Lakewood the Thinking City
A
Summary of the Discussion
On four consecutive Mondays, from June 24 through July 15, 2002, a small group met under the auspices of the Thinking City program to discuss competition and competitiveness. This is a summary of the points discussed, conclusions arrived at and questions raised.
Competition was defined as a system or situation that involves one person or organization (or group or product) being rewarded on the basis of being judged superior to another according to some standard. Competition is distinguished from achievement of excellence, considered by itself, in that it involves unfavorable comparisons.
Competitiveness is the corresponding attitude of individuals, consisting of their striving to win out in competitive situations. This concept, competitiveness, took center stage in the discussions for it was the seemingly excessive attitudes of individuals, rather than the existence of competition itself, that we were most concerned with.
The rationale for the discussions was a concern that in some areas of American life, competition is out of control – for example, in the reported attempts by parents to get their children in the best schools from pre-kindergarten on; in frantic attempts by many high school graduates to get into so-called elite colleges; in the belittling of some groups of high school students which, we are told, resulted in the recent rash of school shootings; in the aggressiveness displayed by some parents toward their children’s’ athletic contests – symbolized in the extreme by a father’s killing a hockey referee for making an unfavorable call.
The discussions aimed to answer these questions: Why is there so much competitiveness in American life? When are competition and competitiveness good, and when are they bad? How can we reduce the bad?
Distinctions and classifications. In the course of discussion, we found we had to distinguish among various types of competition and competitiveness:
Competitiveness vs. desire
for achievement per se.
An individual can desire to achieve something worthwhile – to produce great art, for example – without being competitive, and insofar as an individual merely strives for achievement, he/she is of no concern to our discussion. Unfortunately, what begins as desire for achievement often veers toward competitiveness.
Competition/competitiveness classified according to the type of motivation:
1) Utilitarian competitiveness. This consists in being competitive for the sake of achieving some pre-existing goal other than simply winning out over the other guy. Competition in business life is the most obvious example. Individuals compete with other individuals to get business from a customer, to get a job, etc. The goal, normally, is to earn money. This is a pre-existing goal which pervades our life and is distinct from merely trying to win out in the contest. There is no difficulty in understanding this form of competitiveness, and within the proper bounds it is desirable.
2) Competitiveness for self-grading. Individuals partake of this type of competitiveness for the sake of determining how good they are at some activity. For example, chess players try to win in a chess tournament to see how good they are at chess. There is nothing controversial in this type of competitiveness, but it doesn’t figure prominently in the picture we’re considering.
3) Rivalrous competitiveness. This consists in being competitive for the sake of outdoing one’s rival – so as to be “#1.” (However, it can go along with the desire to accomplish something socially valuable.) Within this category, we can distinguish:
-- The desire to outdo one’s rival, in actuality.
-- The desire to get more acclaim than one’s rival, regardless of actual accomplishment.
This type of competitiveness, needless to say, is the most interesting, the most troublesome and the most difficult to explain.
Competitiveness vs. ambition
or industriousness.
Ambition (striving to achieve a certain goal) and industriousness (willingness to work) are different from competitiveness. A person may have no ambition and may shirk working, but still be competitive, e.g. in wanting to beat all rivals in chess or checkers. Conversely, a person may be ambitious without being competitive – e.g. the person whose ambition is simply to produce great art. Or industrious without being competitive, such as any number of hard workers. This is not to deny, of course, that competitiveness often goes along with ambition and/or industriousness.
Competitiveness classified according to aggressiveness toward one’s rival.
We can see a continuum of types of competitiveness, from the cutthroat to the friendly. Starting with the former, the classification runs like this:
-- The aim is to annihilate the enemy. E.g. Cold War competition; the most aggressive type of business competition.
-- The aim is to reduce the enemy to a subordinate position. E.g., most business competition, in which the aim is not to eliminate the competition, but to reduce the competitor’s share of trade.
-- The aim is simply to out-do others. E.g., sports stars who insist on contracts that pay them more money than their rivals in the field.
