Dialogue: Win or lose, we're more than a slogan

By JOE BENNETT

There's a philosophy in the air which people are occasionally kind enough to write to me about. To call it a philosophy is to dignify it beyond its deserts, but here it is anyway.

The heart of it is winning. Winners rule, losers suck and there's an end to it.

In this sort of thinking, the world has but two types of people - those who win and those who lose. Oddly enough, this is the only point on which I agree. There are, indeed, only two types of people in this world - those who divide people into two types and those who don't.

But according to the fans of winning, New Zealand is suffering from losers' disease. Other countries aren't. The Australians, for example, aren't. The so-called philosophy of winning comes with a set of platitudes. I have been sent a few by a gentleman who is keen to let me know that I am a cynic and a thorough-going bred-in-the-bone loser, none of which I deny.

He informs me that losers have excuses whereas winners have programmes, losers see problems whereas winners see answers, and so predictably on.

In short, he suggests that if we can only think as winners, any difficulty becomes merely a delightful and challenging little hurdle to be blithely leaped over in the happy gallop towards the Plateau of Plenty, while the great mass of losers huddle in the shadow of the first little hurdle and gibber together as perpetual detainees in the Valley of Misery.

A philosophy is a view of things based on understanding, and understanding is based on observation of what is, not what ought to be. So it is not a philosophy that my correspondent is preaching but an attitude. Nevertheless, that attitude is seductive. Being a winner sounds so clean and bouncy and promising. It smacks entrancingly of New Year's resolutions.

It is, of course, nothing new. It has been around for years under a thousand aliases, of which perhaps the best known is the power of positive thinking.

In one form or another, it is the preaching to be found in a trillion self-help books. That there are not, as a result of a trillion self-help books, a trillion triumphant tycoons strutting between heaven and Earth, suggests that there might be some flaws in the thinking.

I have known only one person who has openly espoused the self-help positive-thinking attitude. I will not go into details but he has come, I'm afraid, to no good.

But I know winners and some of them I love. I could drop the name of a good friend here and you would recognise it. He is a man for whom thought and action are all but simultaneous. He charges into projects with irrepressible vigour.

Sometimes he comes a cropper; more often he soars to success. He is fazed by neither. He's dynamic and a doer and a household name and a joy to be with.

Another friend, whose name you would not know, is also a winner.

He makes things happen. When his house was flooded, painters came in for a fortnight to redecorate it. By the time they had finished, he had formed them into a limited company and got them a contract to paint supermarkets in Nigeria. Yet this man, Roger, does not expect others to be as he is. He thinks more wisely than any man I know, and what he wishes there was more of in the world is simply tolerance.

Some winners appeal less than these two friends. I do not think, for example, that I would love Mr Kerry Packer, for all that he has winner stamped over every inch of his cashmere pyjamas.

I have also known and loved people whom my correspondent would condemn as losers. Andy has never won. He is, I think, the bravest man I know, and one of the best, but something squats in him that debars him from conventional success, a sort of longsightedness that's as heavy as misfortune. It has kept him remote and poor, but not, I think, sad.

To use a phrase that's very old and very simple: it takes all sorts to make a world. To divide people into winners and losers is wrong. Every country holds within its population an infinite variety of people, forged in the womb and the cradle, and then steered down their days partly by chance but mainly by character.

And that is how it is and I for one am pleased that it is so.

And to talk of winning and losing is to turn life into the black and white and false simplicity of war or sport.