Surviving defeat

We all know the bitterness of heavy defeats. All of them. And nobody likes even small defeats, let alone defeats that occur in some important or even decisive battles. Despite this, defeats have to be lived with, and their recognition and overcoming are among the most important life skills.

Unfortunately, the defeats are numerous and there are many of them. Sometimes we lose in board games or in sports, which for most people is not of crucial importance. Sometimes one of our rivals is more successful and beats us in the business, private or love sphere. There are defeats in physical battles, and the most destructive ones are in wars. Sometimes, on the other hand, we defeat ourselves and do not have the strength to make a necessary, sometimes obvious, moral decision, and some people sometimes have the feeling that life's adversities and/or tragedies have defeated or even broken them. Also, we often talk about defeats in the political sphere, where an important characteristic of developed democratic societies is that the entire process of determining who is the winner and who is the loser is precise, legal and transparent.

As for the psychological aspect of the whole situation, it all sounds logical. One of our important motives is the desire to have high achievement. Nothing special has to happen for the average person to want to be successful, appreciated, praised, popular, and some expect that from themselves intensely, always and everywhere, so it's hard for them if they don't sleep on it. It sounds logical, since survival - both in nature and in society - is a difficult, often bloody battle, so this kind of motivation can give us additional "fuel" for the effort to survive, reproduce and provide the best conditions for the always very fragile and sensitive offspring. But, in the best case, it helps us to be more and more competent, not necessarily to want to win, that is, to suffer because of defeat.

Science says that the motivation for achievement depends to a large extent on the probability of success and the importance of the reward, which also sounds quite logical, but what we carry inside us also plays a big role. Even when all external factors are the same, differences in reactions can be obvious, so some people crave success more and suffer more from defeat. The causes of such intense motives should probably be sought in their temperament, the circumstances of their upbringing, emotional deprivation or low basic self-esteem.

PLEASURE AND PAIN

Some people find pleasure in seeing others suffer defeat. It doesn't even have to be that they personally caused it, there is simply some kind of malice in a person and someone else's success can bother him. At the same time, such a person feels every defeat as a humiliation and easily loses control and dignity whenever he cannot win, so he insults or attacks his opponent, cheats and plots in order to avoid the more difficult feeling that defeat brings with him at all costs.

Unfortunately, there is worse. For some people, it seems like winning is their whole identity and their whole self-esteem. As if there is nothing stable, long-lasting inside them, so the root of the hunger for victories is so deep that they must be reached at any cost. (Judging by their obsession with training, their attitude towards their opponents or the way they talk about themselves, it's possible that every Jordan, Bryant or Cristiano falls into this group.)

OBSESSION WITH DEFEAT

The situation can be viewed from another angle: for someone, every defeat remains an eternal, insurmountable wound and the future begins to revolve around it. No one likes to lose, of course, but for someone even an insignificant defeat completely changes their life, brings them resentment, obsession, desire for revenge, hatred for others and a sense of their own inadequacy. And now I have to move on to sinister illustrations: it is important to bear in mind that the two bloodiest dictatorships in Europe during the twentieth century - although this is not an explanation for everything that happened - were led by two unfulfilled artists, and that we know for sure that one of them failed the entrance exam for painting school, decided to blame that defeat on someone else and later ordered the murder of millions of members of that group.

Of course, the world is full of unfulfilled artists, but many overcome it without too much trouble by enrolling in psychology studies or becoming overambitious parents. Political power, however, seems to lead to some form of loss of sense of reality. Thus, autocrats begin to take all the credit for themselves, exaggerate successes, deny responsibility for any mistakes, insist on complete control over the entire society, the media and the electoral process at all levels. This, among other factors, enables propaganda such as that developed by Bernice (Freud's nephew) in the USA and Goebbels in Germany at more or less the same historical moment. And when in the Soviet Union millions of people die of hunger just because Stalin (who as a boy dreamed of being a poet) exports grain, wouldn't he prove that he is more powerful than the West, and newspapers and films convince the hungry of a golden age, the perversion of reality and social pathology become so great that the best, if not the only, mirror for them is the Harms Cases and a novel in which a cat rides a tram and night creams bring invisibility.

