Silly Little Country

The Loser and the Doomer

Serendipity is real! It has often played an entertaining role in my life.
So now it plays one again - I just posted on the losers who came to Toronto last weekend and now, in an utterly different context, a blogger describes a slightly different concept, that of the 'doomer'. But actually they are clearly VERY close.

The Doomer confuses his personal collapse with the "inevitable" collapse of society. ("Inevitable" is the keystone of the Doomer vocabulary and, as such, should be avoided whenever possible.) He suffers from a severe case of tunnel vision. Like a horse with blinders on, he can only see what's immediately in front of him. Anything indicating that other people's experience contradicts his world-view is dismissed as false or a lie propagated by the corrupt elite. He doesn't want his dogma tested, because then it might be refuted, and the emotional consequences of that would be too much to bear. He would have to accept that he has failed due to his lack of merit and not by his refusal to make some moral compromise.

And more, and understand that the author thinks he has a streak of the Doomer in him (though I doubt this weekend's losers have any self-awareness):

The Doomer is motivated by much more than a perverse sense of altruism. He mainly desires to see everyone brought down to his level. His fondest wish is for everyone to be as emotionally crippled as he is, and, if they could also be paralyzed fiscally, that would be great too. The argument for the necessity of disaster is merely an excuse for his vindictive fantasies. This is the Doomer's Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity's best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.

I think that is about right; they will be happy when we are all pathetic losers like them!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:49 PM