In the middle of the manic 1990s, the American economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook published a book with the ABBA-inspired title of The Winner-Take-All-Society. The capitalist utopia was undergoing an incredible revival at the time, as the birth of the web, advancements in biotechnology, and the assertion of the global financial market hinted at a real revolution in the opportunities offered by triumphant capitalism. If you were quick, shrewd, and bold, you could catapult yourself from nothing into a place in the front row. Dormant fantasies and desires were roused by hedgefund managers such as John Paulsen, bio-entrepreneurs such as Craig Venter, and entrepreneurs working out of their garages such as Steve Jobs.
The book’s subtitle, however, was fairly sobering: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. The explanation provided by the two economists was, to put it briefly, that we have all been deceived, because more and more people are competing for fewer and fewer positions, for which higher and higher prices are being paid. We’re familiar with this from the media-backed superstar systems in the worlds of sports, cinema, and the fine arts. Usain Bolt, Angelina Jolie, and Gerhard Richter attract nearly all of the attention, esteem, and income, meaning that there is almost nothing left for the majority of equally distinguished athletes, actors, and painters. Who can name the other 100-meter sprinters from Jamaica, or the co-star of a hit film from France, or the highest-paid living German illustrator?
Frank and Cook believe this type of market is spreading to other areas of modern society. What was previously restricted to the entertainment and luxury markets of sports, film, and art now applies to the markets for lawyers and doctors, investment bankers and corporate consultants, schools and universities, charitable foundations and non-governmental organizations. In each case, small differences in presentation lead to big differences in reputation and payment or profit.
The rhetoric of ratings supports the logic of the market. Rankings are generated for all kinds of questions: which female writer has won the most awards, which actress receives the highest fee per day, and which female CEO has had the most children. The rankings are presented to the public in attractive charts with digitally processed portraits.
Performance is the magic word.1 To gain social prestige, people must draw attention to themselves in some way. This means they have to combine familiar role elements in a way that enables them to make a striking appearance before an attentive audience. You can make yourself seem particularly interesting through unusual combinations that add a surprising facet to a conventional pattern: an investment banker with a migration background and a backpack, a professor from an educationally disadvantaged background in a Jil Sander suit, a carpenter with a college degree in a hipster outfit. The combination mustn’t appear random or overblown, of course; it must create a harmonious image that holds out the prospect of innovative capability and success.
When there are many people competing for a few top spots, selecting the best involves a degree of performance pressure. It is not enough to provide proof of a traditional entrance requirement such as an academic degree, habitus security or, if that’s too much to ask, a declaration of loyalty. You have to offer something extra that makes you appear more clever, dazzling, and daring than the rest of the drab crowd. After all, “the winner takes it all!” is a merciless motto.
This isn’t really a new phenomenon. Even the classic performance principle2 in sociology drew a distinction between performance competence and success competence. Performance is only valued and will only lead to social advancement if it is visible and recognized as such. An unknown painter will die as an anonymous hobbyist if he is not discovered and held up as a great artist by a gallerist, critic, or collector. The same applies to an eccentric old inventor who never finds an investor, or a willful discoverer whose pioneering article is never published.
Effort alone is no guarantee of success,3 not even if the educational system has tucked a prestigious degree in your pocket. Labor markets are geared toward educational qualifications, but they demand that individuals submit to additional selection procedures in their professional lives. A certificate is of little use in a corporate environment or for someone who is self-employed. You must be able to assert yourself in competitive situations without formal criteria; you can’t simply harp on about what you were once recognized for in the past. To put it bluntly: the hierarchical educational system monitors performance, while the competition between equals rewards success.
And yet we still believe that success depends to some degree on performance. We’re just not sure what kind of performance ultimately determines success. The formula that performance pays off merely conceals the actual ambiguity of the situation. If, in case of doubt, the illusion of performance is what determines whether you’re still in the game or you should just fold, you might start to wonder whether success itself is ultimately the only deciding factor. Nothing is more successful than success, as the ones who lose out are always told.
Am I one of the people in the limelight, someone who is admired and who attracts others – or do I have to count myself among the rejected and defeated, those who are thanked for their participation but who have to make do with whatever is left over?
The question that arises here, which is more than just sociologically enlightening, is how the mood of a society is affected when such “winner-take-all” markets spread to every imaginable aspect of social life – that is, when it is not just the markets for the upper echelons that are constituted in this way, but also the markets for mid-range positions, or even the marriage and attention markets that are relevant to everyone. Entertainment programs that let the audience choose the best singer, dancer, or model give us a taste of this, as do the coolly self-promotional conversational styles that are typical of social networks. Wherever we look, there is a social divide between the few who call the trump and dominate the game and the many who can do nothing more than play along and hope to take a trick.
Frank and Cook are appalled by the society of top bonuses, blockbusters, and best-sellers that they believe is destroying the middle-class society from which we come. But they have little to say about what it feels like to live in a “winner-take-all” world. How do the losers who are resigned to the leftovers feel, and how do the winners feel who have taken it all?
