Winner worship and the new kow-tow
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 know-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, billionaires and celebrities: proud, sometimes shameless, usually convinced of their own genius and virtue. They want to be loved and worshipped and, in a time of stress and insecurity, many who objectively are amongst life’s losers are willing to do the modern equivalent of the kowtow, in the form of deferential admiration of the winners.
This shift away from the democratic ethos of scepticism towards power and wealth 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, and how ‘winner worship’ might evolve, shaping the politics of the years ahead.
My interest in the rise of winner worship comes from living in the medium-sized English town of Luton. It’s a town that once thrived on manufacturing and then saw much of it disappear (Vauxhall has just announced the final demise of vehicle making in the town). There are plenty of jobs in the airport, Amazon warehouses, or driving minicabs. But they are generally low paid and precarious, making Luton like hundreds of other towns around the world that have struggled with de-industrialisation.
Luton is unusual, however, in having given expression to the feelings that result. It gave the world the influential social media force Andrew Tate, who has over 10m followers on X and was at one point better known amongst British teenagers than their Prime Minister. It was also the base for Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defense League, Britain’s most significant far right grouping, who has now found an enthusiastic backer in Elon Musk.
One result of living in this town is that I’ve had hundreds of conversations in recent years with admirers of both, particularly young men with relatively few qualifications.
Objectively they are some of life’s losers. Yet they love winners. And they love martial arts, which usually include some milder version of the kowtow towards masters. They seem to hope that some of the magic of winning will rub off on them. Sometimes I feel that each of them has decided that if the world is stacked against you, you may be better off allying with the winners than banding together with other losers, and that, as in ancient China, you might be wiser just to worship power rather than to challenge it.
The history of winners and losers
Their choices echo similar choices made throughout human history. For most of our time as a species we lived in small bands, struggling to survive against an often-hostile environment, threatened by dangerous animals and equally dangerous humans. If you were smart and wanted to survive, you tried to follow winners – the leaders, usually men, who were strong, could organize the hunting of mammoths, frighten off neighbouring bands and guide your band to new land if necessary. Your security depended on their strengths, and they were much more likely to protect you if you could show your loyalty to them. Deference, sensitivity to hierarchy and suggestibility, the patterns in which we see all those around us complying and so comply too: all of these have been reinforced over thousands of generations by a survival logic that must have had powerful effects even in communities where women played important roles gathering food or making decisions.
But another dynamic is just as old. As soon as some became leaders, their followers started resenting them. Why should they get the best meat from the antelope that had just been caught? Why should they have the pick of the women, or the most comfortable hut? We are just as much hard-wired for resentment as we are for deference. And so sometimes the followers would revolt against the leaders; mock them; take them down a peg or two; gossip behind their back; or every now and then, just quietly kill them when they weren’t expecting it.
The winner and loser cults
From these primordial origins, two different ways of thinking and being emerged that are still very visible today. The first were what could be called ‘winner cults’ and included most kingdoms and empires. They believed that might is right. That power is its own justification. That whoever wins deserves to win. That the world is divided into winners and losers and the losers should worship the winners and be grateful for their protection.
These cults created extraordinary buildings, pageants, rituals and costumes. The Egyptian friezes which show the Pharaoh holding the defeated by their hair, or sometimes surrounded by piles of decapitated heads, are not subtle: they tell anyone who’s looking to fear and respect the ruthless winners.
Much of our legacy from the ancient world expresses a similar arrogance and hubris, and this lives on in extravagant homes, and towering glass towers that are intended to awe people into submission. Such ideas have lasted to the present day in ideological form too. Tate, Robinson, Peterson, Trump are their contemporary expressions. Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a seminal text, loved by billionaires, which gives a moral patina to the cult of the winners, arguing that to be powerful or to be rich is to deserve admiration and that losers are just that, deserving of contempt more than pity.
The mirror views mutated into what we could call ‘loser cults’. They tend to believe that power corrupts; that the rich and powerful are less morally virtuous than the rest of us; and that oppression and exploitation are not facts of nature, but rather problems to be solved.
Buddhism was one such cult, with its emphasis on compassion, introspection and its denunciations of the delusions of greed and power. The followers of Mozi in China over two thousand years ago, preaching universal love, were another. Christianity was even more a cult of the losers, the martyrs and the victims, all symbolized in the image of crucifixion. Many of Jesus’ sayings crystallize the perspective of the loser cults: that ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last’; that the rich and powerful will never enter the kingdom of heaven; that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’.
