As Western society continues to collapse, the psychological health of Westerners continues to worsen. As it does, the rate of Loser Syndrome increases, which is the main reason why there’s so much visible trashiness in society today. This essay looks at the causes and effects of this phenomenon.
Loser Syndrome can be found wherever a person has a negative effect upon their social environment because of a weak psychological makeup. Losers are those who cause their family, community or nation more problems than they solve, usually because of a shitty attitude that makes them refuse to put their ego aside long enough to make any positive contribution to anyone else’s life.
It’s not fair to call people losers if they were born with genetic conditions or if they were abused or neglected as children and left with traumatic stress disorders. Such people may be unlucky, but they’re not necessarily losers, as they are still fully capable of entertaining the gods through striving to overcome their conditions. The loser does not strive to overcome; true Loser Syndrome can be understood as a psychospiritual phenomenon.
There are two aspects to Loser Syndrome.
The first is giving up on life. This involves rejecting the reality about life and its temporary nature. The loser has no ambitions apart from vague power fantasies. He mumbles, doesn’t make eye contact when talking, disrespects people, and generally lowers the tone of any environment he’s in. His eyebrows are either knotted in a surly scowl or relaxed in a dimwit gaze. He has surrendered.
Some losers are narcissistic enough to dress and groom themselves well, but give themselves away both through body language and through a child-like solipsism that makes them act as if they were alone in the world (a.k.a. Main Character Syndrome). A predilection for destruction over creation is typical of someone who has given up. As such, Loser Syndrome acts like a cancer in the wider social body, preventing it from thriving.
The second, and most important aspect, is an expectation that others will also give up on life. Anyone who tries hard to achieve something, anyone who strives, is sneered at and ripped down by those afflicted by Loser Syndrome. They would rather that everyone else sink to the lowest level of society, and become like them.
If the loser themselves cannot be venerated, no-one can. So anyone who venerates someone else has to be torn down. Such is the viciousness and depth of the resentment that Loser Syndrome is fuelled by. Those with it are always unhappy to see other people do well. The successes of their friends and family bring them no joy. In fact, such successes can often create further resentment.
Herein it’s clear that Loser Syndrome is a slave morality. Like the other slave moralities, Loser Syndrome lifts up the lowest and most execrable (other losers) and pushes down the honourable and the good (non-losers). The more society hates you, the more the loser likes you, and vice-versa.
If misery loves company, so does trashiness.
To some extent, Loser Syndrome and trashiness are similar things, however Loser Syndrome is unique for its aggression. Many trashy people are happy-go-lucky, whereas the genuine loser strives mightily to take everyone else down. Anyone happy, especially if they’re happy about themselves, has to be attacked.
In this sense, Loser Syndrome can be conceptualised as an advanced form of trashiness, in the same way that psychopathy is an advanced form of narcissism. Trashiness can be fun and light-hearted, but Loser Syndrome is a pathological intensification of trashiness that emanates low vibrations. Normal people can have trashy friends, but they can’t have loser friends, because those losers will either rip the Normies down or find a reason to turn on them.
Unfortunately for us, increasing economic pressures mean that Loser Syndrome is predicted to become more common.
The harsher the economic climate becomes, the fewer people get to enjoy a dignified standard of living, which means the more resentment exists. When inequality reaches such a degree that those born without talents see no hope of climbing the ladder, the destructive intent characteristic of Loser Syndrome will fully explode.
Loser Syndrome is ultimately a social contagion that is emblematic of collapse. No-one in authority seems to give a shit, so why should anyone else? Unfortunately, when someone does start giving a shit, and drives the losers out, chances are they will be an authoritarian psychopath who causes tremendous collateral damage. The loser, therefore, is the harbinger of widespread suffering.
There may arrive a point in many of our lives where we begin to feel a natural, indwelling sense of encouragement to question the nature of our lives. I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of reflecting upon who we are and where we are heading with our partners, career and so forth – although that certainly can be a part of it.
Really what I am talking about is looking at is the nature of the entire worldview that we have inhabited, and what is has meant for us to occupy our place within it. Our beliefs, our judgments, our compulsions, neuroses and habits – what has it all meant? Why have we done the things we have, and where did our investment in energy take us along the way?
Self-inquiry in some form or another is often the precursor to great shifts in our understanding, not only of ourselves, but also the way in which we view reality, and ultimately how we move through the world.
