Do the Math

Suppose you're part of a group of, let's say, five people who have to vote on things.  And suppose you find yourself on the losing side of every vote that is 4-1 or 3-2.

Suppose further that your arguments in support of your losing positions are quirky, or counter-intuitive.  And suppose you have to be so inconsistent as to be hypocritical in making your range of contrary arguments.  To make matters worse, suppose you couldn't fully articulate those arguments, or you relied on input from other people whose identities could not be revealed.  Worst of all, suppose that you wanted to make an argument, but there was no identifiable support for it, and you had to resort to inventing the alleged input of others, or even inventing the "facts" that would underpin your position.

If you're a partially rational and passably intelligent person, and if you have at least a rudimentary capacity for self-reflection, how do you explain this to yourself?

Do you tell yourself that you are right, and everyone else is wrong?  Repeatedly and seemingly invariably?  If your ideas and inspirations come only from you, do you conclude that you are ingenious, and everyone else is dimwitted?  If you have to invent support, or tell frank lies, do you reassure yourself that you are simply right, and the ends justify the means?

I have to confess to a struggle.  When Roxy Ross was Mayor of the Village, she opened every meeting with the same request.  She asked Commissioners and other residents to assume "the purity of each others' motives."  I could see that in a humanistic sense, Roxy was right.  Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No," and the well-known "Do the Right Thing" are in the same vein.  Before long, you're just "turning the other cheek."  But even Roxy couldn't endlessly do that.

Ultimately, try as I might, I couldn't do it.  I couldn't make that assumption of pure and honest motives.  And if I can't do that, then I have to look at those regular 4-1s and 3-2s with some skepticism.  I can't assume bad luck, or just happening to have a different view, or being ahead of one's time.  Or even being behind the times.  I found myself assuming a "method to the madness."  I had to assume something of which the loser was conscious, and something deliberate.  In that the invariable losing posture was too much for coincidence, I had to assume the loser was being contrary, or even sabotaging.

Chuck Ross says these losers are anarchists.  I think more in terms of terrorists.  After all, there isn't just something obstructive about the positions they take.  There's something destructive about them.  There seems to be a deliberate, concerted, insistent attempt to undermine, and injure.  And to "prove," in a sense, this conclusion, sometimes the miscreants will actually acknowledge that this is what they're doing.  One of them might say, for example, that unwavering repudiation of whatever others in the Village want is intended as a punishment for that person's having been outvoted on something once.  Or another might persistently act in grossly disrespectful ways to a supposed colleague, then appear to seek to rub the colleague's nose in the fact that the newcomer displaced the colleague as Mayor.  "I'm doing this, because you outvoted me once."  "I'm doing this, because I'm devoted to humiliating you."  Wouldn't it be a relief if I was just making this up?   (At least the Fagin character among these delinquents was smart enough not to announce openly what he was doing.  It was obvious, but he didn't actually say it.)

As a spectator, adding it up this way seems inescapable.  What I don't know, however, is how these losers themselves would explain the position they so often experience.  It wasn't long ago that a reliable losing pair trumpeted to the world that the majority were devils and brutes, and were presumably out to get them.  So they worked hard to create a new majority out of their minority.  Who knows if they ever thought they were "right," but at least now, they could win.  But even that is slipping away, as one of the new troops appears to be seeing some version of what I am seeing and describing, and is too often finding herself backing away from the terrorists.  Or anarchists.  Or geniuses, free-thinkers, and clairvoyants.  Or whatever they are.