Such ideas are just as present in the modern world as the winner cults. They fueled socialism, and the social movements of the 20th century: civil rights, feminism, and the many movements for the victims to assert themselves and overthrow the oppressors. In a different way these ideas fed into the humility of ecological movements, which want humans not to behave as arrogant winners, but rather as sharers, guardians, trustees cooperating with nature and other species and sympathizing with the losers of the Anthropocene.
The struggles of modernity
In the 19th and 20th centuries the two cults often struggled with each other. On the one side you could find imperialism, nationalism and later fascism and Nazism, and the many varieties of authoritarianism: all in their different ways glorifying the winners, admiring strength, violence, success, entranced by the titans of war and business and the gleaming sheen of technology, or the supposedly natural prowess of superior races.
On the other side could be found not only liberalism and social democracy, promoting ethics, morality, fairness and the rule of law, but also communism, a movement that brought the losers together (the words of the ‘Internationale’ speak of the ‘starvelings’, the ‘prisoners of toil’, the ‘servile masses’), and presented the winners as predators, thieves, corrupt, amoral, deserving of oblivion or a firing squad.
A century ago young men were equally attracted to both. The two cults fought each other on the streets. Both tried to answer the question I raised earlier: if you are a loser, are you better off allying with the winners or finding common cause with other losers? For the winner cults there was the exhilaration of uniforms, rituals, taking pleasure in violence and contempt. For the loser cults, there was the language of activism, campaigns, the clenched fist, solidarity and strength through unity.
Sometimes they converged. Fascism celebrated heroic deaths. The 20th century loser cults also found glory in martyrdom and honoured their guerilla warriors (Che, Castro, Mao, Ho). Indeed, the martyr – whether for early Christianity or ISIS - is an interesting example of just how complex the interaction of winners and losers can be, in this case showing how you can win by losing.
The 21st century – a shifting dynamic
In the late 19th century, rich men were often tall and strong, and typically schooled in martial virtues: fencing, shooting and riding. The poor tended to be weak and unhealthy. But during the last half century that changed. The economy steadily replaced physical jobs with mental ones. The new winners tended to be educated, prosperous and secure. They were no longer the strongest, the bravest or the toughest. Perhaps this is why they tended to be quite attracted to loser cults – to admire the victims of misfortune and discrimination, from LGBPTQ+ to race, poverty to sexism.
Indeed, by the early 21st century, the more defeated a group was, the more admired it came to be, precisely inverting the values of a century before. Indigenous peoples now came top of the hierarchy of virtue, alongside victims of ‘intersectional’ discrimination. At times, the emerging ideology came close to parody in its projection of virtue onto victims, such as portraying all indigenous peoples as pacific, wise, and living in pure harmony with nature, or suggesting that millions should feel guilty for acts that happened generations before their birth.
These arguments weren’t helped by the fuzziness of the facts – who really was winning and who was losing? While women started outperforming men in schools, universities and increasingly some professions, patriarchy remained all too strong in other fields, allowing both men and women able to portray themselves as victims. Should someone from a Brahmin Indian background benefit from anti-discrimination quotas in the West? Is someone from a west African aristocratic background a victim or an oppressor? Is Jordan Peterson right to say that ‘boys are suffering, in the modern world’ or are girls suffering just as much, oppressed by social media and expectations about beauty?
What isn’t in doubt is that some of the losers – mainly men with less education, whose relative pay and prospects were in decline – became ever more attracted to winner cults: cults of masculinity, hero entrepreneurs and authoritarian leaders, boxing and martial arts gyms, and most recently the thrill of crypto. At least they could identify with these, whereas the loser cults could only portray them as culpable, somehow sharing the blame for discrimination, slavery, colonialism and an endless litany of past ills.
Indeed, the more they were objectively losing, the more the losers wanted to associate with winners as a route to solving their problems. The more the world seemed to be weighted against them, the more zero-sum the economy became, the more they wanted to identify with leaders who were unworried by this, convinced that, with enough will power, anything would be possible.
Conversely for some of the winners, the more they were winning, the more they seemed to want to identify with the losers, and to share their good fortune with them. The most prosperous nations in the world, north Europeans, and later Japan, became most generous with foreign aid, while in rich Australia or Canada every meeting began with a formulaic recognition of the ancestors whose ancient land had now become Toronto or Melbourne. Much of this generosity was performative or marginal (aid never got above 1% of GDP). But it comforted the actual winners that they could be good as well as prosperous, that they didn’t have to choose between virtue and success.
