Victory as human defeat

In the relentless narrative of contemporary capitalism, the imperative to "be a winner" has profoundly transformed our relationship with others. We no longer see our fellow humans as companions in the human experience, but merely as obstacles to overcome, stepping stones to trample in our ascent to the summit of success. This metamorphosis of perspective turns every human interaction into a potential battle, every encounter into an opportunity for domination.

The neighbor vanishes as a subject and materializes only as a marker of our own triumph. Their function is reduced to being the living testimony of our superiority, the broken mirror reflecting our "victory." In this perverse zero-sum game, personal affirmation is achieved only through the negation of the other, turning the construction of our own greatness into an exercise in the systematic demolition of others' humanity.

This destructive logic reveals the central paradox of our era: in the obsessive pursuit of individual success, we lose precisely what makes us truly human - the capacity to recognize and value humanity in others. Victory thus becomes a form of existential defeat, where the "winner" ends up reigning over a desert of authentic human connections, celebrating a triumph that is, in reality, evidence of their own spiritual impoverishment.