What Distinguishes Winners From Losers?

Around 2015, my therapist said to me, “I wonder if you are so radical in your politics because you are so passive in your life.”

It was a great point. Since then, I’ve noticed that as I become more successful, I’m less interested in radical causes. As I thrive within the system, I’m less interested in overthrowing the system.

When I look at radical movements, I notice that they rarely contain happy successful people. Rather, marginalized movements attract marginalized people. Crazy conspiracy theories, for example, are most attractive to people who are losing at life, while those who are winning (meaning that they are thriving in their work and family lives) rarely believe in things like QAnon.

If you know somebody is into Glenn Beck or Alex Jones or Fox News, you can be sure you’re not talking to a winner.

According to the 2014 book (by two academics) American Conspiracy Theories:

* …conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers. Thus, they tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity. But nothing fails like success, and ascending groups trigger dynamics that check and eventually reverse the advance of conspiracy theories. In short, because defeat and exclusion are their biggest inducements, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” though sooner or later everyone must play the loser. In short, successful conspiracy theories conform to a strategic logic based on threat perception.

* Talk show host Glenn Beck routinely traffics in conspiratorial rhetoric, divining who is secretly working with whom (usually communists) and why (usually to spread communism). Beck realizes that repetitively linking actors and events to pinkish puppet masters might strike some in his audience as obsessive-compulsive conspiracy mongering. To ward off the hurtful slur of conspiracy theorist, Beck invokes yet another conspiracy theory. “Why is it a concentrated effort now to label me a conspiracy theorist?” he inquired of himself on his radio show. His answer: “[Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein] said the government should call anyone who stands against them a conspiracy theorist. . . . This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is what he wrote about. This was his way for the government—and he said, ‘Even if it turns out to be true, you have to label people a conspiracy theorist because it isolates them.’”

* “There seems to be a curious American tendency to search, at all times, for a single external center of evil to which all our troubles can be attributed, rather than to recognize that there might be multiple sources of resistance to our purposes and undertakings, and that these sources might be relatively independent of each other.”
—George F. Kennan

* Sharing conspiracy theories provides a way for groups falling in the pecking order to revamp and recoup from losses, close ranks, staunch losses, overcome collective action problems, and sensitize minds to vulnerabilities. Emerging groups, minor groups, and social movements will turn to conspiracy talk for similar reasons.

* Conspiracy talk provides a unifying narrative of a terrifying enemy. Communicating conspiracy theories heightens alertness to avert tragedy. The tendency of conspiracy theorists to scapegoat, however reprehensible, channels anger, avoids internecine recriminations, and aims at redemption.

* Victory being a lax disciplinarian, large winning groups feel less anxiety, more in control, and less need for conspiracy theories. But losses may be cumulative, and conspiracy talk is most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives, or resources.

* Americans find living with power asymmetry more uncomfortable as time goes on. Anecdotally, 9/11 Truther theories began to strongly resonate not immediately after 9/11/2001, but in the beginning of Bush’s second term.

* What is curious about radical conspiratorial writings is that they are only
a more intense version of mundane political discourse. Where regular politicians highlight problems, advocate solutions, and call for concerted action soon, conspiracy theorists highlight an abysmal state of affairs, advocate titanic policies, and call for concerted action right now.

* …third parties and political movements have more need for conspiratorial rhetoric than do major parties because they are consummate losers—they never win. Those groups that achieve goals and overcome rivals, regardless of their size, may have less need for conspiracy theories. The more losses one suffers, the more tempting conspiracy theories become…

So how do you spot winners and losers? I did a Google search and here are some things I found that resonated with me:

From Weidel on Winning:

You Have to be Fussy to be Excellent

We spend most of our time with people who are slow to learn, and we wind up having to repeat ourselves and explain things over and over again just so they will get it…

A winner is somebody who comes in bright-eyed, full of energy, and asks a lot of questions. You give them a few answers and off to the races they go…

Good Employees Learn Fast

They can’t even imagine doing something in a half-hearted, haphazard way.

