Leadership Quote by Major Owens

Owens is doing something sly here: he frames his critique as a reluctant diagnosis, not a grand moral sermon. “The kind of society which we still have” carries a double sting. It implies both inertia (we “still” haven’t built something better) and complicity (we’re actively maintaining it). The hedging - “maybe, in some cases” - isn’t weakness so much as a politician’s way of smuggling in an indictment that’s harder to dismiss as ideology.

His real target is the cultural rebrand of competition as a moral good. When “competition is becoming a virtue,” a market logic stops being a tool and starts acting like a belief system. Owens points to the psychological downstream: once competition is virtuous, self-interest stops needing justification. It becomes what responsible adults do. The phrase “go more and more into self-interest” suggests a drift, not a choice, as if the social current pulls people away from solidarity even when they don’t want to go.

The last line lands with quiet menace: “Even to see other folks as competition.” That “even” marks the crossing of a boundary from healthy striving to social corrosion. It’s not just that people compete; it’s that they begin to interpret relationships - neighbors, coworkers, whole communities - through an adversarial lens. In the likely context of late-20th-century American politics, this reads as a critique of neoliberal common sense: the idea that winners deserve their winnings, and everyone else is either an obstacle or a metric. Owens isn’t nostalgic for a kinder past; he’s warning about what happens when a society trains its citizens to treat one another like rival firms.