"A humane society is one where we can lose without being losers," Tim Leberecht writes in his beautiful manifesto of losing, an authentic call for an end to the cult of winners. He's hit upon a profound but shameful truth.

For a generation, the digital economy has led most people to work harder but to win less for their sacrifice, while a tiny fortunate majority are able to use their past winnings to control the means of gaining future winnings. COVID-19 has amplified the gap between the winning elite and the losing masses. The stock markets have stabilized as the companies that they represent soak up the lion's share of government stimulus and exploit their connections to protect and expand their hoards.

During COVID-19, even as they've produced banal advertisements promising that they're in the struggle with us, corporations have cut their losses. The bulk of humanity are their losses. Promises of rewards for working long, hard hours have been lost in the shuffle, as millions upon millions of people have been cut loose, unemployed at the very time when the possibility of them finding new work has become absurdly unlikely.

So, people have lost their jobs. They've lost their careers. They're losing their homes, and their families will still follow. The generation emerging from youth into adulthood has lost all hope, deprived even of the ability to get through the crisis by improving themselves with a quality education.

Tim dreams of a humane society in which losers can regain their dignity and find a new freedom to become authentically human. The problem with this dream is that it's clear we don't have a humane society, at least not here in the USA. The United States Congress is blocking additional stimulus. Unemployment assistance and rent forgiveness are ending, though the coronavirus crisis continues without an end in sight.

The old excuse that there just isn't enough money to do the right thig has been exposed as a lie. The problem is that the tiny business club of winners doesn't want to share its winnings, but continues to suck the time, the energy, the creativity out of its "human resources" at a merciless pace before disposing of them.

We are losing everything we cared about, and the truth is that the loss doesn't make us artists and philosophers. It degrades us, making us creatures of hunger, longing for scraps of what we once had.

My 15 year-old daughter walks into the room as I write this, and gives me what she can: A good, long hug. "Things can't keep getting worse," she reassures me.

The trouble is that actually, things can keep getting worse. The efforts to stop a massive social collapse have failed, and the excessively optimized automation of the businesses that survive recognizes no imperative for shared sacrifice.

I want to find a romantic angle for us in this loss, but our new lives are not the savage nobility imagined in comfortable salons. They are debts unpaid, plans abandoned, garbage bags stuffed with what we can no longer carry, cold nights, and hungry mornings.

We have lost. We have nothing but loss, as we fall into despair, punctuated by moments of desperate rage, beaten down by the policeman's club until we retreat back into the shadows, to finally fall apart in the decorum of darkness.

We gave it all long ago.