Jeff Boss writes:

Winning is focusing on what’s important, such as leaving work early to take care of family issues to take and not worrying what your coworkers think.

More than anything winning is about the people with whom you surround yourself.

Trump’s description of Jeb Bush as “low energy” was devastating. A large part of Trump’s success stems from the energy and excitement he creates.

Here are traits I associate with losers:

* Passive
* Listless
* Bored
* Cultivate victimhood and conspiracy theories
* Isolated. Robin Dunbar writes in his 2021 book Friends: “Loneliness is… an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong – a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated can be enough to disrupt your physiology, with adverse consequences for your immune system, as well as your psychological wellbeing, that, if unchecked, lead to a downward spiral and early death.”
* I feel bad when I’m around them
* Frantic
* Vague
* Idea deflection
* Create drama
* Compulsive need to prove
* Cling to useless possessions
* Give away their time
* Fixate on their hurts.
* Discordant
* Takers
* Take long hits of Copium
* Say “please clap.”
* Wear medals to work.

Here are traits I associate with winners:

* Energy
* Drive
* Passion
* Positive
* Good friends
* Busy
* I feel good when I’m around them
* Calm
* Admirable lifestyle
* Tracking. Winners track their time and finances, and if necessary, their food.
* Open to new ideas
* Purpose
* Clear priorities
* Quickly separate themselves from those who are bad for them
* Welcome feedback and quickly discard that which is not helpful.
* Congruent
* Winners rarely need to announce their boundaries. They’re so formidable, you’d never even consider abusing them.
* Givers

My favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, was destroyed by the Green Bay Packers yesterday 48-32. Once my team went down 27-0, I started laughing about it to my friends. When you can be amused by the life outside of your control rather than devastated, that’s a winning approach.

Nicolas Cole writes: “A winner only spends time with other winners.”

From MindGym:

People feel most engaged when performing tasks that stretch them to the limits of their ability…

Energy is infectious…

Cedric Webb writes:

Winners don’t look for excuses…

The priority must always be the priority. If something is important enough to you, it will take precedence. If it is not important enough, it will take a back seat.

When a winner finds another winner, they want to be around them more… The old proverb goes, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

Wasting time means wasting energy. Knowing what to invest your time in is key to maximizing time. As Stephen Covey said, “The key is not spending time, but investing in it.” Invest your time in the right people, processes, and purposes.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

Kevin Daum writes:

1. Winners get in the game.
2. Winners boldly ask for what they want.
3. Winners understand their sphere of influence.
4. Winners gratefully leverage the strengths of others.
Winners invest their time and energy in the things that excite them.

Bedros Keuilian writes:

#1: They show up even when they don’t feel like it.
#6: They keep their actions congruent with their goals.

Giovanni Azael writes: “There is no man, except that who is unwise, who starts a building project, for instance, without counting the project’s cost to the last penny. Winning in life is the cumulative series of successive wins, and for every win, there are distinctive prices to be paid.”

A friend says: “The single biggest thing is if a person is forward thinking and planning and action toward some future goal, or living in the past.”

I’ve long defined happiness as looking forward to the day ahead.

As people get older, they might naturally spend less time planning and more time reminiscing. If you can look back with ease and joy and gratitude, that strikes me as winning. If you look back with bitterness and rage, that strikes me as losing.

We all lose (jobs, friendships, communities, status, opportunities). We all will go through bitterness and anger and depression after a significant loss. Winners get through this phase more adaptively than losers. Adaptive depression is grieving what you lost, noticing where you might have gone wrong, considering plans for the future, working out various scenarios for going forward in your life, and then after an appropriate time retreating from life, you then push forward with plans that will likely advance your interests. Maladaptive depression means getting stuck in depression. Denial means denying the significance of your loss and just pushing forward with gritted teeth.

