This brings me to one of the most powerful myths of Western culture,
our values revolving around the topic of competition.
Stemming from ignorance about human behaviour,
many people assume competition to somehow be an unavoidable,
inescapable part of human nature. The implications of this claim
are that no matter what environment we’re raised in
it is somehow immutably programmed into us to compete.
Let’s suppose, for a second, that this is true.
If competition were somehow an innate human trait,
why on Earth would we be spending so much time
raising and training people to behave this way?!
You would think there would be no need to do so
if it were somehow genetically or otherwise imprinted in us from birth.
Of course, no evidence is ever cited to support this
only conjecture and uneducated speculation.
For example, people often twist and pervert the process of natural selection
into the idea of 'survival of the fittest'
which is wrongly assumed as a Darwinian notion.
The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was later coined
by a right-wing political theorist named Herbert Spencer,
who tried to corrupt Darwin’s thinking
to his own pre-defined political views.
Darwin spoke about natural selection, which simply means
the organism or species that can best adapt to a changing environment,
will be more likely to survive and reproduce.
However that doesn’t actually specify competition as a mechanism.
On the contrary, often the avoidance of competition
or the deliberate intention to pursue cooperative strategies,
increases the chance that an organism or species survives.
On the flip side,
mountains of evidence can be uncovered
that refutes our society’s myths about competition:
that competition is inevitable, that it’s more productive than cooperation,
that it’s more enjoyable, and that it builds character.
Likely the best book I’ve found on the subject, was written in the late 1980s
by sociologist Alfie Kohn
who wrote a book called 'No Contest:The Case Against Competition'.
I really cannot recommend this book enough,
easily one of the best, and I would say mandatory reading
for those interested in The Zeitgeist Movement.
The author’s research that reveals the social cancer
that is competition is invaluable.
I want to address some of the most important research described in the book,
and its social implications relating to sustainable values.
The back cover of the book reads:
“Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised,
Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of 'human nature'.
It does not motivate us to do our best.
In fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble
is that they value competitiveness. Rather than building character,
competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships.
It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.
'No Contest' makes a powerful case
that 'healthy competition' is really a contradiction in terms.
Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable,
we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves
our children, and our society."
The first myth, about competition being a part of human nature,
is usually asserted by those who have not bothered to understand
the environmental conditions that may be responsible for this competitive behaviour.
Of course, as is nothing new to those in the movement,
competition is imposed upon us in nearly every aspect of life it seems:
from the need to compete against our fellow classmates in school for grades;
it is essentially inevitable in the labour force
for the need to compete for jobs, to the playing fields,
to corporations having to compete with one another for market share,
to governments battling one another for economic dominance.
All of it is provably destructive in one way or another.
This multitude of influences can help explain
why competition is so deeply ingrained within our culture,
and why it may seem like it is
an inescapable part of human nature to compete.
What is not usually considered, is that
human beings have lived in periods of great scarcity for thousands of years,
reinforcing the competitive drive of society.
This is essentially inevitable in a scarcity-oriented environment.
The same reasoning can be applied, for example, to a pack of lions
which must fight amongst themselves for the limited amount food
in their environment, not because of some immutable genetic configuration.
So, logically speaking, if scarcity was eradicated,
as is possible in a Resource-Based Economy,
to provide access to goods and services without a price tag,
we should expect a different set of behaviours and values
that correspond to this environment. One that is free of competition
and all other monetary-related symptoms
and instead allows large scale cooperation.
Sociologist Philip Slater offers an interesting insight. He says:
“Scarcity is spurious. It now exists only for the purpose
of maintaining the system that depends upon it,
and its artificiality becomes more palpable each day.”
To quote anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins:
“The market industrial system institutes scarcity
in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated
where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices
and all livelihoods depend upon getting and spending.
Insufficiency of material becomes the explicit
calculable starting point of all economic activity.”
By the end of the 'No Contest' book,
Kohn has presented hundreds of scientific studies
to debunk all of the age-old myths surrounding competition.
The following are some examples:
One research study involves taking a group of people
and instructing them to perform a task.
Half of them are told: “See if you can figure this task out,"
and the other half are told: “This is a contest
with a prize awarded to whomever wins and does the job better or faster”.
Study after study after study, across gender, ages and culture
find that the people who compete do an inferior job.
Another group of studies involved David Johnson,
a professor of social psychology at the University of Minnesota.
He and his colleagues reviewed all the studies they could find
on the subject from 1924 to 1980.
The vast majority of the studies found that children
learn better when they work cooperatively as opposed to competitively,
while only a few found no significant difference.
