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.'
I don't think pre-modern equals strongman worship. (Aren't key democratic practices also pre-modern..? A wonderful exploration into the theme of governance in different types of premodern societies is of course The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow). I might be nitpicking but I think it's important to remember that we are, as a society, capable of anything. We never quite "outgrow" strongman politics but we also have a desire for autonomy and fairness. I would be interested in learning how have more democratic societies (premodern or modern) preserved their democratic practices during time of uncertainty and stress?
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