Depression and anger are adaptive responses at times. We never graduate from being human, we never stop cycling through feelings of competence, dependence, loneliness, grandiosity, and humiliation.

Winners build healthy connections while losers try to manipulate their way through life. For example, a winning employee makes his employer’s priorities his priorities while a losing employee ignores his employer’s mission in favor of his own proclivities. A winning friend is open to assisting his friends achieve their healthy goals while a loser doesn’t want his friends to excel him. Winners get good things done while losers complain and blame.

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Are you feeling demoralized by the psy-ops? (1-14-24)

01:00 Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153926
05:00 Richard Spencer Space on anonymity and dissident politics, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1746318372705648953
28:00 NYT: How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/us/politics/trump-college-educated-voters.html
38:00 Building the greatest stereo and destroying your family in the process, https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fritz-greatest-stereo-auction-cost/
50:00 Elites and democracy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153860
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/mideast-war-israel-yemen.html
1:04:00 Genocide in Gaza: Dimensions of an Unfolding Catastrophe, Featuring John J. Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxeqfgPzVc&t=2726s
1:11:30 Not a war crime, but GENOCIDE: Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1CvtfbXPLE
1:20:00 NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153948
1:38:30 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
1:45:00 Richard Spencer has been neutered
2:23:00 Tunneling for meaning under 770 (Chabad headquarters)
2:35:00 I am the biggest cause of my own misery due to my lack of consideration for others
2:46:00 My Dennis Prager story, https://lukeford.net/blog/?page_id=31620
3:15:00 The Investigator in the Enneagram, https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-5
3:29:50 Patrick Casey
3:33:45 Elliott Blatt joins
4:20:20 Middle East war escalates, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlL9uHaeNqo

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NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’

This New York Times headline is false. Plenty of people want a wider war in the Middle East. Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attacks to encourage a wider war. Parts of Hezbollah, and parts the governments of Iran and Israel want a wider war. Hezbollah has the capacity to devastate Israel, to level its cities, and to kill thousands of Israelis in hours. Why would they not feel tempted to do that? Iran wants to dominate the Middle East, destroy the Zionist state and drive out America? A massive war with Israel could topple the Iranian regime but it also could topple the Zionist state and make America’s presence in the Middle East more precarious. Many Israeli leaders would welcome a wider war because that would enable them to drive out the Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and possibly even Israel proper and create a stronger, more cohesive greater Israel.

I expect Israel to invade southern Lebanon in the next few months to take out Hezbollah.

There are two philosophical reasons why I think this New York Times headline is dumb. One, people don’t always say what they mean. Just because many leaders in the Middle East said they don’t want a regional war doesn’t mean that is what they all truly believe in all circumstances. Right now, I believe the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah do not want a wider war, but plenty of their compatriots do. Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership depends upon an ongoing war. Once there’s peace, he’s likely out of office and on trial. But he can’t say this publicly. He has to placate the United States in his public pronouncements while placating coalition members to his right in private.

Individual incentives are often different from national incentives and Bibi’s incentives are not necessarily Israel’s incentives.

Two. Liberals believe that people are basically good and that peace is our default state. Trads and people on the right do not believe that people are basically good and do not believe that peace is our default state. They understand that sometimes wars have to be fought to a conclusion to allow a lasting peace.

On the liberal-left side of the political spectrum, there’s an individualist worldview, and more confidence in the power of buffered human reason and agency to manage things (think about LBJ micro-managing the bombing of North Vietnam), while on the right, people believe that we are tribal and driven by many forces more powerful than conscious cognition, and therefore we suspect that life and war are inherently wild and less containable.

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Last week, Stephen Walt told Robert Wright: “The Biden administration is the revenge of the blob. After the Trumpian interlude, you brought back the professionals. The Obama team back in action and taking it on the road.”

The Biden foreign policy team has great confidence in its abilities to manage the world and has created greater disasters than any American administration since WWII.

