16 June 2018
I don’t like the classification of human beings into winners and losers. Or maybe I don’t understand it. I think of the symbols that identify a winner. Money, above all—that is to say, the possibility of acquiring expensive objects, and a taste for displaying them as proof of your superiority. Or the exercise of power, demonstrating by very subtle means that you are high up in the hierarchy. Or the sort of aristocracy that derives from media fame, a blue blood of celebrity ensuring that you don’t have to earn people’s attention every time—you’re recognised enthusiastically, at first sight. Or the permanent mise-en-scène of happiness: someone who has a lot of money exercises power, enjoys the status of a VIP, and therefore must be happy.
Except that all these symbols of the winner’s position soon reveal themselves to be less than genuine and, above all, precarious. Money, power, fame, glory, happiness—all are quick to show cracks. And every time this image of the winner collapses, and the appearance of victory turns to failure, the idea of the loser collapses, too; that category of people who have no expensive possessions, no power, no fame, only a sense of unhappiness resulting from their impression of having failed.
Maybe the true spectre behind this classification into winners and losers is precisely that, the fear of failure. It was the thing that as a girl I feared most. Failing in school; failing to get a job; failing any test, be it athletics or maths. I put an exhausting amount of effort into everything that had even the appearance of a competition, because I sensed that one failure leads to another, and that that’s where the list of the good and the bad originates. When you end up on the list of the bad, it becomes difficult to cross over on to the list of the good.
It took me a long time to understand that those classifications are as cruel as they are arbitrary. They pretend that neither socioeconomic inequalities nor sexual and racial discrimination exist, nor the extremely culpable waste of intelligence that results. We draw up lists of the good and the bad as if the many privileges deriving from chance aren’t there: your place of birth, your family, the inequality of opportunities.
Even today, in this so-called advanced part of the world, the conditions at the point of starting out are too unjust to think of as a competition in which the odds are not stacked. If I could, I would eliminate concepts such as failing, winning and losing, which no longer have any basis. If it were really necessary, I would confine myself to a competition like the caucus race that Alice encounters in Wonderland. Nobody loses, everybody wins and there is no failure.