Nietzsche and Jesus
One philosopher who grappled with this dynamic was Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late 19th century. He viewed Christianity, and indeed all morality, as a philosophy for losers. He called Christianity ‘a new and sickly moral vision of reality’, representing the mentality of the slave revolt. Its ideas sapped the vitality of societies and ignored the very nature of nature. In ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ he wrote about what that nature is: that ‘life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.” Not surprisingly he preferred the ‘will to power’ – a way of living that pushed the individual to their limits. He wrote of heroic winner cults, unashamed of power and its exercise. Perhaps the more he himself became weak and sickly, the more he dreamed of the opposite (the man who famously wrote that ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ was proof of the opposite, as his syphilis slowly destroyed him). It’s not hard to see why Nietzsche appealed so much to the Nazis, who despised Christianity almost as much as they hated Judaism.
For Nietzsche, a remarkably creative and profound thinker, such ideas came from reflection. But science could also be invoked with evolutionary theories apparently confirming a world view in which nature is unavoidably a world of brutal competition in which morals and compassion have little place.
The counterview argues that civilisation, culture and reason take us beyond nature and allow us to construct worlds built on very different principles: deeper, more insightful, more ethical, no longer trapped in natural origins. These were the ideas of Jesus and Buddha who thought it a mark of spiritual failure to be trapped by obsession with worldly goods and status, blind to the underlying truths of the cosmos. The winners’ life, in their views, would tend to be one of disappointment, misery and regret. But Nietzsche’s thinking remained appealing, invigorating even, to generations of readers who loved its transgressive tone, the feeling that you could be freed from morality and guilt.
And so a polarity became entrenched. The loser cults believe that they are the enlightened ones. They have woken up and see things as they are. They believe in exposing, uncovering, revealing the underlying patterns of the world – from child labour and pollution to the lives of battery chickens. Theirs is an advanced consciousness, pointing to a future, more advanced planetary civilisation. In their eyes the winner cults are throwbacks: literally backward, reactionary, a memory of a largely disappeared era of monarchy, expressing the values of the organised crime gang and the morals of the warring tribe.
By contrast the winner cults see the losers as an evolutionary dead-end condemned to stagnation, mediocrity and failure; naively blind to the nature of nature, which is red in tooth and claw; unrealistic in their views of how people work and what motivates them. In their view we thrive best by ignoring inconvenient truths, not wallowing in them.
Vladimir Putin crystallises the polarity. For the loser cults he shows winner cults at their worst: running a country as a mafia boss would, shameless in his use of violence, contemptuous of mainstream ethics, willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of young men to his vanity. But for many he is a hero – exuding confidence, at ease with power, virile, and literally at home in nature where he is pictured, often bare-chested, hunting animals.
But Putin also exemplifies how winning is different in a democratic era. The Pharoahs and Emperors could simply exult in their power. But in an era of revolutions and democracy the winners know that they are always vulnerable to the losers – they need their consent and not just their acquiescence. And so we get the odd phenomenon of figures like Putin and Trump portraying themselves not just as macho winners but also as victims, struggling against conspiracies of the powerful, the establishments, who are always trying to do them down. In this way they make it easier for the losers to love them, to care for them, to empathise.
The contradictions can also be seen in the world of ideas. Jordan Peterson is perhaps the world’s most influential public intellectual, and he is very much an advocate of the contemporary winner cult, drawing on Nietzsche and others to denounce the envy of the losers (his comments on some writers inadvertently show that he hasn’t read them; but on Nietzsche he is on much firmer ground).
In his first book, ‘Maps of Meaning’, he argued that the world divides between loser ‘adversaries’ and winner ‘heroes’, archetypes that stretch back in human history and form part of our make-up. Drawing on Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and others, Petersen encourages his audience to live like the heroes, the winners who he sees as decent, disciplined, responsible, and in pursuit of the good. We should reject the ideas of the ‘adversaries’, the rebels who are fuelled by resentment and envy, and whose ideas and actions he argues explain many the ills of the 20th century, from totalitarianism to the destruction of nature.
Such is the story, intermixed with mainstream self-help ideas and a touch of stern Victorian advice to toughen up, that he tells his vast audience, mainly composed of young men, drawing on the authority of great writers and philosophers. Yet his arguments show up the contradictions more often than the clarity. Why be so deferential to power and authority? What if the winners have just inherited their good fortune rather than earned it? Why denounce resentment as a social force and then feed equally bitter resentment, only now directed at liberal values? Why place everything on the individual and ignore everything structural and systemic, the implication of which is that every loser must be wholly responsible for their fate?
