to be the magical message that the Americans are giving the rest of the world. You do what mummy and daddy say, work every evening, you do well at school and go to university, you learn to speak economics, after English the universal language, you get your master of business administration. Then the global market is your playground.
But for most people the American Dream is just that......a dream. You can see the sleep walkers at Las Vegas putting money into slots. They know that the machines are programmed so that, on long term averages, they will leave with less money than they arrived. But they just keep on putting their money in. The hope that they might kick the odds keeps them hung up on the machine. Losers keep on trying to win in the same futile games.
Losers are bound into the games which enables the minority to win, and they insist we play. The winners define the trade rules, they say how the labour markets will work, they write the laws, they employ the experts. The world is described by the winners from their comfortable self justifying point of view and little prominence is given to the obstacles and the handicaps. If you can't make it then it is the fault of you and your community. It's because you can't hack it. You are not good enough and you don't deserve the rewards that they have attained. The inability to win is seen as a personal, community or institutional failing rather than a result of the obstacles in your way.
It is basic to life to be subjected to some competition. It cannot be avoided because sometimes choices have to be made between people. Inevitably some choices that are made will favour someone more than someone else. Someone will be the winner and someone the loser. However I am writing here of when losing becomes long term, repetitive and chronic. I am writing about individuals, groups and communities who are chronic losers and whose situation is deteriorating.
It can be different. Instead of trying to win at other people's expense, people of good will can decide to devote themselves to defending the chronic losers against the winners who abuse their position by exploiting chronic vulnerability.. If enough people of good will did this with the people they knew, in the places that they lived and within the networks available to them, then many problems would eventually become self healing. But it isn't easy. Losers can be powerfully destructive and self destructive.
In the society of winners few people want to help losers. The losers fail because they cannot compete and, in the ideology of competition, that is the original sin. It seems that losers are getting their just desserts. The wretched young people in the shop door ways with their dogs are not like ordinary people, they are an inferior species. What is more they make shopping unpleasant and the streets look untidy.
Losing can become cumulative. You know it when you are going down. You get caught in multiple self reinforcing vicious circles. In a satisfactory life, adults have emotionally sustaining and supportive relationships in a pleasant place to live, paying for their lives with an adequate income earned in fulfilling work. People in a stable life have access to age appropriate ways of occupying themselves and a dignified position in which they are taken seriously by their peers. But when you are falling, or if you actually cannot get started into adult life patterns in the first place, as happens to many young people, your problems in one area of life undermine you in other areas. You cannot get or lose your job. So your income is low so your choice of habitat and neighbours is poor. Your health suffers - physical and mental - so that reduces your ability to get a job. Your poor confidence, low income and lack of work related things to talk about makes it difficult to find and sustain relationships. People don't want to know you so you withdraw from them. Your anger, bitterness or despair closes you off from people. These are some of the many different downward spirals when you fall.
The winners look at the individuals and communities whose lives are in this chaos, the losers, and see people who they regard as their social inferiors, people who cannot hack it. They see the bitterness, desperation and demoralisation, the dirt and the squalor, as the proof that the losers are inferior kinds of people. To justify their comfort they need to think that the wretches littering the street corners deserve their lot - just as they deserve theirs. Tragically many losers regard themselves in this way. They take the failure inside themselves and then become chronically unable to make any effort to try to pull out of their fall. They identify with the destructive or self destructive stories. They take the drugs or sit in the park with their bottles forming communities with other embittered people. They become chronically angry, suspicious and therefore unfit to work co-operatively with other people. They dream that one day things will improve and prefer these empty dreams to the risk of failure if they try again. They watch and admire the glamorous, the rich and successful on the TV screens and in the newspapers and magazines. One day perhaps they will win the Lottery.
Instead of perpetuating such dreams, a Strategy for Losers is an attempt to work out what an alternative would be like. Its aim is not to compete but to try to disengage from the influence and the games of the powerful. Its aim is to become more independent of them. It is about trying to stabilise life around homes, neighbourhood, and help networks - in the period before trying to take on the usual stress of employed work. It is an attempt to find the right frames of mind for recovery. On the one hand there is a need to reject the cult of strength, the arrogance of the winners with their ideas that losers deserve their lot. There is an idea to reject the parasitical ways in which "caring for", "managing", "therapising" or controlling losers has become big money that does little or nothing to help them. On the other hand there is a need to recognise that for losers to pull out of their difficulties themselves, helping each other will not be easy. It is hard work and there are no promises. All life runs up against limits and problems. However it is possible to live differently - learning about yourself, developing yourself and living to do, rather than living to accumulate possessions. Many losers secretly believe that they are very important - because they are actually made to feel very small and uninportant. In a strategy for losers you have to recognise that if you really want to be powerful then you will have to prove yourself by what you do. Your power of influence in your personal and social network is only deserved if it arises through the proven example of what you have managed, that others decide to follow through their own free will, rather than because they are forced to. This is different from the imposed dominance and authority structures of the police, the politicians, or gangsters or the influence which those who have lots of money have - because they have hangers-on who would disappear if you had nothing.
