Giving Up is Good for You

In order to get along, we need to learn when to accept defeat.

Have you ever thought about the phrase “giving up”? I mean, really thought about it? We say it all the time, but it seems we rarely think about its implications. 

There are two main ways we tend to talk about it. We can give up a thing — a bad habit (smoking) or a type of food (meat). We can also give up something that is otherwise fine for us for a limited period of time, as a way to demonstrate our obedience and meet our obligations to a higher power (food during Ramadan, or something like chocolate or alcohol during Lent).  

We can also just give up. Period. In this circumstance, we’re struggling with something and resisting defeat. But at some point, after a long battle with reality, we concede that the ability to change the outcome is out of our hands. As Adam Phillips pithily puts it in the appropriately titled On Giving Up: “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.”  

I’m enchanted by the idea of giving up, which is why I’ve been attracted to related notions of defeat, futility, and the courageous if not exactly advisable act of committing oneself to a cause even after it has been lost.   

But giving up goes beyond this. It is less about a pleasure in losing and more about acknowledging the unavoidable fact of limitation and constraint. Last year, along these lines, I wrote about the satisfactions of “ignorance”—of not knowing the things we could otherwise know if we tried. Despite the war in Gaza (or perhaps because of it), I still find this counsel tempting, and I think it remains the only way to live with something resembling sanity. The world is crazy, unjust, and unfair. At some level, this is just the way it is going to be. We can resist, but we can’t always resist. Hell, for instance, is one of the ways of contending with the inescapable fact of injustice in this world. I would highly recommend believing if not in hell itself then in the utility of hell.   

I can’t quite prove this, and it would be difficult to test empirically, but I suspect the alternative to “giving up” (some of the time) is to leave oneself open to hate and hating, or what Nietzsche called “a will to nothingness, a counter-will to life.”  

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Speaking of hate, I sort of hate the phrase “the personal is political,” but it’s one of those irritating cliches that happens to be true. I’m open to the idea that what we choose, or don’t choose, in our lives is a better guide to our actually held preferences then what we tell others we believe. Phillips is helpful here too, when he says that the “whole notion of sacrifice depends upon knowing what we want.” This is why I find religion(s) intellectually appealing even when I don’t think they’re true — they are ways of structuring choice and committing ourselves to present and future sacrifices. In this sense, they are statements about the kinds of people we think we should be and might actually become. Sacrifice, in this sense, is “a form of prediction.”   

In our politics, I see everywhere an inability to reckon with defeat as a legitimate outcome of our own political efforts despite those efforts. Even as I write this, I bristle at it myself. What if, after all the “pro-Palestinian” advocacy and awareness-raising and generational shift, American policy on the issue remains just as bad in ten years as it does today? I find that frightening. But it’s also a real possibility. Obviously, it is easier to get angry about other people’s inability to concede both defeat and the possibility that one might be defeated at some future point.  

Democracy, at its core, is about accepting defeat at semi-regular intervals, and it’s a great equalizer in that both sides must pre-commit to the possibility. To put a finer point on it, democracy is about the likelihood that people will choose “wrongly” repeatedly and accepting that there’s nothing much you can do about it except trying again at the next election (and then finding out that the people, in their preferences, are rather stubborn). This, as longtime readers will know, is what I tried to explore in my book about “the problem of democracy.” It’s a problem! And not all problems have solutions, and perhaps the solution lies in realizing precisely this. 

In our individual lives, there is a temptation to always be striving, to be the CEOs of our own start-ups, where we are the product. This isn’t entirely new. Hobbes wrote of "a general inclination of all mankind ... a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Desire is a fickle mistress and an unpleasant one to boot, even if she insists that chasing after her will satisfy us. Of course, it won't. We know that. Yet we chase. And this desire — this will to strive after uncertain, impossible ends — has political implications. We want more than politics can give, just as we seem to want more than our own lives can offer.  

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Similar to “giving up,” think about the idea of settling, which we still tend to view negatively. As the political theorist Robert Goodin notes, “to settle for something means to accept less than some ideal.” When do we decide that good is good enough? Yet we continue to entertain political fantasies of a new consensus, that somehow unity can be fashioned out of division. But our divisions are real, so how is it exactly that we will be able to transcend them?  

The Case Against Consensus

Thinking about the progression of wars is helpful here, something we debated in a fascinating conversation with the author, novelist, and veteran of the Iraq war Phil Klay. Even the most definitive victories are not all that definitive. Wars, eventually, require some kind of compromise with the defeated population. There must be a “day after,” which means that the victor must accept something less than an ideal outcome. Members of the Nazi party couldn’t obviously all be eliminated. The vast majority weren’t, with only a relatively small number of the senior leadership facing ultimate justice. This is why we speak of postwar “settlements.” A settlement — after a war — is about, well, settling.  

To settle can be a brave act, both personally and politically. And, counterintuitively, there is a kind of openness in making a decision that you can’t turn back from. Etymologically, to decide is to “cut off” any number of other possibilities. Goodin notes that we settle with the knowledge that “on any given occasion, it might turn out to have been better to do something else."  

Regardless of the rhetoric I so often hear from my own side, Trump is not a Nazi nor are his most loyal supporters. But even if Trump were a “Nazi,” whatever that might mean, there would still be some requirement of conceding that he might win and we might lose, and that we would have to find a political settlement with reality. I know that so many of us are already steeling ourselves for that possibility soon enough. We hope that we might not need to settle, that we might still actually get what we want and what we desire and that we can strive for a better world, a better nation. But we also might not. For a moment, or for a year or for four, we might have to give up on some of our hopes. But I suspect there will also be a certain kind of freedom in giving them up.  

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