Can you accept being a loser in this world?

[Sacred Fool]

What is actually won by the winners?  What are we fighting for, exactly?  Please remind me.

The 'winning' (thus it's opposite implication 'losing') is an STS thought framework.
Winning = gaining superiority, gaining dominance over the losers, enslaving the losers.

Well, I think one point of the Hatonn story is that it's the framework of both parties if both parties choose to engage.  Then it's a mutual standoff (as in your tall tale).

It seems to me it all depends upon the level of catalyst one is vibrating to in one's own little holodeck bubble.  If one needs to explore confrontation leading to capitulation or self-surrender or whatever (see your list of possible outcomes), then those possibilities are available for you to experience.  If one is ready to move beyond the "thought framework" of confrontation, then that experience is likewise available for your experiential pleasure, as it were.  In my personal case, I find in my heart movement slowly passing by the self-revelation-through-conflict model of earthly life.  And, parenthetically, that feels quite salubrious.

Therefore, my friends, look to your heart for guidance and not to conventional wisdom, for it is within your heart and not your mind that the course of your desire will be revealed.