Self-inquiry could take the form of ‘something in my life needs to change’. It could derive from a sense of overwhelming dissatisfaction. When I am talking about this line of inquiry, I don’t mean how we can be bigger, better, or different versions of ourselves. Personalities are already very much engaged in this kind task at any given time, so we aren’t talking about that aspect of reflection.
What is however revolutionary in our inner world is to begin to question that which has been fundamental to our entire way of operating.
Changing a partner, a name, or a profession is a little bit like swapping out one pair of shoes for another. We are not talking about touching upon a superficial change. The task of self-inquiry questions in a way that does not emerge from any of assumptions about getting somewhere else, being someone else. It centres its focus on pursuing a clear and direct understanding of the way things are. This is not a relative understanding – how we think they should be, or how they were, but how they actually are right now – in other words, what is actually real?
Who am I really, when all of this personal history with all of its various wants and habits falls by the wayside?
Some people will not feel any clear pull to do this. There are some people who are compelled to do so even from an early age, and even when it was far from comfortable to do so. This inquiry is not necessarily outward – asking our parents or teachers, for example. It is more that is a very direct inner experience of questioning in which we hold in a light of unremitting scrutiny, again, not to look better or to feel better – but to actually know.
The renowned Indian sage Ramana Maharshi famously likened self-inquiry as being like a stick used to stir the embers of a fire. The stick of ‘who am I?’ would stir the hot coals, and in doing so, would itself catch fire and eventually be burned away. This analogy demonstrates something important about the nature of the self-inquiry process – it isn’t really about the power of our answers, but the power of our questions. What is energetically real within those questions does not remain for us as psychological form, but is reclaimed by the truth.
Nothing is perhaps a clearer sign of awakening than the falling away of questions.
When there is any confusion inside us about the nature of things or our true identity, there is usually a persistent sense of being unsettled. Whether we give voice to this confusion or not, there is a yearning for closure that has a way of gnawing at us internally.
Usually, the response for this kind of disturbance or discomfort is some form of going along with a temporary distraction as an analgesic. Making the sense of discomfort going away can work temporarily by any number of methods. Some people do things as simple as ride a bike, watch a movie or listen to the radio in the car.
In other more acute forms, the disturbance of unresolved energies can lead to more dysfunctional patterns. Once you begin to look in earnest upon your inner world, you will begin to see how much of your strange behaviour, built upon years of habit, has been recruited and held in place just to manage certain persistent kinds of unpleasant feelings. My experience has been that in any case in which we experience painful or uncomfortable inner states, we are really being presented with an issue being brought to our attention that asks for closer examination.
Sometimes, the path of inquiry can appear relatively simple. We might have had one feeling haunting us for years when all it was really asking of us was to be looked at once, only to dissipate.
This is not altogether that rare, and it is something I have observed first-hand.
It can be a strange experience waking up into the next moment, only to no longer think or feel something that you might have been unwittingly committed to for decades. Understanding can be a very quick or gradual process of uncovering layers of error. Mostly it is some combination of both. We aren’t problem solving, or committing our inner world to any kind of rigorous psychoanalysis. We are starting out by just looking in the energetic direction the question is coming from.
Do we want to be a bigger, better ‘me’, or do we want to meet the truth with our entire being? Sometimes these confusions and questions carry an immeasurable power behind them. This is why the negative effects we experience from some unresolved questions can seem so turbulent.
Usually the question ‘who am I?’ being the basic question of identity has an enormous momentum, because the reality is that we have either discovered who we truly are and we have stopped seeking, or we haven’t and we’re left unsure.
There’s an enormous amount of energy that can be tied up in this question. Strangely enough, this can also be one of the reasons people are so terrified of dying (specifically our ideas about what death might be), because they don’t know who they are yet, and they feel an extraordinary compulsion issuing from within for them to find out before it is too late.
It is a grand irony that the one thing that is asking you to stop for one moment in total stillness, also happens to be very same the force within us prompting our frantic searching in all directions.
Have you ever had the thought occur to you ‘Imagine what I would get done in life if I no longer had to worry about this?’ It is very much like that. What the process of self-inquiry is doing for us is freeing up our energy so that we can really get on with this task of living, and not persist in driving with our brakes on.
My own experience has shown that the most powerful of these questions have been, for me: ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is actually true?’ The form your own questions take will vary, but choose whatever you feel resonates as the most important and meaningfully worded line of inquiry for you.
