Via Kathy Kinsley at On The Third Hand, I found a fantastic, thought-provoking essay on radical losers. It's much too long to discuss in its entirety, but the writer identifies certain traits shared in common by the loser:

He can explode at any moment. This is the only solution to his problem that he can imagine: a worsening of the evil conditions under which he suffers. The newspapers run stories on him every week: the father of two who killed his wife, his small children and finally himself. Unthinkable! A headline in the local section: A Family Tragedy. Or the man who suddenly barricades himself in his apartment, taking the landlord, who wanted money from him, as his hostage. When the police finally gets to the scene, he starts shooting. He is then said to have "run amok", a word borrowed from the Malayan. He kills an officer before collapsing in the shower of bullets. What triggered this explosion remains unclear. His wife's nagging perhaps, noisy neighbours, an argument at the pub, or the bank cancelling his loan. A disparaging remark from a superior is enough to make the man climb a tower and start firing at anything that moves outside the supermarket, not in spite of but precisely because of the fact that this massacre will accelerate his own end. Where on earth did he get that machine pistol from?

At last, this radical loser – he may be just fifteen and having a hard time with his spots – at last, he is master over life and death. Then, in the newsreader's words, he "dies at his own hands" and the investigators get down to work. They find a few videos, a few confused journal entries. The parents, neighbours, teachers noticed nothing unusual. A few bad grades, for sure, a certain reticence – the boy didn't talk much. But that is no reason to shoot dead a dozen of his schoolmates. The experts deliver their verdicts. Cultural critics bring forth their arguments. Inevitably, they speak of a "debate on values". The search for reasons comes to nothing. Politicians express their dismay. The conclusion is reached that it was an isolated case.

This is correct, since the culprits are always isolated individuals who have found no access to a collective. And it is incorrect, since isolated cases of this kind are becoming more and more frequent. This increase leads one to conclude that there are more and more radical losers. This is due to the so-called "state of things." This might refer equally to the world market or to an insurance company that refuses to pay.

But anyone wishing to understand the radical loser would be well advised to go a little further back. Progress has not put an end to human suffering, but it has changed it in no small way. Over the past two centuries, the more successful societies have fought for and established new rights, new expectations and new demands. They have done away with the notion of an inevitable fate. They have put concepts like human dignity and human rights on the agenda. The have democratized the struggle for recognition and awakened expectations of equality which they are unable to fulfil. And at the same time, they have made sure that inequality is constantly demonstrated to all of the planet's inhabitants round the clock on every television channel. As a result, with every stage of progress, people's capacity for disappointment has increased accordingly.

The radical loser has no notion of resolving conflicts, of compromise that might involve him in a normal network of interests and defuse his destructive energy. The more hopeless his project, the more fanatically he clings to it. There are grounds to suspect that Hitler and his followers were interested not in victory, but in radicalizing and eternalizing their own status as losers.

Their pent up anger discharged itself in a war of unprecedented destruction against all those others who they blamed for their own defeats. First and foremost, it was a matter of destroying the Jews and the opponents of 1919. But they certainly had no intention of sparing the Germans. Their actual objective was not victory, but elimination, downfall, collective suicide, the terrible end. There is no other explanation for the way the Germans fought on in World War II right to the last pile of rubble in Berlin. Hitler himself confirmed this diagnosis when he said that the German people did not deserve to survive. At a huge cost, he achieved what he wanted – he lost.

I found myself wondering whether the term "loser" isn't a modern construct for what Nietzsche called the "untermensch," -- the people who are down, but who lurk, have to be watched and kept down by the ubermensch lest they band together in a sense of triumphant inferiority, rise up, and ruin everything for everyone. The Romans knew that such people ("barbarians") were all around them, and they worked tirelessly to keep them down, while allowing civilization to spread where it could.

(Not politically correct stuff in an era which glorifies losers.)

And at the risk of compounding politically incorrectness, I think one way to take the stigma and the sting out of losing would be the relegalization of drugs. Obviously, this wouldn't work for everyone. And hell hath no fury like a reformed sinner (especially if he's an angry loser who now demands to win -- or die trying). I think the reason this sort of thing isn't discussed much is because it's elitist to call anyone a loser. More than elitist, it might be dangerous. Prisons are said to be full of losers. The term "three time loser" has been part of the criminologist's lexicon for many decades.

The thing is, I've known and loved some losers who were very nice people, and who really weren't a threat to anyone. In order to become dangerous, a loser has to be filled with a thing called resentment. Resentment is the ultimate source of fuel, and it can really cause something to arise where there was nothing. In certain instances (as at least arguably it can supply pride) it can turn losers into winners in the good sense, but I think resentment is usually a very negative emotion -- hence the need for the Tenth Commandment. But don't tell that to the people whose purpose in life is to instill losers with "righteous" resentment (whether via class war, jihad, or God knows which Kultur Kampf.)

Ultimately, I think there may be a form of animal instinct at work here. Whether it's a poorly understood remnant of our Pleistocene past, and whether we want to face it or not, the barbarians will always be at the gates.

Here's Josef Dzhugashvili -- a man who would seem to epitomize the type of "radical loser" outlined above -- at the time of his arrest by Czarist authorities:

The irritating paradox is that according to the laws of nature, Stalin would have to be declared a winner.