The underdog effect

Youtube is a web of rabbit holes. I recently entered one where one video of Khalil Gibran's masterpiece 'Defeat' opened the gates to the absolute hell of motivational videos. The first few were fine, a bit too transparent, but fine. And then the real gems came along. There was an Elon Musk video where the teary-eyed multi-billionaire, who's currently (most likely) destabilizing the markets with his tweets, talked about his struggles of commercializing space flights so that his billionaire rivals would be enslaved to him before they land on his Mars colony while escaping the poor burning earth (with all of us in it) in Elon's space ship. The commenters on the video would definitely cancel me had I expressed my views there. They were all too inspired by Elon. Moved by his mission and vision for humanity. At this point, I need to confess that my smart-ass acerbic critique infused with good old moral judgment over the lovely shy Elon wasn't a spontaneous genius. It was a calculated afterthought. Truly, at the moment, my feelings were the same as those of others in the audience. What I felt was immensely passionate solidarity with Musk's "vision for human supremacy". At 2 am in my bed, emotional Elon had convinced me that humans deserve what we set our minds to, even if it's as ridiculous as to be on Mars, and that I need to work hard just like him to make the human dreams come true. Then, I wondered after my afterthought why I felt that way. And I figured it was the underdog effect.

Mostly, we all feel that we have a good taste in morality. That we can distill out the good or the bad from the chaotic grey. However, the lack of awareness about the ease with which the forces of civilization hack and tame our imperfect morality is just another manifestation of human arrogance. One place where our sense of morality clearly fails is when we see an underdog. It's always the same story. Everything about human survival is a fight. And every fight has two sides - the big bad bully (man or nature) and the underdog. It doesn't matter if the underdog is a hero or an anti-hero. An underdog by embarrassing himself, shamelessly revealing his misery, being helpless and unsexy, and by being the persistent loser until the very last minute commands our attention and empathy. We feel unconditionally for the underdog. We all fall for him. An underdog can beg, steal, and kill and we will root for him, fight with him, fight for him, and even forgive him while dying for him. The underdog has a kind of charm that Satan would lust for.

We become all too human when we see the struggle of the underdog. But it's not any struggle that seduces our moral minds. The peculiarity of an underdog's struggle is that it is against something big. The big bully, the big forces of God and nature, the big problems that have tormented human minds for centuries. Anything big is perceived as worthy of defeating and then we root for the small guy. So, one does not need to be good but be small. Be the underdog and the poor will be charitable to make the dreams of the billionaire underdogs come alive. Our morality gets irreversibly skewed when we see the small guy play brave. In our mythology, we seem to care little about kindness or ethical balance, or other things that we otherwise boast about as civilized rational beings. David dragged Goliath's decapitated head all the way to Jerusalem but the mob cheered for him. Rama killed Ravana, who was a good king to his people and a better husband to wife, two things Rama failed at. Yet, Rama was the Purushottama (The Perfect Man). In our fiction, the underdog always steals the show, no matter what. When Batman fought Superman, and we knew at the bottom of our hearts that both were "good guys", we still rooted for Batman, just because he was the mortal. And when they made a film about the anarchist Joker, who is otherwise a villain in the routine Batman story, we were all sympathetic towards Arthur who shot the host's brains out on live television. In recent real life, Trump, a multi-millionaire TV celebrity and failing business tycoon who was in bed with politicians of all parties for decades, won the 2016 US election by promising to "drain the swamp" among other things. People, at least the ones that supported him, saw him as an outsider standing up against the lazy political colossus. Ironically, he got away with bullying other people around him by being an underdog in the larger narrative. In India, Modi fought and won the 2014 election not just against the Congress party but against the degrading dynasty that had ruled India for over 50 years and four generations. Despite his problematic track record, a humongous section of the Indian population saw Modi as the underdog. More interestingly, the moral evaluation of the same actions by underdogs vs. bullies results in different judgments. Although Babur was as cruel, if not a thousand times more, as Aurangzeb, there are kids still named after Babur but no one would dare name their child Aurangzeb. That's probably because Babur is the underdog. The kid who risked his life crossed the continents, fought the world, and started the empire. Aurangzeb on the other hand represents the bloated and oppressive Mughal empire struggling to sustain itself. Even between billionaire Bezos and billionaire Musk, the latter has a fan club because he's not buying off other corporate giants, but rather solving something that a 50-year-old government-funded institution with hundreds of rocket scientists has had trouble doing. In all these cases, the trickery of the underdog effect is that it reframes a real moral dilemma from the complex good vs. bad to much reductive small underdog vs. big bully and that reframing somehow pushes us to a default valuation - let's stand with the underdog - a purview that can be glaringly damaging to derive an adequate judgment.

The main trouble with the underdog effect is not just the risk that the underdogs can make us negligent or more tolerant towards their crimes. Underdogs are a threat because of what they can make us do. Throughout history, whenever society has come together to participate in conspicuous moral corruption, it has been because it chose an underdog to be the champion. While the Vox-literate woke socialist children of the capitalist parents might have been fooled to believe that Hitler gained the applause of the German crowds by appealing to their sense of supremacy, the unconniving truth remains that Hitler did no such thing, at least not at his political commencement. In fact, supremacy is a very hard sell to garner public support in a failing economy that has lost the previous war. The Underdog of the Reich knew that he needed something else. Mein Kampf starts out with a nostalgic Hitler talking about his birthplace. On the same page, the first page of the book that later became a sort of manifesto for the Holocaust, the underdog writes - "At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well." Talking about the inspirational German martyr, Hitler tries to win you over. Hitler tells how the German people have been wronged throughout the course of history, what they truly deserve, and how they should come together. That he will bring them together and fight for them. That he will be their David against the French, against the Marxists, the bullies of the West and the East, and against the world. That he will be their underdog-in-command and bring the Fatherland to its glory. In return, they need to pimp out their morality and cheer for the small guy. They should be okay killing the neighbors when the small guy asks them to and be the clueless puppets of the underdog effect. If this sounds too dramatic and too old, there is a recent example - an ongoing parody. When the unruly mob inspired by the tweets of the most powerful man in the free world trespassed and attacked the US Capitol they didn't do it for a loon. They did it because they were convinced that their underdog, who was going to drain the swamp, was being robbed of his victory. As paradoxical and nonsensical as it might sound, they considered themselves to be the righteous mob fighting the injustices the “small-guy” is always subjected to.

In one of the best TV comedies of all time, The Office (US), one of the most eccentric characters, Robert California, in his capacity as the CEO, decides to make Andy Bernard the Scranton branch manager. Andy is a cuckold, an unwanted child of his parents, an undeserving Ivy League "solid B" graduate, and at best a below-average salesman. Yet, Andy has his moments as a manager and is successful at pushing his employees to achieve targeted quarterly profits. So, when the documentary crew asks Robert what he saw in Andy, Robert replies - "There's something about an underdog that really inspires the unexceptional." The underdog has a way of playing the audience where the audience always wants to be a little more involved in the story. Because the audience is nothing but a crowd of aspiring underdogs.