Competition can be healthy, up to a point. We’ve passed that point as a nation, and probably as a species. We have come to a place where we worship winners and demonize the defeated. I’ve seen it on an individual level, among people who believe that their success depends on seeing others fail. They thrive on the failure of others. They elevate Schadenfreude to the level of religion. A study published in July 2014 claims to have found Schadenfreude in children as young as two years old. When I started writing this song, I was thinking about those people who see life as a zero-sum game. As I gave it more thought, I realized that our world seems to have made a shift in the same direction. Certainly, our country has. Not all of us think this way, but enough powerful people do that it does not matter what the rest of us think. I don’t even pretend to be bright enough to explain this, or propose a way to fix it. I just wrote a song.
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