The Myth of Leverage: Why Most People Never Had a Chance to Win

By Cliff Potts
Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Promise of Leverage

Modern culture is obsessed with leverage. We are told that success comes from positioning, strategy, branding, networking, or timing. If you fail, the implication is clear: you did not leverage yourself correctly. You missed an angle. You made the wrong moves.

This belief is comforting to systems that benefit from inequality because it reframes structural barriers as personal mistakes. Leverage becomes a moral test rather than an economic reality.

What Leverage Actually Is

Leverage is not intelligence.
It is not effort.
It is not creativity.
It is not morality.

Leverage is pre-existing advantage that allows effort to compound rather than evaporate. It includes capital, family stability, institutional access, geographic safety, health, and time. Without these, leverage does not multiply action—it absorbs it.

Most people do not lack talent. They lack conditions.

The False Universal Playing Field

The dominant myth is that everyone is playing the same game with different skill levels. This is false. Most people are not playing the same game at all. They are operating under entirely different constraints.

Some lives allow mistakes. Others punish them permanently.
Some paths include safety nets. Others include cliffs.
Some people are allowed to fail forward. Others are erased.

Calling this “competition” is dishonest.

Effort Without Compounding

For people without leverage, effort does not compound. It resets.

You work, recover, work again, and recover again. Progress stalls because energy is spent maintaining survival rather than building momentum. The system interprets this stall as lack of ambition rather than structural exhaustion.

Persistence is praised only when it is rewarded. When it is not, it is reframed as stubbornness or incompetence.

The Cruelty of Retrospective Advice

Survivors of the system often become its loudest defenders. Their advice is retrospective, not universal. They mistake survivorship for strategy.

What worked for them worked because leverage was already present—even if invisible to them. When others fail to replicate the outcome, blame shifts downward. The system never indicts itself.

Why Recognition Comes Too Late

Many people are told—implicitly or explicitly—that their ideas, warnings, or insights will matter “eventually.” Perhaps after crisis. Perhaps after collapse. Perhaps after death.

This is not leverage.
This is archival delay.

It preserves ideas while discarding the people who produced them. The system keeps the product and writes off the producer.

The Cost of Naming the Myth

Admitting the myth of leverage is destabilizing. It challenges the belief that success is earned and failure is deserved. It forces confrontation with the fact that many lives were constrained long before choices were made.

This is why the myth persists. It protects the moral self-image of those who benefited while offering false hope to those who did not.

What Remains When the Myth Falls

When leverage is stripped of its mythology, what remains is clarity. Not despair—clarity.

The truth is not that no one can win.
The truth is that most people were never given conditions where winning was structurally possible.

Naming that reality is not surrender. It is refusal to lie.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

APA Citations

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood.
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs: A theory. Simon & Schuster.
Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew effect in science. Science, 159(3810), 56–63.