Success remains true to the successful for as long as they can convey an impression of success. The certainty of victory eliminates all doubt. Customers eagerly await the latest product models, colleagues applaud shrewd deals, and lenders don’t want to miss out on the next big catch. Hence the great astonishment when it subsequently emerges just how long people stood by someone successful, even though the signs of failure had long been impossible to ignore.
This is why winners are usually their own worst enemy when they win. The doubts of others are immediately stoked when signs of self-doubt become apparent in the victor. Public navel-gazing, confessing to bad judgments, and withdrawing from attacks are all toxic. The public quickly starts to feel deceived and betrayed when the stars of the market waver and falter. The respective stock market listings react immediately, and suddenly there are rumors of bad luck in the air.
The winners who take it all are allowed to appear generous, they can show sympathy for the weakness of others, and they should even reveal their humanity when the appropriate opportunities arise – but they must also express their conviction that they dominate the field. Trust is good, but everyone knows that control is better.
The main fear of the winners is a loss of control over their field of rivals. In top positions you have to cooperate, form coalitions, and keep a check on colleagues who are on the same level as you; but the fear here relates chiefly to the danger emanating from people on your team whom you may not even view as competitors. The nervous boy who always has that glint in his eye in stressful situations, the ambitious young woman who seems to be storing away her experiences for her next female boss, or the eternal deputy you inherited from your predecessor – any one of these people might be plotting day after day to trip you up in the phrasing of a final report or a project presentation for the CEO so they can steal the limelight for themselves. The bad thing is that you don’t know whether it’s true, but you have to take it into account.
The defeated can only dream of such anxious fantasies. They are ruled instead by the poison of resentment. This is a buried feeling of rancor stemming from the fear of their own aggression. Powerless to take revenge, incapable of retaliating, and prevented from a reckoning, they are seized by a mentality which, as Max Scheler put it, is “caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature.”4 They rail against the regime of unscrupulous locusts who are totally indifferent to the fate of the workers, and they mourn the good old days of industrial paternalism; they bemoan the devastation wrought by a mass culture of fashion and fast-food chains, and they attend vinyl nights and collect illuminated editions of books; they revolt against the capitalism on credit of private deficit spending and dream of a full-reserve economy of honest businessmen.
This feeds a sense of grievance that finds reason for complaint everywhere. They are, like “most of us,” the ones who have fallen behind in the scrum for the few positions at the top. Resentment literally means to resense a past injury, defeat, or degradation – and there is always a fear of being totally contaminated by this gnawing feeling.
In Theodor W. Adorno’s study of the “authoritarian personality,” which was produced with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, Adorno attributed resentment to a rebellious impulse against a system of life that has become impossible and obstructed. One must assert the rebel within oneself in order to be able to identify in any way with the existing system. And the system of selection in the winner-take-all society is outweighed by the fact that inferior characters can reach the top and take everything. One characteristic of the “usurpation complex”5 is a hatred for winners who are the same as you. If they were “alpha” types against whom you never stood a chance, then you could put your mind at ease. But when faced with so many duds calling the shots, the losers who wind up with nothing fly into a rage. They hate the system, democracy, and capitalism in equal measure.
Sociology has a long tradition of resentment toward ressentiment,6 one which, following Nietzsche, is played out between men of sovereignty and men of resentment. While the man of resentment is characterized by anxiety, pettiness, and doggedness on account of his inhibited revenge, the “noble man” has vanquished the fear of his great desires and liberated himself from the “spirit of revenge.”
From a psychoanalytical point of view, Nietzsche’s “war against shame” can be identified as the source of his devastating critique of resentment.7 Those who lose out to a societal trend are filled with shame at their defeat and destined to succumb to self-poisoning through a soul that “squints,” as Nietzsche puts it. They always see what is awry, unsuccessful, and obstructed first, and in doing so they rob themselves of happiness out of a fear of their own feelings.
We can accept the winner-take-all society as an honest description of the expansion of the capitalist principle of the ruthless selection of elites, and we can even praise it as a way of discovering outstanding performers. But this total mobilization of competitive energies comes at a social cost – namely, the proliferation of a post-competitive embitterment disorder8 among the second- and third-place competitors who view themselves as humiliated losers. Their swallowed revenge motif manifests itself in a loss of drive, a tendency to withdraw, and an attitude of being offended by life itself. They just wanted a place in the sun like everyone else, but instead they were passed over, embarrassed, and rejected. All of this lodges so deeply and so firmly because those who were eliminated and passed over feel that the fundamental assumptions of fair play have been violated.
When it comes to socially important competitions, one person can’t take it all. Just as schools have grading scales, there are always top, middle, and lower ranks. Even those who are out for victory must have a shot at a recognized midfield position. A performance society needs a culture of success that rewards the winners without demeaning the losers. Otherwise the fear of losing out will only produce resignation and bitterness.