No Contest Read Free Page A

selfish, our fates now are linked. We sink or swim together. Cooperation is a shrewd and highly successful strategy—a pragmatic choice that gets things done at work and at school even more effectively than competition does (as I will show in chapter 3) and can serve as a basis for creating challenging and enjoyable games that do not require us to compete against one another (as I will show in chapter 4). There is also good evidence that cooperation is more conducive to psychological health and to liking one another.
    Even in a competitive culture there are aspects of cooperative and independent work. In fact, a single day at the office can include all three models. The most common mix consists of intragroup cooperation and intergroup competition: working with others in a group in order to defeat other groups. Football players cooperate in order to win and employees pull together in order that their company can earn higher profits than another company. It should be clear, however, that these orientations do not appear with the same frequency. Notice how often cooperation in our society is in the service of competition—and how often we must compete without being able to cooperate at all. As Robert Bellah and his colleagues put it, “The world of individualistic competition is experienced every day; the world of harmonious unanimity is fully realized only in sporadic flashes of togetherness, glimpses of what might be if only people would cooperate and their purposes reinforce, rather than undercut, one another.” 11
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    That most of us consistently fail to consider the alternatives to competition is a testament to the effectiveness of our socialization. We have been trained not only to compete but to believe in competition. If we are asked about it, we unthinkingly repeat what we have been told. Unfortunately, the case for competition, as most of us have learned it, does not stand up under close scrutiny. It is a case that relies on rhetorical gambits, such as the insinuation that people who oppose competition are simply afraid of it, or on a lack of conceptual precision, such as the confusion of competition with conflict or with success. It is a case that sometimes misrepresents itself, such as by disguising the impulse to compete as a simple need to survive. Long ago, Bertrand Russell pointed out that what is often meant by “the struggle for life is really the [competitive] struggle for success. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” 12
    Most of all, the case for competition is based on a great deal of misinformation. Specifically, it has been constructed on four central myths, and these myths, in the order of their popularity, form the basis of the next four chapters. The first myth is that competition is an unavoidable fact of life, part of “human nature.” Although this assumption is made casually (and without evidence), it demands a considered response; if it were true, arguments about competition’s desirability would be beside the point since there is nothing we can do about our nature. The second myth is that competition motivates us to do our best—or, in stronger form, that we would cease being productive if we did not compete. This assumption is invoked to explain everything from grades to capitalism. Third, it is sometimes asserted that contests provide the best, if not the only, way to have a good time. All the joys of play are said to hinge on competitive games. The last myth is that competition builds character, that it is good for self-confidence. This claim is not heard quite so often as the others—probably because it contradicts not only empirical evidence but our own experience of the psychological impact of competition.
    I mean to refute each of these myths by looking at all the arenas of human life where competition is present and