Winning

 

(previously posted on Medium April 17. 2023)

Winning, as a precept for human interaction, is a failure.

Winning at business, politics, and social stature has no benefit to society.

Winning used to be applied to quality, that is, being the best. The best athlete, the best car on the track, the best employee in the office.

These days, winning is just about not losing. Whatever you can do to avoid losing is the overall strategy of corporations, politicians, media heads, insurance companies, banks… every institution in our society is driven not by the goal to be the best, but to be the last one standing.

The carnage that that implies is obvious to everyone who isn’t playing the game of “I win, you lose.” Because if you don’t have the money to play that game, you are always the loser.

If you think that money is the goal, please stop. Everyone at that level already has more money than they and their descendants will ever need. It’s only the winning over someone else that counts. This is why cruelty is so often the point.

You name the industry, I can tell you how companies cheat and lie to get their company’s price higher on the stock market than it’s competitors. How Fox News cheated and lied to keep it’s position at the top of the ratings chart. How 3 tech bros who squeeze their employees to get just a few more billions of profit, spent them on a rocket ship ride, trying to beat the other tech bro billionaires. And these are seen as the Winners of our society!

But even the losers play the game. Again, there is no goal, other than to beat the other guy. Cheat, lie, play games, falsify and gaslight, these are tactics that have real world consequences, but it doesn’t matter as long as you win.

Winning for the right wing is now about destroying their opponents, for no other reason than they want to have all the power. The ultimate win. And this win requires psychological warfare and torture. Gangs of trolls and bots, all dedicated to “owning the libs” a form of winning that is as twisted — “I will demean you and threaten to hurt you or someone you love, in order to make you angry, which means I win” — as it is meaningless. Now these trolls write policy, so hurting other people just to win is a government precept too.

But what is the goal? How does this move society forward? Do these wins the right wing claims achieve in any way some higher goal? Certainly not Christianity which they have re-worked to leave out everything Jesus stood for but includes the Prosperity Gospel and Aryan tribalism. Because fuck Jesus, Christianity has to WIN!

Does competition now happen without the competitors involvement? Does the winner just win by declaring it? When your product is shoddy, but your fellow techbros like how you union-bust, do you deserve that price per share? Is there any reward anymore to winning when you are not the best, just the meanest?

This is why the right wing stunts seem so pointless — there is no point other than to take an ephemeral strike against some ephemeral imaginary opponent.

Meanwhile, as our society crumbles under the weight of so much pointless victory, the precepts of cooperation and mutual support, protection from harm, making stronger, safer communities and yes, the precept of Quality, are being vilified as weakness.

Winning as a structure for society is bankrupt, reference entirely intended. Our economy, banking system, healthcare system, judicial system, supply-line, everything is predicated on winning, and the winning billionaires have discovered there’s no ceiling on that need to win more, or on the amount of collateral damage needed to achieve it.

Liberals are caught in the War Games conundrum: there’s no way to win except to not play the game. But we are now wired to win also, it’s the prevailing value in our political climate.

I think we need to undermine the gospel of Winning and promote the values that will make society better able to deal with the crises that Winning has caused. 

Winning needs to die.