LOSERS BECOME WINNERS BECAUSE THEY NEVER QUIT!

LOSERS BECOME WINNERS BECAUSE THEY NEVER QUIT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 22, 2010

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In “Self-Reliance” (1841) Emerson insisted that society’s views of failure and success were skewed. “If our young men miscarry in their first enterprise,” he wrote, “ they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined."

Today, college graduates are considered a failure if they are not connected in their chosen profession within a year.

Emerson argued, the flexible person who “in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles it, keeps a school, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.”

He was making allowances for his friend, Henry David Thoreau, who seemed to fail at everything, and so he bankrolled him, let him set out on his land, and contemplate nature, which produced WALDEN (1854), and would make him immortal.

Thoreau says in "Walden" he tried trade (father's pencil business) but "found that it would take ten years to get underway in that, and that then it should probably be on my way to the devil." He was convinced that "the way you get money almost without exception led downward. He abandoned business and pursued art, using other people's money (Emerson's) to pave his way.

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In describing Thoreau's lackadaisical waywardness, Emerson could just as easily have been describing John Brown's. In 1859, he would attack Harper’s Ferry with an impossible plan to liberate blacks while killing many whites with the aim to start a revolution, only to fail and to be hanged.

“Self-Reliance” was written sixteen years before Emerson met John Brown, but the abolitionist lived it to the letter.

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There were cells of abolitionists across the United States, but they were essentially pacifists who hoped that slavery would eventually end through non-violence. Not John Brown. For his bloody scourge at Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry, where white slaveholders were cut down mercilessly, with Brown and the freed slaves fleeing to the mountains, he would become a legend. Songs and books would be written about him. Emerson even saw him as Christ-like.

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Abraham Lincoln spent a good part of his early life as the failure Emerson described. But whereas Brown was a man of action, Lincoln was essentially a prudent man of reflection. He was never an abolitionist, but read of the exploits of Brown and not unkindly. David S. Reynolds writes in “John Brown: Abolitionist” (2005):

“Though John Brown did not live to see the Civil War, he embodied its spirit in advance. What Abraham Lincoln became by the end of the conflict – an antislavery warrior who resorted to extreme violence and who humbled himself before what he called ‘the providence of God’ and ‘the judgment of the Lord -- is a heightened version of what John Brown, the God directed fighter against slavery, had been when he died on the scaffold six years earlier.”

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Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852). The story, she acknowledged, was inspired by the memoirs of Reverend Josiah Henson.

Henson, a Negro and abolitionist, was recognized for his work in the Underground Railroad from his home in Canada. His courageous struggle for freedom, and to free others was captured in his memoirs.

It was quite a find for Stowe, as she wasn't taken seriously as a writer. "Uncle Tom" is modeled after Reverend Henson. More than one hundred and fifty years later, children of all ages read this book. It captured the mind of the time.

Harriet Beecher was one of thirteen siblings of the famous abolitionist preacher Lyman Beecher, and sister of Henry Ward Beecher who was equally famous as a preacher and the accused in the adultery trial of 1875, which some called the "scandal of the century."

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Mark Twain is considered to be our greatest American writer. He wrote many books, but one great book, “Huckleberry Finn” (1885). It is great because it is well written, bold, and confidently written in the vernacular. Again, it was a reflection of the mind of the times.

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Like John Brown, Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain evolved. He encountered more than his share of failures or miscalculations along the way.

Twain was something of a gambler and speculator. He managed to invest in schemes going nowhere, while failing to see the possibilities of Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, passing up that opportunity. He did publish the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, which I suspect he edited, as it is considered the greatest biography of any president.

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WHAT DO THESE LOSERS AS WINNERS HAVE IN COMMON?

They were mainly unconscious of being special, or gifted or in anyway extraordinary. Rage, often like a slowly gathering storm, welled up in them before it cascaded into any kind of expression or action. They were incubators that were in the world but separate from it. By that I mean they successfully avoided getting caught up and trapped in the prevailing nonsense.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was not of this crowd. He was a poetic and philosophical OD psychologist one hundred seventy five years early.

