Divide Themselves Into Winners And Losers

The classic device for legitimating the unequal distribution of rewards in a democratic society is, of course, competition in which the same rules are applied to all the contestants and the status system of the society is protected by the nature of the rules rather than by their inequitable application.  The people in the society thus learn to divide themselves into winners and losers and to blame themselves for being among the losers if they are.

-- Edgar Z. Friedenberg (1927-2000), American social critic and scholar of education, R. D. Laing, p. 96.