About this site

We Told Ourselves We Lost is an independent publication launched in August 2025 by Corey Clippinger. Metamodern in tone, often despondent, looking to the sink to the bottom in the hopes that it'll offer ground to push back upwards. Because he loves the promise and hope of both nation, faith, and technology, he is it's harshest critic.

What's with the name

The publication's name is derived from a quote often attributed to Leo Tolstoy:

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

The non-fiction works of Leo Tolstoy had a deep impact on me as a young man. Tolstoy's rediscovery of faith and meaning, in the aftermath of his own decent into nihilism served as a model for me in my youth. Having become entirely alienated by my religious community's acquiescence to Bush era politics. Tolstoy's own pointed critiques and work to tear at the roots of the Russian state and church. As outright perversions of the universal truths it claimed to represent gave me a template for what I should do with my life. To cooperate with the present order of power and dominance was and is anathema, a denigration of life at it's core. Apathy and ignorance a constant flight from reality. But to recognize the truth and fight to take it back from those who claimed in falsely is the only path to true life. In Tolstoy's exhortations, he names only people's apathy and feelings that the present conditions of this world as being inevitable as the only real obstacle to change. Atrocities continue simply because soldiers obey evil orders. People lack because those who have, cannot conceive that by sharing they too might receive the same. In the end the conclusion is only inevitable because we tell ourselves it is. We lose because we assure ourselves we have.

The world is more of a mess now that it was when I first read The Kingdom of God is Within You back at 19. Within one segement I see magical thinking and almost comical amout of what Rene Girard terms the crisis of contagion. Within another there's apathy and nihilsm, and some false hopes that at least in the end the everything crisis will lead to a quick and painless death (it won't). I am not immune to either but in writing I hope to move towards a third path. To reject the notion that it's ever hopeless, even if I may not see the world to come as least I am crawling towards it. To try and share notes, not as some holder of profound truth but as another person trying their best in turbulent times. Someone who tries to see clearly when the truth is deprioritized. At the very least I hope I do not loose simply because I have told myself I have.