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December 20, 2005
Here's why they hate us!
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?As I read through the piece, I immediately started thinking about the danger posed by such people finding each other, and of course, the German author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, has much to say about Hitler and the Nazis as classic radical losers: 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.If you think this sounds like the Islamofascist mentality, well, you're right, and you owe it to yourself to read the rest. The essay one of the most thoughtful explanations I've seen to the vexing but unanswerable question of "Why Do They Hate Us?" (A question I've always thought should be asked psychiatrically, preferably post mortem!) 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:
posted by Eric on 12.20.05 at 09:31 AM
Comments
"(Not politically correct stuff in an era which glorifies losers.)" Yeah, really! I wish somebody like Wretchard would take that essay and run with it. I can't get through it.... Anonymous · December 20, 2005 05:12 PM "Every Goth wanted to be a Roman. No Roman wanted to be a Goth." http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art162.htm I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that Rome inspired jealousy on the part of the barbarians and that this may well played a role in its downfall, and ultimate sacking. (Of course, it could also be argued that by that time in their degenerated history, the Romans were also losers, albeit a different kind.)
Eric Scheie · December 20, 2005 06:56 PM |
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Interesting essay, but I have to quibble about one thing: the people the Romans called "barbarians" were not radical losers; they were people whose societies and cultures were more primitive than Rome's, and who simply took over Roman-occupied land as their populations grew, assimilating bits of Roman and Christian culture and mingling it with their own. They weren't quite the same as the radicals in Judea, who, as the famous musical goes, "produced messiahs by the sackful," resisted Roman rule with often fanatical religious fervor, and (I suspect) tended to blame Rome for all of their domestic problems.