Peterson has no answers to these questions. But he claims, like Jung before him, that the deep archetypes he describes are simply facts of human existence which we ignore at our peril. In this respect he shares with most of the thinkers of both the winner and loser cults what philosophers call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. This is the tendency to conflate ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and wrongly deduce moral conclusions from what is thought to be an unchanging human nature (selfish, violent on the one hand, or compassionate and cooperative on the other). Peterson on one side; Bregman on the other, to choose just two of many candidates.
Both sides are also guilty of convenient thinking. The winners tend to believe that their victories reflect their own amazing virtues – their genius and willpower (not surprisingly, quite an attractive belief for business leaders with large egos, especially if, like Trump and Musk, they inherited huge fortunes from their fathers). The losers tend to believe, by contrast, that the victories of the tycoons and autocrats are more the results of luck, inheritance, corruption or a skewed system. Yet they also believe that their own prosperity is the result of intellect and hard work, and that it’s fair in a meritocratic system that they earn so much more than their Uber driver or cleaner.
Both groups also borrow from each other. The winners can be the most enthusiastic advocates of help when things go wrong: bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, police protection, hospitals. Rugged self-sufficiency is much more attractive as an idea than as a practical reality. Conversely the loser cults often need winners. Even if you believe in compassion, fairness and ethics, you may still want a strong enough leader, with the spine to make difficult decisions and frighten off enemies. To be run by a feeble committee, which spends years consulting and never gets to action, is not much use for your interests. So, to caricature, you might quite rationally want a carnivorous leader to enforce your vegetarian values.
The world stage
In international affairs, the two views are now locked in contention. On one side there is the belief that power is its own justification and that, if you have power, you should use it to advance your own interests – ramming up tariffs or assassinating your enemies. On the other, there is belief in aid, help, humanitarian support, compassion for victims and respect for laws that constrain the powerful.
These were also the two poles of argument 80 years ago. The newly formed United Nations expressed the hopes of a world in which the losers would be protected – from invasion, famine or future holocausts. But against it stood influential figures like Hans Morgenthau who argued that all global institutions were part of constant political struggle and that international law was an illusion in a world shaped by the unavoidable realities of war and competition. ‘The choice’, he wrote ‘is not between legality and illegality but between political wisdom and political stupidity’. In this view, to adapt Marshall McLuhan’s definition of art, morality in international affairs is ‘whatever you can get away with’.
Of course, the problem with this position is that everyone becomes your enemy; and no one has much reason to trust anything you say unless it is clearly guided by self-interest. Worse, in a world that has become deeply interdependent, the cynical view makes it even harder to solve big shared problems like climate change, cybersecurity, unintentional wars and much more. What purports to be a ‘realist’ view of the world become remarkably unrealistic as a response to the needs of the world. But there is no denying its appeal in the mid-2020s.
Artificial Intelligence
The winner/loser dynamic also shows up in a very different domain: the world of artificial intelligence. The main protagonists are convinced that there will only be one winner on the road to what they call Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – one company and one nation will get there first and whoever wins will then rule everyone else: game over. They may or may not be right (my hunch is that there will never be a single AGI but rather multiple routes and iterations). But this belief, deeply held by figures like Sam Altman, explains why they are so fervently opposed to regulation. Every now and then they pretend to want it, but in private they are adamant that it has to be stopped, since it will slow them down on a race which can have only one winner.
The paradoxes
Where does this leave us? Are we condemned to a return of winner worship and winner cults, as a response to scarcity, heightened competition and mounting crises? I suspect that their dynamic will in practice never be simple, as their ideas are weighed down by paradoxes and contradictions.
One is the paradox of results. The winner cults promise the losers that they can share in the winning. But their programmes rarely deliver on this promise and any distribution of the gains would run counter to their beliefs. Naturally, tax cuts for the rich, trimming the state and welfare are unlikely to do much for an unskilled, relatively uneducated worker. And so the winner cults are always skating on ice, at risk of falling apart. This is why they need distractions (wars are the best) to postpone the moment when their failure to deliver becomes obvious. It’s also why they are always at risk of over-reach. Southern Italy and parts of New Jersey have shown that if organized crime is too successful in allowing the winners to take it all, this impoverishes the very communities they want to exploit, mirroring the problem in warfare of the Pyrrhic victory, the victory so costly that it destroys the winner, or in auctions, the ‘winner’s curse’ where the very fact that you have won tells you that you bid too high.