There are no predetermined answers here – a volume of written answers would not be worth one true revelation within you, however small. It is critically important that you meet this inquiry, whatever the result, in the privacy of your own heart. After all, the benefit of the authenticity of this intimate process is that you are not taking anything for granted. In this inquiry, no reference is being made to what anyone else has taught you or imposed upon you. You are a free agent.
If the will is pure, and you will know the degree to which you seek truth for its own sake, you will happen upon whatever is most important for your own unfolding.
In what we call spiritual affairs, there is no truth so certain and universal that is justified asking someone to believe on your behalf. It simply doesn’t work this way.
This is illustrated in the Chan tradition (the Chinese origin of the Zen tradition) in the following way: to have a piece of knowledge as a belief or a commitment is like someone giving you a cup of tea. You could be anyone, holy, righteous, high ranking – if you had the tea given to you, you could show everyone else that you had the tea, and bring it out any time you wanted. However, having the tea is not the same as tasting the tea – if you have not tasted it, then you haven’t connected with the real value in having it.
All true spiritual revelation comes to us by way of tasting the tea. Many people insist on believing things they have never experienced that have simply been bequeathed to them by other people they once placed their trust in, whether it was friends, family or cultural institutions.
If someone attempted to tell you who you were, in the closest, most exact definition possible in your native language, that would still get you nowhere. You would maybe have a nice definition, and you would run around reproducing that definition as a thought form. It might even change your life in all kinds of ways, but it would never be the truth. In self-inquiry, we’re not after mixing things up in our life, we are after a revelation of truth. Therefore, we have to meet it directly, or not at all.
This process can seem intimidating for a number of reasons, the first of which is that we have erroneously been led to believe that the unknown is always dangerous, and therefore to be avoided. The second reason, whether we are aware of it or not, is that our sense of psychological survival is tied up in who we believe ourselves to be as a conglomeration of memories, thoughts, beliefs and identities imposed by ourselves as well as others.
When these are met with challenge, this arouses within us a kind of existential fear. In the realm of self-inquiry, both of these fears are unfounded. They really are phantoms of conditioning. Of course, it will not help you to believe that, but I hope this at least gives you a sufficient nudge of encouragement to brave the first meeting with yourself.
You will not disappear, die, or be possessed by evil spirits.
The only thing that is real in us is what has been here all along, so know that you will not be facing anything that cannot be met fully. The ground of being is a little like a universal safety net. You’re not going to lose ‘you’, but you likely have entertained very distorted ideas of who ‘you’ were thanks to our collective enculturation. You may arrive upon a very different understanding of who you are, but you are only going to find more of what is real inside there, not less of it.
Who you are is something that is not an idea. It is not encapsulated by ideas. The only things that can fall away are illusory. Because what is real in us is very powerful, it is also prone to misunderstanding. When you come upon it, it is likely to surprise you. Sometimes losing our psychological definitions can be sudden, dramatic and unsettling, but more often than not, the alterations are more gradual, nuanced and bring with them a sense of having weight taken off your shoulders.
These moments of realisation, even when they are small, carry the quality of having woken from a troubling dream.
Likely everyone has had the experience of being asleep, fully convinced that something very complex, involved and stressful was happening, only to realise upon awakening that actually this wasn’t true at all – you were dreaming the whole thing. Waking up from the dream of personal identity is much the same type of experience. Don’t take anyone’s word for it – go and discover this all for yourself. You will not regret it.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
we’ve had 15 years together and I feel that this is enough. It’s time to go our separate ways. I feel that a separation is the true desire of both of us. The way I see it is, I’m going up, and you’re going down, and the tension is too great to keep us together any longer.
When I opened my FaceBook account, in 2007, you were the coolest thing out there. One big problem with life before then: you could make great friends through, say, a mutual acquaintance, and then those friends would go back overseas and you’d lose contact with them. A network that a person could use to stay in touch with these people was the perfect thing for a then-university student.
I can still remember how much fun those early days were. Back then, everyone I met through you was cool. You seemed to only know cool and interesting people: the talented and the educated. In 2007, if some random commented on a friend’s post, that random was probably someone worth knowing too. A FaceBook account was a gateway to a world of great people.
But over the years, I saw your standards fall and fall.