The worst cases are when the defeated person drags everything around him down with him, when it is more difficult for someone to admit and accept defeat than to sacrifice himself and other people. Fanaticism and obsession with the achievement of a goal dominate certain minds so much that they become more important than life, and even the destruction of large groups or civilizations. So Hitler, for example, could capitulate and prevent further deaths, bombings and destruction, but it was less painful for him to recruit twelve-year-olds to defend Berlin and commit suicide himself (while Goebbels and his wife killed their five children first). Have no qualms about what they would have done if they had had atomic bombs at the time of defeat.

UNTIL THE LAST DROP OF OTHERS' BLOOD

I guess it's obvious that I'm writing about this topic at this moment ("over the line") due to the fear that something like this could happen in Serbia, now that it's become obvious that a big and important defeat is imminent and it's only a matter of time when it will have to be officially recognized. You don't have to be a psychologist to understand that fear has disappeared, that there is no room for manipulation of the protest organization, that propaganda reaches fewer and fewer people and leaves an ever weaker impression. The further development of the specific events that will lead to this will depend on countless factors, and I doubt that anyone can see them all precisely at this moment. But if one psychological factor can play an important role, it is the maturity of the personality and the strength to admit defeat before the last vestiges of independent institutions are destroyed and even more massive bloodshed ensues.

Because, although its practice is very complex, the idea of ​​democracy is actually just that: no matter how much political power someone may have at a certain moment, the system makes it inevitable that sometimes his ideas also experience defeat. (They say that the first assembly of the Soviet Union rejected some of Lenin's proposals.) And nothing to anyone. When you enter the political process, you have to be aware that it can only end in defeat, that a new idea or a younger party must inevitably come, but since it is not a life-and-death struggle, you retire and write your memoirs.

Except, of course, when the political situation has turned into a life-and-death struggle, when the stakes have become too high, fanaticism and the cult of personality have taken deep roots, when we are aware that our hands are bloody, that is, that from the first day we have only been concerned with preventing the loss of power from ever happening to us again and shouting: "You will never defeat me/us!". Then the defeat is equated with humiliation, imprisonment, exile, loss of power, which in the meantime has become dearer than life, so there is a readiness to fight violently until the last drop of someone else's blood. And that is precisely what is most important to avoid, the outcome is inevitable, defeat can only be postponed a little.

It is especially complicated that this process takes place in a society where defeat is the central theme. There are only a few peoples in the world who base their identities on the narrative of a devastating defeat from which they had to recover for centuries. This is exactly what happened to us, so our most famous ethnologists noted even at the end of the nineteenth century that folk poetry is "mourning the empire", all accompanied by the mournful sound of the fiddle. Many of the darkest and worst sides of our social history must be connected to this idealization of defeat in Kosovo, from the heroic resistance to the occupiers to the inability to separate the political system from myths, death and killing.

FAIL AGAIN, FAIL BETTER

Wherever in development - historical or personal - there were no defeats that bring destruction and trauma, it is possible to teach a child or a group how to recognize defeats, survive them, and even "turn them around", turn them into stronger training or other ambitions. It is in the nature of childhood to fantasize unrealistically, that we will be pirates, astronauts or top athletes, so something like that should not be stifled in children, but they must be gradually, to the extent tolerable for their age, pointed out that defeats are an inevitable part of life, that no one always wins, and that despite the defeat and precisely because of the defeat, they must play the next game with even more fighting spirit.

Because there is little wisdom as precious as Beckett's “Fail again. Fail better”. Victories are easy to enjoy, but few build character like the capacity to integrate the defeats we are exposed to, few give non-destruction the motivation that a failure from which we have recovered can. It cannot be a coincidence that almost every Dostoyevsky, Einstein, Verdi or Kafka was actually a "loser" who did not allow any of the numerous defeats to make him give up.

The author is a psychologist