Posted in Iran, Israel, Lebanon | Comments Off on NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’

The Prager Christmas Dinner

Dec. 25, 2023, Julie Hartman asked Dennis: “What do you do to celebrate Christmas?”

Dennis: “On Christmas day, I don’t listen to classical music. I listen to Christmas music. I revel in the ambience of the day. My wife converted to Judaism. She is as Jewish as I am from the perspective of Judaism, but she comes from a Christian home and we have all of her family over and we have a big Christmas dinner, which I love. I even wear my kipa at the dinner. It’s my way of both reminding everyone that it is the Jew in your family who's enjoying this with you, and while it is not my holy day, it is their holy day. I open up with a prayer.”

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Danielle Allen: Justice By Means of Democracy

Stephen Turner writes:

Works from Harvard in political theory have a special sociological interest because they come from a center of power and indicate the probable rationale for where the elite are next taking the government. The last 50 years have been dominated by Rawlsian redistributionism. Danielle Allen’s new book proposes a radicalization, correcting the flaws of Rawls. But it retains the basic animus of Rawlsianism, which is that justice is fundamentally about equality. The book is deeply indebted to the Harvard milieu and to a large group of interlocutors…

The focus of much of this work has been on diversity, meaning racial difference should be taken into account in normative democratic theorizing under the slogan “difference without domination” — the title of her co-edited collection with Rohini Somanathan. “Domination” is a term taken from a non-Harvard source, Phillip Pettit, who made the interesting move to replace the liberal notion of freedom as “non-interference” by the state (i.e., “negative freedom”) with the idea of non-domination. The point of the replacement was to relativize the goal of limiting power to the common knowledge of the people in the society in question about what was and was not legitimate interference in people’s lives. This meant that state intervention had no absolute limits. Some forms of power which rested on absolute rights of a negative kind, for example, socially disapproved cruelties, could be legitimately limited by the state. But, it also opened the door to “positive” interventions for the good of the recipient, however unwelcome…

…the majority may want coercive acts by the state that the minority regards as unjust and oppressive. And the minority may be oppressed by what is allowed, either by the state or by negative liberties. As Lawrence Bobo puts it, “modern racial inequality relies upon the market and informal racial bias to recreate, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality.” Hence, the phrase “Laissez Faire Racism.” These are hierarchies of domination, which unjustly restrict opportunity, power, and influence. Rawlsian notions of justice, which preserve negative freedoms and prioritize redistribution with a market economy, do not touch, and indeed can exacerbate racial injustice, and assume homogeneity. Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy, oriented to achieving a transformative consensus, fail to respect differences that should be preserved. Justice requires something else…

Democracy requires loss: people can vote, but they must “sacrifice” to the majority, which frequently(?) disempowers them. As a result, “democratic citizenship requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign.”9 This turns to the emotional matters. To make these sacrifices acceptable, they should be honored as such, and grievances should be open to redress. And this can happen only if there is a basis in “friendship,” in which we are not strangers but are vulnerable to one another.

“Difference” is a challenge to this: it estranges and allows us to evade the mutual vulnerability necessary for friendship and trust. We need, she concludes, new habits for dealing with one another in spite of difference. Friendship answers this need: “friendship’s basic habits for establishing equality of material benefit, recognition, and agency do the same work as justice….the core practices that are necessary for a relationship to count as friendship are practices to equalize benefits and burdens and power sharing.” There is a further complication, addressed in Allen and Light’s volume: immigration. Can these arguments apply to immigration? To the digital sphere?

So who rules in this new order? On the one hand, she claims to support egalitarian, inclusive, participatory, and self-transformative political liberty. On the other, she concedes that participation will not appeal to everyone. Similarly, the activity of political friendship and the making of bridging ties between quasi-representative group members with parallel figures from other groups, which is at the core of her model, will be for the very few. One gets the uncomfortable sense that she is describing a form of rule in which justice-enlightened multi-tasking people with good connections across groups, like herself, use state power to “steer,” one of her favorite terms, the rest of us.”

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