“We, the Winners, Are Confident We Will Be on the Right Side of History!”
Greetings, losers. It’s us. The winners! We’ve been winning since the dawn of time immemorial, and we have no plans to stop anytime soon. Accordingly, we’re doing everything we can to ensure that, once again, history reflects the best version of ourselves, and the worst version of you. We’ve been writing history with every previous win we’ve been able to muster (i.e. all of them), so make yourselves comfortable while we spin yet another version of our preferred truth. Even if it’s not wholly based in fact.
Which specific winners are “we,” you may ask? And what “wins” are we referring to? Of course you would ask that. You’re the losers! We could go into granular detail, but doing so would run the risk of hurting your tiny heads with things like socioeconomic standing, systemic inequalities, and good old-fashioned class conflict. Suffice to say, we’re the winners. The ones who get ahead by placing our thumbs on the scale, stacking the deck in our favor, and employing any other folksy simplification you want to affix to it. You’re idiots, too. Have we mentioned that yet? After all, we have gone to the trouble of making quality education prohibitively unaffordable for you!
We own the means of production. We turn the wheels of industry. We grease the machinery of capitalism with the blood of the workers. We’ve allowed a few reforms here and there in the interest of avoiding strikes and walk-offs from the assembly line, but, all things considered, it’s a trade-off we’re willing to make. Much like playing with a house pet, you sometimes have to let the cat get the string, or the dog to have their chew toy to keep them interested in the game. In this day and age, we can also threaten you with the loss of your health insurance and other “benefits” that should fall under the category of “basic human rights.” But as long as we keep you enticed with the illusion of individual rights and personal agency, the system pretty much maintains itself.
Do we even need to address our stranglehold on the halls of government? The Presidency, Congress, and every branch of state and local government are stacked with winners from the top on down. In addition to literally winning elections, they’ve also won at life by emerging from the right birth canal and into existences of wealth and privilege. Sure, every so often a few less privileged winners will fight their way to the top through hard work, ingenuity, and a healthy dose of luck, but, by and large, the winners v. losers paradigm perpetuates itself there too.
It’s gotten to the point where so many of you are convinced we’re actually looking out for your interests, that we hardly need to do anything. We just have to thump a Bible and portray progressives who really are trying to improve your station in life through legislation and civil resistance as “radical socialists” or just plain ol’ communists! We’re using our control of the present to control the past, and thus write the annals of the future.
It turns out George Orwell was right, but don’t bother trying to read for yourself. The book bans we’re supporting by proxy will make that nigh on impossible. After all, we own the publishing companies, too, including those that create history textbooks! Put them in the classrooms and in the empty spaces on the library shelves and our work is halfway done.
Get in, losers! There’s a lot of winning left to be done. SO much winning!
Are you sick of it yet?