Alternative Editorial: Is Winning For Losers?
As we write, today is the last day of the English Football Premiership. While you are reading, it will all be over – you might know what we certainly don’t. It will be interesting for us, in the final edit, to see if we are tempted to change anything. How much are our ideas about what is possible for the future determined by what happened in the past?
Like planning for the Spring in the middle of Winter: some resist. You’re bound to feel differently once the sun is out and the buds are bursting. Others feel it’s vital – to be holding natality in every moment. Not just when it presents itself on schedule. In the same way the question of winning in football is not only true at the end of a long haul – the season is 38 games over roughly 42 weeks - but was true from the first kick-off, every August. A ‘winning mentality’ doesn’t switch its ‘hunger’ on and off; it’s ever present, waiting to score.
It’s quite possible that most of you reading won’t care much for football. You may even be a little dismayed that we are drawing your attention to something you already feel is overplayed in the mainstream media.
You have plenty of justification for objecting that football is everything wrong with capitalism, ongoing patriarchy, colonialism and racism. Even as others might claim football is a petri dish for tackling all of those problems.
Yet, it’s likely that none of us reading have such a loyal, global following as any of the teams playing today. Football - despite all its faults - remains the most watched, lucrative and influential of non-work activities the world over. A huge source of global soft power for countries mostly outside the US. For men in particular, it provides an opportunity for discourse, a sense of identity and an arena for winning and losing—without dying. For the questions it raises about male sociality alone, it demands our attention.
For those unaware/uninterested, the English football season – especially the Premiership - is down to the wire. Two teams are battling to win it and a third is close behind. At many points in the season any one of six teams could have triumphed, a distribution of talents that most leagues cannot display.
But as we race to the final match, the same team that has won for the past four years is likely to win. (Note that we won’t mention any names here, because we are trying to raise universal points). There is some cynicism around this team and its ability to win: they have been in court cases for several years, charged with breaking the rules on financial fair play. Meaning, they spend more money on their squad than is officially allowed, creating advantaged conditions for winning.
Which leaves the competing team with a mountain to climb. Not only do their fans imagine the system – often only understood as a shadow, difficult to hold accountable - is against them. But in addition, the very real and mundane bookie’s odds are heavily in favour of their opponents. This gives rise to another enemy within, their own, unmanageable expectations.
When faced with impossible challenges, should they simply prepare to lose well: play philosophically with no attachment to winning, no fear of losing? Just have fun? Because really going for it and losing risks a pain they can barely contemplate.
The relentless challenge to win
No doubt everyone reading has had to face that conundrum many times, in many ways in their lifetimes. It might be easy to duck out of directly competing, avoiding sports and calling out competitive cultures in favour of collaborative ones. Helping children avoid losing by awarding prizes for all (seems fair; does it work?).
But the winning is not only over others, clearly lined up to the left and right of you at sports day. The compulsion to win at life follows us around everywhere. From waking to sleeping each day, we constantly nominate challenges for ourselves: buses to catch, workloads to complete, promises to remember, progress to make. ‘Are you winning?’ is as common a greeting as ‘are you busy?’?
We try not to care whether or not we get a job/audition when we know we have to shine in the interview. Maybe we do a minimum of preparation so as not to experience the waste of time, should we fail? Then we regret afterwards that we could have done more.
We make every effort to land some funding, or pitch for a contract, knowing that the rules of engagement are not really clear. You try because you feel you have a unique approach. Yet the panel may not be looking for what you are offering; might not see the value of the outcomes you are guaranteeing.
It takes great capaciousness to shrug off rejection after rejection. Yet, logically, 99% of those applying are doing exactly that, regularly. Entertainment culture thrives on the challenge to ‘dare to believe’ you can win: from parading to cooking to surviving bugs in a jungle.
As with football, each season is about micro-challenges building up to an eventual winner. As viewers, we are constantly being educated to try: yet, logically, the vast majority fail. Losing graciously is a badge of character but losing doesn’t receive the respect and confirmation everyone craves when they put themselves on trial. In that sense, our public space is full of discouragement: winning is seen as rare, losing is normal.
Is there a win to be had?