Then there is the paradox of agency, which faces the losers who may be attracted to winner cults. In the past the loser cults offered you a feeling of agency: taking part in marches, pickets, revolutions. But today they offer you a role mainly as a spectator (eco-activism is a partial exception), with just a vote every few years. But the same weakness affects the winner cults. You might invest in crypto or start a small business, but the winners really just want you to be a passive and deferential supporter, and the odds are that in your various ventures you will end up a loser.
Then there is the paradox of elitism. The winner cults now run against the elites, even though they are not just elite movements (linking the richest people, the most powerful politicians and the biggest owners of media) but also ideologies of the purist elitism. They can obscure this by emphasizing traditional values (family, nation, religion). But they are always at risk from loser cults that do the same and expose the reality that the winners so often reject any moral constraints on their own actions (which is why they tend to be the most corrupt, sexually predatory and atheistic).
Linked to this is the paradox of numbers. There will always be more losers than winners. In sports, far more leave the Olympics with no medals than with one. Many industries pull in vastly more people than they can reward with anything remotely resembling success – film, music and theatre are obvious examples. The arithmetic should favour the loser cults, especially in electoral democracies. And for long periods it does, even though in times of stress we return to the primordial roots, the ingrained sense that our best chance of survival in adversity may be to hitch our wagon to the winner, the strongest, the toughest, the most shameless.
Then there is the paradox of time. In general people living poor and precarious lives have very short time horizons of necessity. The winner cults should have much longer time horizons – and occasionally some do, as with Elon Musk’s interest in colonizing space. But in practice the winner cults are marked by remarkably short time horizons, perhaps a symptom of a glorified selfishness which manifests as a lack of care for the future, let alone future generations, which once again clashes with the more traditional values they sometimes associate with.
Resilience
Here we get to a crucial feature of the new regime in the US. You might expect the winners in a system to be most concerned to protect it, and that the losers would be more willing to take risks that might wreck it. But the recent generation of winners defy this logic. They seem to assume a resilient world. This is reasonable in that the last 70 years have seen no world wars and no global depressions. So they believe that you can take risks, disrupt, play – confident the world will sort itself out. The extent to which Musk, Trump and others take this for granted is under-appreciated – and it is literally embedded in the models used by investment titans like Ken Griffin, Steve Schwarzman and Bill Ackman, who are some of Trump’s key funders.
Others take a very different view. President Xi in China was scarred by the Cultural Revolution and sees a world that is precarious, always just a step away from chaos. A previous generation of leaders, brought up around the Depression and WW2 also saw the world as fragile; that mistakes, recklessness and carelessness can lead to millions of deaths, not just a fall in the share price. Their perspective is echoed for the many who see just how easily the 21st century could bring systems collapse, as climate, food, economics and then politics pass tipping points that remorselessly take the world out of sync.
But some of the most powerful in the world really do believe that it’s OK to ‘move fast and break things’ (to use one of Silicon Valley’s favourite sayings) since their own experience is that there’s always someone else to pick up the pieces, and that the battles of life are really much more games than anything existential.
What lies ahead?
So where will the winner/loser dance go from here? Observation suggests that more stress, more zero-sum environments and more visibility of the winners tends to amplify the appeal of winner cults. That’s certainly what we’ve seen over the last decade.
Back in 2016, Donald Trump commented "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible." That is as good a summary as any of the know-tow, with millions willing to back leaders regardless of their actions, giving them carte blanche, just like an emperor. Yet even emperors could sometimes lose the ‘mandate of heaven’, their legitimacy to rule.
The same pressures that have encouraged the winner cults and the new kow-tows also feed the loser cults too: resentment, anger, humiliation are just as natural responses to seeing more of the winners in action. Indeed, history suggests that greater awareness of the winner/loser dynamic can play out in opposite ways, and it’s not hard to imagine the mood switching from seeing today’s billionaires as genius titans to seeing them as clever thieves.
As a result my guess is that political success will go to those who can forge creative hybrids. Winner cults that look seriously at programmes that really can redistribute power and wealth and rethink state power (in this respect Giorgia Meloni looks more impressive than Trump and his acolytes). 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.
Because if these really are as deeply rooted world views as I suggest, then we should not expect one to overthrow the other.
They will ebb and flow because they are both very human responses to the human condition.
Our profound uncertainty. The randomness of fate. And our desire to win and not to lose in the one life we are given.