The more complex the learning task, however,
the worse children in a competitive environment fared.
A 1983 study of 310 laboratory technicians by Dean Tjosvold
and his colleagues here at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver
found that subordinates who worked for a competitive leader
were largely dissatisfied with their jobs.
The motivated employees were those whose bosses were cooperatively inclined.
That finding nicely complements Tjosvold’s other research
which has shown repeatedly that cooperation in the workplace
translates into much better decision-making and higher productivity.
So, why would this be?
Why does competition translate into a more destructive environment
for which to be creative and efficient at whatever the task might be?
Firstly, competition makes us anxious,
which interferes with concentration.
Second, the inability to share talent and resources
as would be possible in a cooperative strategy,
disallows us to learn from one another.
And third, and maybe most importantly,
trying to win distracts us from the task at hand.
We’re forced to focus on beating others
rather than to work together to maximize performance and achieve excellence.
It is psychologically destructive in the sense that
we are forced to see others as obstacles to our success.
It leads to dishonesty as the goal, of course, becomes to destroy others
by whatever means possible, as is what the market system has become.
This makes sense obviously, as it’s irrational to trust someone
who gains from your failure.
Recognizing this, people shift their stance to something like
“Well then, we just shouldn’t overdo competition.
We should pursue it to a healthy amount.”
Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is also flawed.
The problem with competition is not the amount to which we pursue it,
or to what avenue we apply such strategies.
The problem lies with competition itself.
A social poison is a social poison, no matter the quantity.
The phrase 'healthy competition', then, is really a contradiction in terms.
So, enough about the destructive effects intrinsic to competition.
Many people claim that competition is enjoyable
and, as such, is enough to warrant this sort of recreational activity.
Firstly, the problem with such a claim is that it’s not compared to anything.
Another problem is that people are hardly exposed to cooperative sports
or other cooperative games in our robustly competitive culture,
so they can’t accurately judge competitive games against anything else.
Dozens of studies have been carried out to determine
whether competitive games are more enjoyable to cooperative games,
assuming people are exposed to both.
Overwhelmingly, in fact, most boys and essentially all girls,
once exposed to cooperative games, preferred them over competitive games.
A good exercise I’ve found is to simply think of cooperative games
we were raised to play as children and see if we can even think of any.
The fact that most of us cannot should show how deeply indoctrinated
we are as a culture to this mindset.
Competition is, of course, profoundly destructive in our economic system
from just about every angle imaginable.
This is essentially the context in which The Zeitgeist Movement has discussed
its detriments, from the planned and intrinsic obsolescence, and thus waste,
that is produced due to the need to create a multiplicity of products
to compete for market share, to the artificial scarcity,
to the ever-widening income gap, and the list goes on and on.
It is, of course, claimed that competition is an incentive mechanism
to get people to perform their best.
As I mentioned briefly already, studies repeatedly reveal
that people generally do an inferior job
when working in a competitive culture or competitive structure.
If we step outside our current economic and political system
and frame things from within a Resource-Based Economy,
this would resemble a truly cooperative framework.
If scientists got together to share knowledge and information
to build the best computer possible, then it would just be done
without the need for corporations to each hire a group of scientists
to compete with each other, hording patents and unable to share ideas.
Again, I’ll go more into the science of motivation soon.
The implications of this understanding is that our schools,
our workplaces, and in fact, our entire economic system
are predicated on a motivational structure that is backward;
and it, of course, walks in tandem with the monetary system’s structure.
Back to competition. The research clearly suggests over and over
that competition is a social cancer,
always, not just a lot of the time or most of the time,
and it's simply another reason we must remove the monetary-market structure
for the social well-being of everyone.
Going back to the issue of sustainable values,
valuing competition as anything other than
a wholly destructive force within society
would seem an unsustainable value to hold then,
as all the research clearly demonstrates.
In sports, or any type of competitive game,
we’re well aware of how badly it feels when you lose,
but few pause to reflect on the psychological ramifications of winning.
You feel a strong high, you gloat for a while,
and then you come down. In fact, you crash down and you need more of it,
precisely like building up a tolerance to a drug.
Even sitting on the sidelines, we’re envious of the winners
and feel contempt toward the losers, and we’re suspicious of everyone.
The emotional needs that we attempt to meet through competition
are actually exasperated by competition!
They make us more dependent. They make our self-esteem more contingent
on competition.
Bringing this back to the topic of human nature
to show that any quality is part of a fixed human nature
would entail demonstrating that that particular quality
is exhibited to the same degree in all environmental circumstances,
which holds no ground for competition, and as far as I know
has not been done for any specific human behaviour really.