The first sign was the televisionisation. The prospect of money from the advertising guys seemed like a drug for you – you were hooked instantly. Suddenly there were ads everywhere, in between the quality posts from intelligent people. Ads, ads, ads, ads. Everywhere.
Then the quality pages started to get throttled. The great awakening/conspiracy pages started to reach far fewer readers. And then the mainstream media started to muscle in. Soon there were “Recommended” posts that were all mainstream media content. Just the same mainstream media content that I stopped watching television in order to avoid!
The worst thing, though, was the bannings. Why ban me for making Hitler jokes? Were you worried about losing advertisers? Eventually a person could get banned for anything on FaceBook. It was a simple matter of making a joke that the Filipino moderators on $1/hr didn’t approve of, and wham – banned.
It seems to me like you care more about money now than information quality, which is the exact opposite of the spirit of the Internet. The old FaceBook, which was full of groups of subject matter enthusiasts sharing expert knowledge, is gone. The great meme pages have been censored into oblivion. Now it’s just ads and low-IQ drivel.
Now, every pissed-off loser is on FaceBook, crying about stupid shit that I don’t care about. All the scientists and philosophers are long gone. By today, 2022, you are filled up with trash, worse than television ever was. I’m more likely to get death threats through FaceBook than invites to a good party.
In fact, many of the worst people I know I have met through you.
This is a complete turnaround from 15 years ago. Back then, it was the people in my physical environment who were rough and trashy, and online life gave me a chance to get away from them, and to meet a higher quality of person. But now that I’m getting older, getting more accomplished, earning more respect, the people in my physical environment are fairly decent. The people I meet through you though… ‘rough and trashy’ only begins to describe it.
It seems like all the quality people no longer have FaceBook accounts and spend time elsewhere. And it’s not just me who thinks this. Your reputation is in tatters. People now call you ‘FaecesBook’ without any irony, and, worst of all, you show no sign of any intention to change the direction in which you’re going. That’s what tells me that we now have to go our separate ways.
I’ve enjoyed the entertainment you have given me. I have had some good laughs over the years, winding up tards and debating politics with normies. But you’ve shown me that you’re going downwards and have no wish to change course. So this letter is to give you notice that I am deleting my FaceBook account. Best of luck to you in sorting yourself out.
You may have sometimes wondered whether you have become the person who you were destined to be, or the person you want to be, or ought to be. How are the expectations about who you are, or who you should be, framed? Do you often pose this question to yourself, with a view of changing or reinventing yourself?
Perhaps you want to be a model, but the most important people around you value you not for your attractiveness, but because you’re the best mother possible for them. It may be that you want to be seen as strong, as a tough guy, but people don’t see this in you at all. Perhaps who they actually see is someone who always knows the right thing to say, who listens, is caring and trustworthy, someone that they can always rely upon to talk to without feel judged. Perhaps we have seen how children who were slow in school were treated by teachers and other students, so we decided we were going to be the clever ones who always had the right answers – but even though we view ourselves that way, others don’t view us as intelligent but just as a hard worker.
Maybe you view yourself as successful, but everyone else in your family feels like you are trying too hard to seem special, and what they really value about you is how you cook amazing food, or make thoughtful birthday cards.
Learning these kinds of things may even be very disappointing to our ego. I know it was for me. We may find it disempowering and frustrating that people just don’t see us in the way that we expect that they should. This is often because the masks we try to wear never tend to do anywhere near as good a job at representing us as we think they should.
In a world full of horses trying their hardest to be unicorns, just a simple, honest horse is a rare phenomenon. Striving to be special has become thing one thing we can expect from nearly everyone, making the thrust toward specialness perhaps the most ordinary of human traits.
The way we build our expectations about who we are, or how we should be in our minds is often bound up with our core beliefs about who we originally learned to want to be. These are often conclusions made very early on in life about our role and our place in the world. Maybe when we were children, we thought we weren’t safe, so we wanted to be viewed as a strong protector. Perhaps we saw how unhappy that the people in poverty were around us, so we concluded that appearing well-off and fancy was valuable.
What really matters is that we have unexamined core beliefs that feed directly into who we think we should be, how our role should play out in life, and how this ought to be reflected in the eyes of others present in our lives.
Instead of recommending that we go about throwing out every single belief we have about ourselves and others, why don’t we simply start by looking at how we hold onto our own views about ourselves and how we expect to appear before others? If we can just loosen our grip on these expectations, we might be surprised at what rises to the surface in our relationships without forming any firm rules about how we would like to appear.
