Winners and Losers: An Unhelpful Dualism

A few weeks ago I watched a clip of a hearing held in the US. There appears to be a fondness for these sorts of hearings in the USA where elected representatives question and grill government employees. During this particular hearing the elected representative was asking about the outcome of previous elections.

In what follows I will briefly summarise the essence of the encounter. However, I will refer only to Candidate A and Candidate B rather than the given names of the candidates for office. Also, the years of the election will only be referred to as yyxx. I have chosen to do this so that this blogpiece does not descend into the very dualism I hope to show as being unhelpful.

What follows is not a verbatim transcript of the encounter, but is very close to it (from memory):

Elected Representative to government employees: ‘Did Candidate A win the yyxx election?’

The government employees prevaricated and hesitated to answer the question with an affirmative or negative answer. When pressed again with the question ‘Did Candidate A win the yyxx election?’ they admitted that the candidate had obtained more votes than Candidate B.

The elected representative then asked a follow-up question: ‘Did Candidate B lose the yyxx election?’

To this question the government employees stubbornly refused to answer.

The questioner became visibly upset, possibly annoyed, and continued to ask, ‘Did Candidate B lose the yyxx election?’ At times verging on yelling the question out.

The government employees continued to not answer this question. They may have chosen to not answer the question because they were employees of one or other of Candidates A or B. Or, they may have chosen not to answer for ethical reasons. For whichever reason, it is to their credit that they did not choose to enter into such a dualistic question and answer debate.

As I listened to this exchange it occurred to me that the attribution of winners and losers in an election is one of the fundamental problems we have with modern-day politics. Not only is the culture of winners/losers a disturbing trend in politics, but more generally in society as a whole.

Politics should not be about winners and losers. Politics (in its truest sense – the means by which we make collective choices) should be a forum in which ideas are presented without animosity and an honest dialogue takes place with a collective (hopefully consensual) decision arrived at.

(I know that sounds utopian and has little place in modern political debate. But, it can be done within a democratic setting. I have written extensively on the theory and practice of sortition and will not cover it further here. Check out my sortition posts by using the Search box.)

Returning to the theme of winners and losers we can trace much of this back to dualistic thinking that gained widespread prominence in ancient Greece with philosophers such as Plato.

More recently the idea of winners/losers in social settings gained popularity from the late 19^th century onwards with the rise of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is a now largely discredited set of theories that attempted to apply Darwin’s theories of natural selection to social settings. Thinkers, such as Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton (the founder of eugenics) misunderstood and misapplied the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’¹ by suggesting that social arrangements meant that the wealthiest and most powerful should see their wealth and power increase at the expense of the poor and lower classes. Social Darwinism greatly promoted the winner/loser duality.

The mocking sobriquet of “loser” appears to have arisen in US student slang during the 1950s. Being labelled a loser suggested the person so labelled was a perpetual failure and deserving of being mocked, ridiculed, and ultimately, rejected. Such a label can be tremendously damaging to someone’s psyche, especially young people.

During the 1970s the field of sociobiology further encouraged the idea of winners and losers by emphasising a person’s genetic heritage, and largely ignoring social constructs of culture and environment.

The neo-liberalism of the 1980s/90s, promoted and championed in the US by President Ronald Reagan and in the UK by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (the Iron Lady) nearly endorsed the notion of winner as being the greatest worth a person could attain. Losers, on the other hand, could be dismissed and given no assistance in a civilisation where ‘There is no such thing as society’ as Margaret Thatcher so infamously announced.

The exchange referred to above between the elected Representative and the government employees is the outgrowth of these notions of humanity. Humanity is nothing more than a collection of individuals all in competitive struggles for resources, riches, fame, and power.

Sadly, the use of the term loser is increasing in our everyday speech. During the 1940s and 1950s the term was used only 0.4-0.5 times in every one million words spoken. During the 1960s usage began to climb and climbed rapidly from 1990 onwards, so that by 2018 the term loser was being used more than twice in every one million words used. That is a 500% increase in just one generation.  

Winners and losers is an unhelpful, and erroneous concept. It leads to low self-esteem, self-harm, aggression, xenophobia, hatred, and ultimately to war.

We should beware of anyone attempting to classify us or our societies as winners and losers.

Notes:

1. The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was not coined by Darwin. Nor did he use the term fittest in the sense of biggest, strongest, most powerful. See these blogpieces, here and here.