Winner worship and the new kow-tow
I've written quite a long essay on substack about winners and losers:https://open.substack.com/pub/geoffmulgan/p/winner-worship-and-the-new-kow-tow?r=qox4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
This is how it starts:
'In ancient China, everyone had to bow before the emperor, and ordinary citizens also had to ‘kow-tow’ to officials and magistrates: prostrating the body and touching the forehead to the ground. The kow-tow was an act of humiliation in front of power. It symbolized the relationship of the winners to the losers, the strong to the weak.
Many assumed that the kow-tow was a thing of the past, that we no longer needed to worship the powerful. But today we live in a world dominated by strongman leaders and billionaires: proud, sometimes shameless, usually convinced of their own genius and virtue. They want to be loved and worshipped and some, like Chinese emperors, demand absolute obedience, manifest, for example, in the humiliating deference Donald Trump demands from Republicans.
Meanwhile, in a time of stress and insecurity, many who objectively are amongst life’s losers are willing to do the modern equivalent of the kow-tow, in the form of deferential admiration of the winners.
This shift away from the democratic ethos of scepticism towards power and wealth, and towards styles of leadership that are pre-modern in nature, is one of the surprising twists of an era of stalled globalization and ubiquitous social media.
In this essay I explore why it has happened and why it has become so important not just in politics, but also in fields of technology like artificial intelligence, and in the dynamics of international affairs. I examine the tensions and contradictions, the influence of Nietzsche, Peterson and others, and how ‘winner worship’ might evolve, shaping the politics of the years ahead.'
That's a powerful framework for thinking about contemporary developments.
A couple of thoughts:
- The framework splits the world into the "winners" and the "losers". But what about the large group in the middle - the people who are doing OK for now, but aren't Randian-style winners and perhaps fear that they might end up losers in what seems an increasingly precarious world? Isn't that the group that has to be won over? Can the winner/loser coalition you point to broaden its appeal to this group?
- It seems that we currently have a fight going on between elites for legitimacy. A new elite (exemplified by Trump and Musk) can point to the failures - and they would say outright corruption (or worse) - of the old elites, and contrast this with their own personal triumphs (often against adversity imposed by the old elites). It's not clear the old elites (e.g. the traditional party politicians who are dropping like flies across the west) have much to counter this. In the UK they seem to be pinning their hopes on delivery, which (even if it works) seems quite thin gruel compared with what their adversaries offer.
- Crypto itself is, among other things, explicitly anti-old elite (governments, monetary authorities, banks). The Reddit/Gamestop phenomenon is similar (this group explicitly identified themselves as "losers" pitting themselves against a corrupt Wall Street elite) though it doesn't seem to have the same winner worship attached to it.
- You say the young men you speak with in Luton have decided that "if the world is stacked against you, you may be better off allying with the winners than banding together with other losers". Put this way, that doesn't seem all that crazy (though maybe it's more that they are banding together both with other "losers" and the winners). What can the "left" offer to these young men that they might find preferable? Or is this group destined to be neglected by the left as a lost cause?
An interesting perspective that feels horribly resonant.
"Loser cults that are unembarrassed about the exercise of raw power, that look and feel as strong as their adversaries and don’t lock themselves into minority values, reconnecting to the everyday values of the majority. Cults in other words that can pragmatically steal from the other side."
Is this a thinly-veiled message to Kier Starmer...?