Emerson observed, reflected on his observations, processed them in terms of his mental powers, and then laid out his assessment “as observations,” being careful to maintain a certain unobtrusive sobriety. He was just provocative enough to be in demand as a speaker and writer.

Emerson could see American society was moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, and he wasn’t happy about it. He could see society going from a subsistence to a capitalistic economy, from the handyman to the specialist. He wrote:

“Functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, while each other performs his. This reduces man to a thing, into many things. The food gathering man on the farm becomes the mere farmer, the businessman a moneymaker, the attorney a statute book, the mechanic, a machine, Man Thinking the bookworm, and so forth.”

Emerson was describing most everyone, but not these winners who were often losers, while resisting becoming machines.

Certain individuals take the opportunity of society in transition to make their mark in their own inimitable way, and for that we read about them and celebrate them, but not always in their lifetime.

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These losers as winners were conscious or unconscious outsiders with a rage or passion to right wrongs that they could not stomach.

For John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln it was slavery. For Mark Twain it was the chaos, corruption and dysfunction of "The Gilded Age."

Twain was forced to go on the road in his white suit with his gift of sarcasm and humor to delight audiences because he couldn’t pay the bills back home with his writing.

One hundred years later, Hal Holbrook revised his career by training to emulate and imitate the Hannibal, Missouri native on stage to approving audiences across the continent.

The first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography is now on sale, one hundred years after his death. I suspect that people are not going to be too please with how closely he resembles my characterization of losers as winners. We like to romanticize our heroes into stick figures.

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Winners who were once losers are always individuals. They manage to touch a cord in the heart of everyman by their ability to break free.

Already in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, factories were replacing guilds, machines were replacing manpower, corporations were replacing family businesses, commercial farms were replacing family farms and other appurtenances of capitalism were ushering in the age of depersonalization, the age that has steamrolled into our times.

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OD psychologist Emerson could see this. He blamed it on Christianity, mainly Calvinism, and organized what would come to be called “transcendentalism,” which was a hybrid of Christianity and Eastern religions. It never took.

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Losers that become winners do not have the temperament much less the patience to compare and compete with others. The reader may use the sports analogy to show that competition in sports makes winners. Competition in sports makes a bland confection in which perfection of a type is realized but not something of lasting quality. Never.

Competition has made society so bland, so common that everyone looks and acts and thinks like everyone else, that is, except losers who become winners.

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There are many other attributes of losers who become winners but the most important is that losing is never a “stop sign.” It is a pause to redirect, reinvent, or revise the plan.

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WHY DO WE NOT EMBRACE WHAT IS GOOD FOR US?

Losers who become winners have no problem with this question because “good” and “bad” are not relevant to their motivation. I have written a long piece on this subject, which is covered in another missive.

OD psychologist Emerson, I suspect, would gladly return to his grave once exposed to our times.

He would see the pervasive mediocrity in virtually every aspect of society and would doubtlessly wonder how everything went so wrong.

In his most nightmarish reflections, it would be impossible for him to believe:

(1) That commercial television represents entertainment,

(2) That more than 95 percent of working people are wage slaves, and act as if they are satisfied with their lot,

(3) That everyone is talking into some handheld device or pounding on another one impervious to their surroundings,

(4) That the “seven deadly sins” have reached capitalistic splendor as wealth creators,

(5) That religious zeal, which he thought was insane in his time, has become a patricide phenomenon,

(6) That what masquerades as art in music, literature, painting, architectures and philosophy has taken on a blandness that doesn’t reach above the gonads, and

(7) That science, which he thought was the rational answer in the Age of Enlightenment, contains the spark of mankind’s total destruction.

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Alas, we don’t have a poet, philosopher OD psychologist like Emerson, and suffer mightily for the absence.

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