A man is made to lose if he can’t find a woman. A woman is made to lose if her man treats her badly.

I’ve been seen both as a winner and as a loser at different times in my life. Mostly it was about what kind of job I had. Some people dump on losers and think that they’re bad; but with me, here’s someone who has been both a winner and a loser; which negates the paradigm.

In experiments with quail, a female was shown two males fighting. The younger quail picked the winner and the older quail picked the loser. Some women think that winners are meaner than losers. However I have known many losers who were mean, and I have known many winners who were kind. I do not see how the two have anything to do with one another at all.

So, we see many people see successful businessmen as greedy bastards and the workers as good. But I have known a number of successful businessmen who were good people. The abuses I’ve seen were committed across socioeconomical lines. I have known women who were very badly abused by rich husbands, and I have known people who were raped since age 3 or 4 by people who were poor.

Dumping on “losers” is wrong. So is their glorification. Sometimes the little guy is the good guy; sometimes he isn’t. One of the worst behaviors I have seen is what I call the Mobutu behavior. Here, someone from a disadvantaged background appropriates for himself the sympathies of the well-off, then uses it to abuse and oppress other disadvantaged people. Someone poses as the little guy then mistreats people who are smaller than him. This kind of behavior murders humanitarianism. Nobody will want to donate money to feed Mobutu’s corrupt and cruel behavior. Actually helping the little guy means in many cases helping him to stand up to the world’s Mobutus.

Communists claimed to speak for the little guy, then they unleashed one of the worst forms of totalitarianism practiced in history. A lot of wrong has been done in the name of the little guy. I am against both mistreating the “losers” and against glorifying them. It is just as wrong to mistreat people who have less than you do as it is wrong to advocate for slaughters of propertied class. In Freemasons, which I attend, there are both the well-off and the less well-off, and they get along as brothers. It is toward this state of affairs that it is necessary to strive.

On the other side there are people who think that, unless you have everything, you have nothing to offer anyone else. The quality of the insight that you have is independent of the quality of life that you lead. There were many major contributors who lived deprived lives. Nikolai Tesla made vast contributions to civilization, but he died in poverty. Karl Marx spent his adult life in poverty, but for a long time two fifths of the world followed his ideas. Gandhi lived in poverty, but he became one of the most admired political figures in history. Sometimes one’s work is compensated adequately, at other times it isn’t. Most of what business sells comes from science; but it is businessmen, not scientists, who become multi-millionaires.

So there are both good and bad losers and there are both good and bad winners. I seek to be good, and I seek to make the biggest contributions I can. I don’t care if I am seen as a winner or as a loser. I do care what I contribute. And that can be done whether or not I am adequately compensated for it.