The Myth Of Winning

By Gerald S. Clay and Fletcher Knebel

“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”

–         Vince Lombardi

No American quotation so misrepresents the essence of modern life as that ascribed to the late Vincent Lombardi, coach of the Green Bay Packers, who purportedly tossed off the famous line about winning. The sole purpose of the game, the remark implied, was not the playing of it, but the winning of it.

However pertinent the comment might be for professional sports—and even there it fails to reflect reality by a wide margin—as a metaphor for life, Lombardi’s enshrinement of victory is junk psychology.

For every minute of our lives bent toward winning, we spend hours and days adjusting, accommodating and compromising. Most of society’s rituals, customs, and advisories on behavior serve to avoid rather than incite the struggles that result in winners and losers.

Games and sports, as prevalent and popular as they are, belong to a world apart. Games take place in a highly artificial, structured environment. They have rigid rules designed to yield winners and losers in every contest. But life beyond games features elastic rules, limitless ambiguity, and wide areas where winning becomes irrelevant and the pursuit of victory seems ludicrous at best and perilous at worst.

Short of war, modern life holds only restricted fields in which winning over losers is the goal. Games, both physical and mental, yes. Gambling, yes. Beauty, endurance, and muscle-bulging contests, yes. Running for political office should not belong to the same category as these—and yet, it is constantly framed as such.

Elections as they currently exist are defined by the idea of winners and losers: we obsessively track candidates’ standing in polls and their ‘electability’ more than we interrogate their values and histories. The ideal of selecting a candidate whose beliefs align with our own has long since decayed, if it ever truly existed; our two-party system turns political office into a game of red vs. blue that cares little about what actually happens once its players are in positions of power. In a system like this, is it any wonder that Hawaii’s 2016 voter turnout was the lowest in the nation?

By rethinking our perception of public office as a position to be won, we can revitalize civic engagement with our leadership. Don’t trust politicians based on their status as victors—look to their status as moral leaders.