-- The aim is to compete within a cooperative relationship. E.g., the U.S. and Russia in the present space effort.
What causes competitiveness?
Is competitiveness innate – built into human nature? Some say it is, for we see rivalry throughout the animal kingdom as well as sibling rivalry in humans. But if it were innate, we would find competitiveness in all cultures, and we don’t. The Chinese, for example, are traditionally much less competitive than we are. So competitiveness must be a matter of socialization. In particular, the culture of the schools was said to foster competitiveness. According to one participant, the schools may give lip service to cooperation, but their real message is that “collaboration is for schmucks.” Also: “The value system of corporate America has been introduced into the schools.”
But socialization is quite a general and abstract explanation. What, specifically, causes a person to be competitive? A number of explanations were offered, characterizing both sides of the fence that divides the desirable kinds of competitiveness from the undesirable.
On one explanation, competitiveness is a natural spillover from the spirit of progress that characterizes American economic and business life. This explanation of course emphasizes utilitarian competitiveness, and sees rivalrous competitiveness as a necessary, if undesirable, by-product.
A number of considerations contrary to this view arose in the course of the discussion, focusing on cases in which the competitiveness is empty and out of control – in which it has no apparent basis, and certainly no justified basis:
For example, star athletes demand salaries that are far beyond what they will ever need to live a prosperous and secure life. Likewise with many business executives (as we have recently been told), or high-flying stockbrokers. The notion of competition as a game seems appropriate in these cases, along with the saying “The person with the most toys at the end wins.”
Another example is the notorious competitiveness on the part of the parents of children in sports. There is no evident goal in these cases, except simply to win over others.
It seems, then, that in many cases competitiveness is driven by a need for self-esteem. Why should this be? One explanation is that there is a vacuum of values in many people’s lives – they have no values to live for and to measure their lives against. Therefore they gain self-esteem simply by outdoing others.
A related explanation is personal insecurity, which drives the individual always to be one-up on others.
When is competition/competitiveness
desirable, and when undesirable?
It was generally agreed that economic competition is desirable as a rule, for obvious reasons. It provides better choices for the consumer and leads to more material prosperity for the society. Of course, such competition can be perverted, for example when it results in unethical practices, or when it turns the economic system in the wrong direction. (This last point is outside the present discussion, but an interesting treatment appears in The Winner-Take-All Society by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook.)
When it comes to artistic or scientific competition and competitiveness, the situation is not so clear. While some creative efforts may be inspired by competitiveness, in other cases competitiveness has degraded artistic talent. Norman Mailer was given as an example.
Consideration of art and science leads to a wider consideration: Since competition is a process in which rewards follow from judgments based on certain standards, it must result in the valuing of those characteristics on which those judgments are based, and it is generally easier to base judgments on superficial characteristics than on deeper characteristics. In school, for example, students are more likely to judge one another on the basis of appearance or athletic ability than on the basis of moral integrity, while teachers find it easier to rank students on the basis of factual information or facility than on the basis of deep understanding. Therefore, the more competitive a student is, the more he or she will tend to cultivate an attractive appearance, or to be a star athlete, or to acquire factual information -- instead of striving for moral integrity, deep understanding, etc. In short, competitiveness tends to encourage superficiality.
How does rivalrous competitiveness fit in? Since this consists only of aiming to outdo a rival, it doesn’t necessarily involve the intention to do anything socially valuable, and it may well be that the effort required is out of proportion to the value achieved (as in the case of children’s athletics). However, it’s still possible for rivalrous competition to result in valuable achievement. This would hold true if winning out involved a socially valuable accomplishment. (For example, I may compete to be named Citizen of the Year, merely for the sake of outdoing the other candidates, and without any real regard for the good of the community; yet in order to win that title I may have to do good deeds.)
(An interesting sidelight of the discussion on this point was the career of Bill Gates. Two pictures were offered: According to the good picture, Gates wanted to help society by building the “better mousetrap.” That is, he saw that a standard operating system was needed and so he stepped in to build his MS-DOS and market it. His efforts were instrumental in advancing the personal-computer industry, and for this he obtained great wealth. According to the bad picture, Gates saw a business opportunity in the need for an operating system and so he stepped in and got a monopoly in the OS field to the detriment of would-be competitors and innovators.)
