Imagine that you are dating a very hot person. Both of you are still in the developing stages, not quite at the shared reading and day trip level but not without that potential either. You enjoy your time with the hot person, and they presumably with you. So when the hot person has a seemingly sudden change of heart (though probably less seemingly on reflection), the hot person knows the disappointment that awaits them. They’re grateful for the experience, they assure you, but they aren’t ready for something serious. They hope that they can keep you on as a friend. Though your reason has taken a secondary place in your mind at the moment, it is still sending up some helpful flares. Friendship as a concept could not be less appealing to you in this moment. You are as Gravedigger crushing a life’s worth of friendships all neatly piled up for your enormous wheels. But even if that wasn’t the case, the sincerity with which the hot person is willing or able to honor their own offer of friendship is very much in doubt. In truth it’s not really an offer, it’s more of a coping mechanism, or even a psychological test, taking a measurement of the hardness of the rejected’s feelings and then deflecting them when confirmed. You know this even as you accept the proposal through gritted teeth.
But my friend, it gets worse. For this breakup occurred in the middle of a political conflict that quickly escalated into a wide scale civil war. You came out of it with your life, but not with victory. So not only are you a loser in love, you are also a loser in war. As with love, you never got to do very much beyond moral support, but that meets the standards of opprobrium for most on the winning side. Things seems really shitty for you right now. But here is the good news: the winning regime is offering reconciliation. All that’s required of you is a written statement of admission to be read by you at a reconciliation hearing. The reconciliation is binding, so much so that most of the rights that you forfeited—not to mention fought against—will be granted anew. That sounds sort of fun. There’s something solemnly dramatic about wooing a tribunal of your vanquishers with your eloquence. So why is your reason sending you similar flares of warning?
It’s easy to understand the integral role of forgiveness in our broadly shared Christian morality. Jesus forgave and so should we—A+ for Catechism. Few appreciate the gravity of forgiveness until they have to confront it. It’s like doing a waltz of mutual humiliation. Someone seeking forgiveness must accept total responsibility for the damage they’ve done, while the person forgiving must set aside some of their (probably still justified) bitterness resulting from the damage. If it is done in earnest between the two parties, the waltz then becomes a treaty. There is a peace but not a restoration. Both accept that there is no going back to the way things were.
That all seems fine, even as doubts about it are foremost in your mind. A lot of Bad Things transpired in the conflict that are being written into the historical narrative, many in which you are plausibly complicit. Even a partial restoration of civic dignity falls short of merit. But that doubt has a surly roommate whose possession of the logical flare gun shines a brighter light on the whole enterprise. It reveals yet another mechanism, but a subtler one. Less one to grant absolution, or even to extract a new surrender, than one to gauge just how serious your convictions were and maybe remain. Here you go again, you think. Another proposal with an intent that squirms under scrutiny. But this time with more acute stakes. Every fiber of your intuition is telling you to take the offer. Let the waltz of mutual humiliation become a foxtrot of mutual self-delusion. Everything is objectively better, there is no need to keep up these old disagreements. We can move on in harmony.
The call to be harmonious weighs upon all losers. It is the call to get their stories straight. For it is a hazard of the winner that their victory takes on a seamless narrative cohesion easily scanned by all involved. So really all this reconciliation is just a silly formality. And the winner has any number of ways to imply that they are going above and beyond the call of justifiable generosity. Yet even with all that, you struggle to bring your own “story” up to their desired pace. They see assured destiny and absolute personal malevolence. You see failed strategy and contingent personal judgment. If these cannot cohere without incredible force on your part, the prospect of having to reject the offer of forgiveness takes on a more severe dimension.
History being rife with conflict is necessarily rife with losers. Each one brings to their special circumstances a variation on sore-loserdom. None of them can or should be imitated. You cannot choose to be prideful like the ex-Confederates anymore than you can choose to be mournful like the Spanish Republicans. Knut Hamsun practically demanded to be tried for his Nazi boosterism (all the way down to writing an obituary for Hitler) to disprove his senility by way of a famously slippery apologia to the court. Not that it worked. Whatever the historical context, self-justification has that recurring problem of sounding pretty self-justifying. “My heart was in the right place, and it was badly misled” blah blah blah. Even the aristocratic contempt felt by Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn toward denazification, though not without its appeal, is inappropriate.
The temptation to imitate is understandable enough. A modern American like yourself is lacking in a language of defeat. It’s a practice of this country to charge toward the precipice of total disaster only to stop just in time before ever even having to consider such a language. But after a certain number of charges the brake lines wear through eventually. The luxuries of denial and coping mechanisms lose their value. Sides have to be chosen. Only one can prevail, and the one that doesn’t—the one you, again, are on—needs to get its words in order so that its example will be better understood. Logically, if American triumph is epic, lyrical, and sometimes overlong, American defeat is terse and economical. Less Daniel Webster and more Dashiell Hammett.
Now let’s return to the moment of proposal to see what a good American refusal might sound like.
“Hi, Loser! I’m a representative of the Provisional Government. According to our records, you qualify for our National Reconciliation Program. Participation in this program gives you access to many social benefits, including but not limited to restoration of your constitutional rights such as the right to vote and speech protections, the ability to apply for compensation for damages incurred during the conflict, vouchers for mental health services, and a new library card. What is the best time for you to appear before the Reconciliation Committee in your designated zone?”
“Never.”
“Interesting. Do you mind telling me more?’
“Uhm … that’s sounds all fine … but while new information has come to my attention that puts my initial convictions in a new light, I don’t see anything about the way in which I originally arrived at those convictions that needs to be answered for.”
“Okay.”
“And because my convictions remain pretty much as they were before and during ‘the conflict,’ it stands to reason that I forfeit the restoration of benefits and accept as an alternative a second class or, I guess, voluntary pariah status. How can that be arranged?”
“All the info is in the brochure. Or maybe one to follow.”
A lot goes on in that Platonic ideal of customer service that not even you might catch. You recognize the political legitimacy of the victorious regime. Maybe more importantly, you ease any anxiety on the part of the winners of the threat of renewed hostilities. Though what you’re actually doing is denying the regime’s moral legitimacy. The loser can live among the winners but stops short of showing them respect, rejecting any right, amenity, or benefit that would put that disrespect in doubt.
Because I am very comfortable in the state of my society, there are certain gaps in my empathy toward this particular experience. But you and I can speculate with little risk that you will come to learn, or at least appreciate, some general truths that may elude people like me. You will probably appreciate that nothing is less American than speaking more than is necessary. You will appreciate that engaging a nationwide “mute” function is a high, if not the highest, moral position. Going by your ex’s difficulties surrounding allegations of machete-related incidents, you appreciate the relative ease of your deprivations and acknowledge the improvements needed in your romantic instincts. And you may also appreciate how civil war is a kind of utopia for people who value honest dealing.
Anyway, enjoy the silence! You’ve earned it.