I found this fantastic picture when browsing a stock photography site a little while ago:

I don’t know whether the artist intended to write ‘looser’ or ‘loser’, but I like to imagine he or she spelt it that way on purpose, rather than it just being poor spelling (although this is entirely possible, the graffiti is from Lisbon, Portugal).

I have started dropping it into conversation now and then, if you say it fast enough people don’t catch the last word and it’s interesting to see the different responses you get, whether they interpret it as loser or looser; perhaps when it is ambiguous people are likely to hear the phrase which fits with the philosophy they believe, the christian hears loser, the ardent agnostic hears looser.

At different times in my life, or even from day to day, you could place me into either interpretation. Mostly I believe that you can be more ‘free’ without inflexible dogma, but I also believe in ‘cosmic-objective’ moral truth (as in good and evil are more than bio-evolutionary products); I believe in truth, but my idea of the nature of truth is flexible and constantly being knocked down and rebuilt. A good way to look at it could be “Without a truth you are the loser”, even if that truth is “there is no truth”; the place not to be is that of not caring or not thinking about truth.

As time goes on I find myself less attached to truths I once held dear, especially those of a political or philosophical nature; as I learn more I realise just how limited my knowledge is, I am infinitely ignorant. I have become less eager to subscribe to any ideology or movement or to place myself on the political compass because I don’t want to commit without enough information, but I will never possess enough information. This give me more freedom to criticise and to move between ideas, but also means that I have less constructive ideals of my own to share.