The Prep is going through a difficult period. The Jock needs a new challenge. The Nerd isn’t suited to that environment. The Scumbag has always been like that, what the fuck did you expect.

The Loser is showing a pattern.

Notice the difference. Everybody else has circumstances. The Loser has revealed himself. His mistake is not an event to be handled but a window through which people believe they have finally glimpsed the underlying problem.

Cliques are limited-liability structures for human embarrassment. The incident takes the loss. The identity remains protected. The Loser is a sole proprietorship. One unsuccessful anecdote and the creditors can seize his entire personality.

The Prep can ask a stupid question because nobody believes the question exhausts his resources. Presumably there is a reason he asked. The Loser asks the same question and the room begins revising its estimate of what he understands.

The Jock can be briefly incoherent without becoming a man who cannot communicate. He’s fired up. He’s exhausted. He’s not a fucking speechwriter. An entire contextual defense assembles itself before he has finished mangling the sentence.

The Nerd can be socially inept because the ineptitude is understood to be attached to something valuable. Somewhere, presumably, there is a machine that justifies this interaction.

The Hot Girl can give a boring answer while three people independently construct the fascinating inner life she must be withholding. The Loser gives an interesting answer and everybody detects a need to impress.

Even the Scumbag has protection. He has established such a recognizable relationship with disorder that individual fuckups barely constitute news. He misses an appointment and somebody says, “That’s fucking Dale.” The Loser misses one and somebody asks whether he is struggling.

Dale has a brand. The Loser has a concern.

This is why copying another Clique’s behavior goes so badly. The Loser observes the successful man’s arrogance and concludes that arrogance produces success. He has mistaken an insured activity for a transferable skill. He then performs the same maneuver without coverage and is astonished to discover that the damage is coming out of his own account.

His response is to become his own unpaid defense attorney.

He explains the circumstances. He supplies the missing context. He demonstrates that his behavior was reasonable under a sufficiently complete understanding of the situation. The explanation is meticulous, factually persuasive, and an additional reason not to invite him.

Every paragraph advertises the absence of someone else willing to say, “No, he’s fine.”

Eventually he arrives at the Loser’s great political project: perfect compliance. He will eliminate every defect. Learn every convention. Acquire the correct credentials. Say nothing that could possibly be misunderstood. Then nobody will have grounds to reject him.

He has confused belonging with passing an inspection and appointed everyone he meets an inspector.

The High Loser can become successful without escaping this arrangement. He gets the title, the money, the authority, and continues conducting an internal disciplinary hearing over a remark somebody made near the elevators. He now has subordinates but still reports emotionally to an unidentified committee.

And the committee’s standards are wonderfully economical. His failures confirm the classification. His successes require an explanation. Luck. Obsession. Overcompensation. Of course he’s good at that; look how much he needs it.

He keeps trying to accumulate enough favorable evidence to reverse the verdict.

He has not understood that Clique determines which evidence is admissible.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5902515&forum_id=2),#50128374)