In the final analysis, then, the important question is not whether competitiveness is utilitarian or grading or rivalrous, but rather whether the achievement that brings competitive success has value or not. The winner in a competition may be the person or organization that achieves something of social value (e.g. a new product) or a person who achieves something truly of value to him- or herself (e.g. mastery of academic subject-matter). In such a case, the competitiveness is desirable. On the other hand, competitive success may depend on achievement that patently has no value (e.g. winning in youth sports), or which may not have the great value ascribed to it (e.g. admission to an elite college), and as such would be undesirable. In other words, the desirability or undesirability of a competitive attitude depends on how the competition is set up by society.
Also, calculation of the value of competitive success should consider any undesirable side-effects, such as psychic damage, harm done by one competitor to others, or distortion of the economic system
The high school scene.
Several recent graduates of Lakewood High participated and gave their impressions of competitiveness in high schools. The picture they gave was rosier than that often given of the schools in the wake of the school shootings.
According to their description, the student body is indeed divided into cliques, listed as: Goths; Skater-kids; Drug users; Athletes; and Preppie-kids (An additional group – the intellectuals or artists – should probably be added, judging from their testimony.) However, this segmentation of the study body does not result in the belittling of one group by another with all the destructive consequences we have been led to expect. Rather, the students said, many different interests and subcultures have become “cool,” with the result that there is little competition between one clique and another. (The Gifted and Talented Program was given some credit for this, in that it places the more intellectually-minded students together in a situation where they can socialize with one another.)
What about competitiveness within each clique? We did not delve into this, but we did talk about competitiveness for college admissions. The picture was mixed. Some students, it was said, were concerned about other students’ class standing and chances for admission to choice colleges, but other students cared little.
One of the adults in the group, involved with young people, mentioned “relational violence,” i.e. attempts by young girls to destroy the reputations and popularity of other girls. The participants in the group said they had not heard of this in the high school, though it may go on in the middle schools.
What is to be done?
On the basis of the discussions above, we can see several things a community can do to eliminate undesirable competition and undesirable effects, while maintaining or increasing desirable competition.
1) Emphasize – especially for young people – valuable achievement for its own sake, as opposed to achievement as a means to competitive success. Show that the understanding of oneself and others, the creation or appreciation of art, and all the other intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual accomplishments a person may realize are intrinsically valuable, apart from any comparison with the accomplishments of others.
2) Downplay competitiveness in general. Assume that the individual will strive for intrinsic achievement and for the wealth, status, or other such goals, and that this striving will provide sufficient incentive to be competitive when competitiveness is called for.
3) In particular, downplay or eliminate competitiveness when the rewards are not clearly worth the effort. For example, minimize the importance of winning in youth sports, except to the extent that competition is necessary to grade one’s own efforts.
4) Emphasize cooperative effort as a setting for competitiveness and as an antidote to the most aggressive kinds of competitiveness.
Areas to be explored. Here are some of the areas that that group did not explore fully:
The schools. Helpful as the recent grads were, they could not give a full picture of life in the schools, especially the middle and elementary schools. To what extent is there vicious and destructive competitiveness on a personal plane? How much do students feel competitive about college admissions? To what extent is competitiveness inculcated in the schools, especially in the lower grades?.
College admissions. Why – at least in some areas – do parents and their children make such frantic attempts to achieve admission into the so-called elite colleges, beginning with admission to pre-school? What is the goal they expect to achieve?
More generally, what is the goal that competitive individuals aim to achieve? Money? Power? Status? (If materialism disappeared from American life, what effect would that have on competitiveness?) Do competitive individuals really achieve what they expect to achieve?
What are the implications for equality? With fierce competition, do a relatively few number of people garner the positions of power?
Competition in politics. What are the results of having one party government for an extended period of time, or of having no competition for the School Board (as in Lakewood).