And now the biggest challenge of all: facing a climate crisis on the back of a polycrisis. Is there even a win to be had? So much of the environmental movement is resigned to mitigation: accepting that we are in the sixth mass extinction and planning mostly for damage limitation.
Yet those visibly in the game – maybe Greta Thunberg and RegenA – are still playing for a win. They see a clear opposition – those who have the power to change global outcomes – and they are investing every bit of energy into causing a change: an upset in predicted outcomes.
Some would say Greta’s deluded: the game is already over. No-one has the power to save us in time: it would take every one of our six billion active consumers to switch direction and there’s no reason to believe they are even engaged in the task. Yet there is no appetite in Greta for being reasonable: like our football teams, she is hungry for the win, she doesn’t concede.
The hope/optimism distinction
Witnessing Cornel West in a series of dialogues with Roberto Unger in 2018 revealed a dance between what look like similar emotions, but are indeed quite distinct: hope and optimism. When it comes to progress in equality for black people in the US, West calls himself a ‘prisoner of hope’ This is because (as Tavis Smiley explained) he sees no cause for optimism – things are not objectively getting better (see decline of Black Lives Matter). Yet his ‘jazz-like’ ability to shower sparks of light every day means Cornel believes in life’s essential beauty and resilience. He cannot give up on that: that’s his ‘trap’.
Unger on the other hand is one who never gives up on the possibility of change occurring. Life is to be fought for every day, in the certainty that it’s not over till it’s over. While Cornel describes a daily death and resurrection, Unger demands we live life ‘as if we die only once’: life is the longest season, with the ultimate prize always on offer.
West and Unger are the best of sparring partners; they agree profoundly that life is worth living, but have quite different experiences of it. The former is ‘trapped’ in a commitment to joyful hope, with no real expectation of winning—but nevertheless powers on, hoping to share that quality of life with others. The other is frustrated, convinced that progress is constant, inevitable unless you give up.
The first looks at life unfolding as the result of facts: when they don’t stack up, there can be no optimism. Yet the joy he has access to is neither “brief” nor “compensatory” – it “spills out and over” from the confines that it starts from, aiming to liberate and energise a wider set of the oppressed. The second invests constantly in action, believing that this investment in itself will always yield results, new facts, ever more subtly measured. Growth is in the mind of the beholder.
There is no single spiritual path
Many reading this will be smiling philosophically, having backed away from the hazards of competitive culture: observing wryly the pain it causes, seeing it as illusional. Life cannot be controlled in any way. They maybe unaware that, for those who are committed to winning at life’s challenges, that looks like retreat. There is no neutral way of being – we are always, as Dylan would say, on a spectrum between actively living, or actively dying.
Buddhism – often the practice invoked to uphold non-responsibility, non-attachment to outcomes – in fact holds possibilities for both kinds of engagement with life.
There are meditative practices that withdraw individuals from society to a more internally sourced path, finding joy through transcending the human ego. Getting over the superficial drama of life. And there are outgoing, chanting practices that make no distinction between the inner life and what is being manifested as real. For these, the role of the Bodhisattva is about the transformation of all kinds of suffering, so we can generate a new reality.
Maybe most of us would claim both possibilities sit side by side in in daily life: the importance of trying; the capacity for failing, joyfully. No doubt this would be West’s position as he stands for President of the US, not expecting to appeal to anyone but those currently not voting.
Yet it’s likely that Unger would ever accept that compromise. For him, going full throttle for the whole win itselfraises all boats: there’s all of human, personal and social development at stake.
Here’s the manager of the underdog team in today’s final, speaking in his last pre-match press conference of the season. To the question of what he will most value about the season in the event of losing, he replied “I can’t think like that. I just think that we are going to win the game and hopefully something beautiful is going to happen. Let's wait.”
If you have read the front pages of Monday’s papers you will now know what he didn’t at the time. In your eyes, was it worth it, the relentless drive to win? Or is that now increasingly, the path you would never want to tread again?
We clearly didn’t hesitate to write this piece: we call our project Spring because we believe natality is implied at every stage of the four seasons. Like the underdogs, we know every act of development counts – we create value out of the losses, as much as the draws and wins. Winter can give way at any time so we prepare all the way through to harvest. And the more we are ready, the more likely our opposition is to concede.