{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Episode 54 \u2013 The Art of Losing","description":" Let us begin with some unsettling facts: You will die someday. It is quite possible your death will be painful and frightening. For some, death comes tragically early and unexpectedly. For some, death comes much later and is fully expected, after years of the body and mind steadily deteriorating to the point vital organs no longer function. If you live long enough, everyone you care about now will die. I\u2019m not trying to be macabre here; I\u2019m simply trying to frame things in a certain context before we proceed.   Our society is obsessed with success, winning, reaching our goals, being our all, \u201carriving\u201d, self-help, and self-actualization. Trump promised his supporters we\u2019d be winning so much they\u2019d get tired of winning. We love winning. Shelves are dedicated to self-help books in bookstores and there\u2019s no end to podcasts offering advice on how to get rich, be successful, and reach whatever goal you have in mind.   Failure is temporary. If it manages to truly set us back or keep us from our goals that\u2019s only because something or someone\u2014God? The lifeforce? The Universe?\u2014has set in motion something even better for us than we had imagined. Death, if it enters our minds at all, is some distant threat that won\u2019t come knocking until after a long life of success and a solid legacy that will ensure our life\u2019s impact is felt for generations to come.   Conservative thinkers have had a lot to say about loss and failure. And their words can be a great comfort when our shallow world of "winning" falls apart.   British philosopher Roger Scruton observed in his book, How to be a Conservative: \u201cThe loss of religion makes real loss more difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it, or to expel from themselves the feelings that make it inevitable\u2026The Western response to loss is not to turn your back on the world. It is to bear each loss as a loss. The Christian religion enables us to do this, not because it promises to offset our losses with some compensating gain, but because it sees them as sacrifices. That which is lost is thereby consecrated to something higher than itself.\u201d   \u201cThere has been a decline in the belief in an afterlife in whatever form\u2014the belief that, somehow or other, the \u2018unfairness\u2019 of this life in this world is somewhere remedied and that accounts are made even,\u201d wrote Irving Kristol in his book Neoconservatism, \u201cAs more and more people cease to believe any such thing, they demand that the injustice and unfairness of life be coped with here and now.\u201d What if the faith of our ancestors that taught life everlasting is awaiting us after death wasn\u2019t an antiquated superstition that we\u2019ve evolved out of, but the very glue that held people together when everything else around them looked meaningless in an eternal sense?   \u201cI am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so,\u201d wrote Russell Kirk several generations ago, \u201cYet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.\u201d Can Millennial conservatives muster the strength of mind to say the same today? Once again, a new generation of conservatives faces the very real possibility of the movement fading into oblivion. The only thing that has prevented that in the past were those brave men and women willing to choose the prospect of losing over meaningless victory. Let us pray that we can find the same courage. Because when all we\u2019re about is winning, we\u2019ve already lost. ","author_name":"Saving Elephants | Millennials defending & expressing conservative values","author_url":"https:\/\/www.savingelephantsblog.com\/","html":"