"Might does not make right, it only makes history"
About this Quote
Power rarely bothers to win the moral argument; it just makes sure its version is the one that survives. Jim Fiebig's line strips the rosy paint off a familiar cliche ("might makes right") and replaces it with something colder: might makes paperwork, monuments, borders, textbooks. Not virtue. Record.
The intent feels less like philosophy and more like an operating manual for how institutions behave. Coming from a businessman, it reads as boardroom realism: outcomes get treated as validation, not because they were ethical, but because they were effective. In markets and in politics, winners acquire a strange secondary power the power to narrate. Once you control the story, your methods start to look like inevitability, even to people who would have condemned them in real time.
The subtext is a warning about how easily societies confuse persistence with legitimacy. History, in this framing, is not a jury but an archive, and archives are biased toward the forces that can fund armies, print documents, buy airtime, or lawyer their way into permanence. The line doesn't deny morality; it denies morality's automatic victory. Right doesn't "win" by being right. It wins by organizing, enduring, and sometimes by outmuscling the people who are right.
Contextually, it lands in a late-20th-century mood of institutional skepticism: post-Vietnam distrust, corporate consolidation, media-saturated politics. It asks the reader to stop treating "what happened" as proof of "what should have happened" and to notice how quickly success laundered through time starts to resemble justice.
The intent feels less like philosophy and more like an operating manual for how institutions behave. Coming from a businessman, it reads as boardroom realism: outcomes get treated as validation, not because they were ethical, but because they were effective. In markets and in politics, winners acquire a strange secondary power the power to narrate. Once you control the story, your methods start to look like inevitability, even to people who would have condemned them in real time.
The subtext is a warning about how easily societies confuse persistence with legitimacy. History, in this framing, is not a jury but an archive, and archives are biased toward the forces that can fund armies, print documents, buy airtime, or lawyer their way into permanence. The line doesn't deny morality; it denies morality's automatic victory. Right doesn't "win" by being right. It wins by organizing, enduring, and sometimes by outmuscling the people who are right.
Contextually, it lands in a late-20th-century mood of institutional skepticism: post-Vietnam distrust, corporate consolidation, media-saturated politics. It asks the reader to stop treating "what happened" as proof of "what should have happened" and to notice how quickly success laundered through time starts to resemble justice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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