A Strategy for Losers is an attempt to provide practical economic, environmental and social project activities that will improve the lives of those who come last. It is an attempt to help the last to come first in the ecological transformation of society. Since there is so little hope for most chronic losers to come first in the mainstream society, because the cards are stacked against you, my argument is that it is a better use of their time and effort to come first in a new kind of society, an environmentally sustainable one. In the next century humanity will have to make huge changes if it is to survive - it will be necessary to find ways of living just as comfortably, or more so, while at the same time using less non-renewable energy, less water, less materials, less transport and so on. This means things like insulated and cheaper homes, more solar power, water saving, growing more food closer to home in community gardens rather than buying it from across the world, sharing tools and equipment and transport. It means a lifestyle in which people get pleasure from what they do rather than owning and wasting. But these are just the kind of things chronic losers could help each other do when they try to improve and stabilise their home lives and their relationships.
This still means effort and it isn't a magical solution. It means trying. It might mean failing. In the other articles on this web site I write about my own disappointments and failures because it is better to be honest than to give Public Relations guarantees. It is better to be honest also because one of the advantages of a Strategy for Losers is that it describes the world as it really is. If you are trying to rebuild relationships between people you have to be sincere first of all - otherwise you mislead with promises that might not be fulfilled. All I can hope is that if you decide to do something like pursuing what I have called "the strategy for losers" then you start struggling with the world as it is. You live outside the dream. Often this isn't very nice but that is how it is. Often you fail, but that is how it is. If freedom be an icy wind then let it f...ing blow.
Partly the aim is to live in the real world not the ideal world pictured in the advertisements. It isn't the story in which the hero is still alive at the end of the movie after most of the bit characters have been shot down - it is the story of what happens to the bit players themselves, as most of us losers are the bit players. It isn't a story in which right triumphs in the end, in which the characters get their "just desserts" because the idea of "just desserts" is one of the myths that simply isn't true. It isn't a story of "eternal truths" only things which seem true, as far as you can see at the time. It's a story in which you may in theory have many rights but not the money or time to enforce them. In which you might win an occasional victory, and then lose again. In which a lot of people think you are bad tempered, nasty and mean spirited, because you are having to put with a lot, which the sweet tempered reasonable people are not having to cope with. It is a world in which someone is making a lot of money studying your problem, or making TV programmes about it, or making drugs to sell you to cope with it, but not actually helping you do anything to solve it.
After many years of working out the ideas for A strategy for Losers I haven't achieved very much. Then along comes this thing called Internet and I have decided to put into Internet what I have discovered.. I don't want to create any false hopes that will later be dashed because I know how hard and bitter are disappointed hopes. I know what disillusion feels like. But I know it helps too when you know that there are people are out there who are not living in the dream. People who know what it is like so that you feel that somewhere someone can understand what it is like.
At the end of the Millennium things are getting desperate. The more chaotic it gets, the more desperate and bitter the losers (i.e.millions upon millions of ordinary people) get, while the more punitive the winners get. The more they lock you out, the more you try to get back in and the more surprised and angry they are that you don't quietly disappear, that you come back angry and/or even more desperate at being blanked out. Life becomes more absurd, life becomes more futile but the winners are so sure that they must be right and that you must be wrong so the prisons, the asylums, the nght shelters, the refugee camps continue to fill up.
In the end it seems that angry and desperate people have no right to be heard. People who have suffered a lot, who have had to put up with indignity and injustice feel boiling rage or terrified desperation yet if they express their rage or let out their desperation they know that that they will lose again.
It is not what has happened to losers that the winners notice - it is the profit opportunities in managing their rage through tranquilisers, prisons, social workers and therapists. Losers know also that if they speak or show their desperation that they will be condescended to, diagnosed or victimised.
To escape the trap ways must be sought to disengage, by helping each other and finding ways to share, to live well on less, to grow and create, redeveloping the places that we live in and finding a new way forward for society.
Brian Davey
Mid July 1999
© BRIAN DAVEY