The mind can act as an extremely powerful filter. Our beliefs can totally cloud what appears in front of us to the point where we are not seeing any of reality.
Some lines of self-inquiry in a quiet space might be: how important is the way that I am perceived by others relative to the truth of who I am? Who am I, truly? Who am I without the influence of expectations from myself or others? Is it true that I will only be a success as a person if my circumstances and appearance match up with my ideas of what a successful person is? What are some of the ways in which I have created and been following my own recipe for misery?
Would my true conditions for success ever strike anyone as particularly commendable or special? If yes, or no, would that ultimately prove of lasting consequence? What if I found my calling, along with peace, happiness and well-being, but nobody on the planet ever recognised the value of that for my entire life?
Would I be able to live with that, or would I choose what my mind had in store for me that has not made me happy or peaceful, but might convince others that I was special, powerful, advanced or successful? What would the ultimate value of that be? Could you dispense with every idea of being whatever your version of a worldly success was? How would that feel, and what exactly would be left?
Our masks for ourselves have been tailored since childhood. Some of the shaping of that mask is due to the efforts of others imposing their values and expectations upon us, and still more of it is about how we have continued to shape that mask in response to others’ expectations.
Those claiming power and authority demand we act one way, so we make our mask look like we either obediently conform, or we are in rebellion against them. Perhaps because the world tells us that tough guys are survivors, we wear a mask of being a man of the world, an impervious survivor. Perhaps the world tells us we have nothing material to contribute to society because we lack success or attractiveness, so we wear the mask of the intellectual one, or the holy one, the one who is mysteriously above it all.
Point this out to any mask-wearer and they will be angry and embarrassed. Mask-wearers the world around seem to hold to a mutual understanding of not calling each other out, because we risk exposing ourselves.
The simple fact of the matter is, a mask is just a mask. Other egos know that. They even rely upon it to make sure you will fall into line with their delusions.
In the game of delusions and lies, the demon Mara is always one step ahead of you. You aren’t ever going to out-illusion the source of all illusion. No one succeeds in the world of Maya, the world of illusion, they just keep going around in smaller or bigger circles. The only progress we can make in this is when we give up the game of appearance. Our activities beyond this then are virtually invisible to the world of ego, because they don’t factor into ego’s schema of gaining and getting.
Only appearances matter to the False Self, so why would it value authenticity? We can’t even say whether our masks are even perceivable to other egos in the way we think they are. We assume that one way of appearing, behaving or speaking makes us seem powerful or admirable in the eyes of people, but to most people it may make us appear reaching or weak-minded. We wear a mask that we assume means people will think we are insightful and have special access to all the answers, whereas people might really just see us as a blowhard.
Even when people agree exactly with the fiction we portray, then what? Does our fiction become true? Even if our ruse is successful, what will sustain us until next time?
I remember as child I was obsessed with every subtle movement of my body conveying the appearance of having a robotic metal skeleton like the Terminator. This was mainly because I had concluded, in my nine-year old’s mind, that nothing else in the world would impress pretty girls more. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I would bet my last dollar that over the course of that time I was engaged in this ruse, not a single person (never mind a pretty girl) concluded that I was just a skilfully disguised Terminator.
What most people don’t focus so much upon is that wearing a mask is painful, however you have made it. It is uncomfortable, it is heavy, it is unnatural. We all wear them because we think we have to, being part of the human tribe. When I was pretending to be a Terminator, I was not experiencing joy. I was experiencing great suffering, having concluded that I needed to beg others for love and a sense of worth.
Taking a mask off is a relief for people, which is why people feel such relief when they are by themselves. Note that when we are around entities that we do not perceive as judgmental of us, such as our cats or dogs, we can still unwind and relax. It is fellow humans where we invest the sense of not only threat and demand, but the sense of promise that we may be meted out a rare share of love, praise or worth.
Our masks rarely convey the impression on others that we assume they do. We all take them off when we go to sleep at night, so why not practice leaving them off when we wake up in the morning? See what the real-world consequences are of you not following your own rules about how you should appear , and who you think others should think you are.
You might just find a welcome respite.
I have personally discovered that the greatest possible gift I could have given myself and the world is to retire one mask-wearer, one source of delusion. Looking back on this life, I maintain that I would rather have this freedom than any mask the mind could conjure. The really relevant question is: who should you be?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
