No Contest (23 page)

When process has been supplanted by product in so many aspects of our lives, the same transformation must eventually occur with respect to the way we regard life itself. Who we are and what we are worth have come to be evaluated in terms of what we actually have produced or done, what tangible evidence of achievement can be adduced, what we have to show for ourselves. As soon as we illuminate this thinking, of course, its absurdity becomes clear. What is the point of all our frowning purposefulness? This shattering question—typically whispered in middle age when we can smell our mortality (and hastily dismissed as depression)—never gets a satisfactory answer. The pursuit of results is ultimately futile because there
is
no grand summation or coherent unity to our lives other than what we confer on them by the process of living. A bumper sticker that nicely satirizes the commodity fetishism which tends to accompany the product orientation reads:
WHOEVER HAS THE MOST THINGS WHEN HE DIES, WINS
. The economist John Maynard Keynes was similarly impatient with talk of “the long run.” “In the long run,” he is reported to have said, “we are all dead.”

Competition is not the sole cause of the product orientation, but it is a mighty contributor to such thinking. The goal of competing is, by definition, to win. To enjoy aspects of the activity in its own right is beside the point. It can happen, but it is at best tangential. More typically, the process orientation is actively discouraged because it seems a distraction from the main purpose. The student who loves intellectual exploration will not want to rein in this impulse as the syllabus demands, and she will not have the highest grade-point average. The attorney who delights in the nuances of the law probably will not win as many cases as the one who cares only about the verdict and thinks in strategic terms. Competition is necessarily product oriented. And as more of our activities are directed toward winning, the process orientation becomes attenuated in our lives. Our eyes remain fixed on the scoreboard.

According to two social scientists, whose essays on sports were coincidentally published in the same year, this product orientation is associated with rigidity. “In competition,” wrote William Sadler, “one's perspective is fixed on attaining a definite result. If this competitive posture were sustained, one's personality system would tend to become rigid.”
⁶⁹
The intrinsic rigidity of the goal orientation, not surprisingly, makes the individual rigid, as well. We might propose that the more competitive an individual is, the less spontaneous he is, the less receptive to surprise, the less flexible his cognitive process. Here is psychologist Dorcas Butt: “The character of the competitive athlete becomes increasingly undesirable as he develops an intense egocentrie orientation with rigid psychological defenses and insensitivity. His obsession with his own winning status dominates his being.”
⁷⁰
Not all competitors are equally obsessed, of course, but competition itself predisposes us—and not only athletes—to become invested in results to the exclusion of the process of working or playing or learning.

E
ITHER/OR
T
HINKING:
It is common to view a situation as if only two alternatives existed—the “black-and-white fallacy.” America is either to be loved or left. I am either the most gifted and attractive person who ever lived or I am utterly worthless. Now we can respond to this thinking by pointing out that there are other alternatives (or a gray area in the middle, as the case may be)—treating it, in effect, as a lapse in logic. Or we can deal with such an all-or-nothing attitude psychodynamically, tracing the unconscious roots of perfectionism to the first years of life. But neither of these responses is quite sufficient. Dichotomous thinking is more than an error in logic. It is a real-life orientation, closely connected to how we deal with other people. And there is more going on than individual psychopathology: the social structures that shape our interactions also affect our assumptions about the alternatives that are open to us.

Specifically, dichotomous thinking is both conducive to and a consequence of competing. In a contest, there are only two possible results: you win or you lose. Those inclined to see the world in an either/or fashion will be attracted to competition, but, by the same token, competition will help to shape such an orientation. A recent study of more than three thousand women in careers found that “the vast majority . . . came to believe that there were only two possible outcomes to their actions. Either they would somehow manage to force themselves to run at top speed all day, every day, or they would lose so badly that they might as well not have entered the race to begin with. . . . There was nothing in between.”
⁷¹
To slap a psychiatric label on these thousands (actually, millions) of people misses the point. More useful would be an investigation of how a competitive culture teaches us that the world is divided into winners and losers, and how we generalize this lesson and come to see everything in either/or terms.

The dichotomous worldview is a loaded one. When there are only two choices, typically one is seen as good and the other as bad. Everything we encounter can be neatly sorted out as rational or irrational, righteous or satanic, progressive or reactionary, reasonable or radical. A world that can be reduced to such simple antinomies is a much more manageable, comfortable world, one that does not ask us to grapple with tough moral questions. The price to be paid for this comfort is steep, however. To begin with, it is a distorted view of reality—akin to squashing the three-dimensional world into a twodimensional flatland. Second, when dichotomous thinking is competitively generated, there is a tendency to be concerned almost compulsively about what is the best. People, including ourselves, are either number one or they are unworthy. This is not a terribly productive way of thinking about restaurant meals or computers, much less about human beings.

Finally, when we perform this kind of value-laden division, we normally place ourselves on the good side, and we want the good to triumph over the bad. A gulf opens up between “us” and “them,” and this very division invites aggression—a topic to which I will return in the next chapter. This is what Anne Strick described in the context of our adversarial legal system: From seeing Right and Wrong as the only two possibilities,

 

we claim righteousness for ourselves and require an “other,” an opposite (religious, political, racial, national, sexual, name-it), a nonself who embodies evil. To that degree does blame become a basic behavior and revenge a solution. Such polarity not only implies superior-inferior; as it denies complementarity, it also invites battle. For superior tends to become pitted
against
inferior.
⁷²

 

The steps are short: from “either/or” to “good/bad” to “we/they” to “we against them.” Structural competition is a significant contributor to this ominous progression.

C
ONFORMITY:
Because the United States is both an exceedingly competitive and a highly individualistic society, and because competition here usually takes place at the individual (rather than the group) level, we often assume that competition promotes individualism. But the word
individualism
actually is associated with two very different philosophical movements. On the one hand, there is the individualism championed by such nineteenth-century Americans as Emerson and Thoreau and found in certain strands of twentieth-century existentialism: it has to do with genuine self-sufficiency, conscience, autonomy, and nonconformity. The concern here is with the freedom to think and act on one's own, the commitment to deeply held values, the courage to risk disapproval and worse from others.

On the other hand, there is the vulgar parody of this movement
that one finds in contemporary pop psychology and parts of the human potential movement. This is the desperate attempt at selfreliance that bespeaks alienation from others—while, in turn, contributing to just this predicament. It is the blithe dismissal of relationship in “you do your thing and I'll do mine,” the pathetic attempt to compensate for loneliness in “be your own best friend,” the undisguised selfishness in “look out for number one.” (It is not at all surprising, by the way, to find this egocentricity walking hand in hand with a uniquely American proclivity for instant intimacy. The lat ter is just a superficial chumminess that vainly attempts to compensate for the effects of an ugly individualism.) As political scientist Michael Parenti put it, our

 

“individualism” is not to be mistaken for freedom to choose moral, political and cultural alternatives of one's own making. Each person is expected to operate “individually” but in more or less similar ways and similar directions. . . . “Individualism” in the United States refers to
privatization
and the absence of communal forms of production, consumption and recreation.
⁷³

 

It is with this latter kind of individualism that competition is compatible. A narrowly conceived self-interest is conducive to beating out others. It is a short step from looking out for number one to trying to
become
Number One. This version of individualism implies an alienation from others, and here, too, it is commensurate with competition. But competition does not promote the more substantial and authentic kind of individualism. On the contrary, it encourages rank conformity. Here is George Leonard: “A culture dedicated to creating standardized, specialized, predictable human components could find no better way of grinding them out than by making every possible aspect of life a matter of competition. ‘Winning out' in this respect does not make rugged individualists. It shapes conformist robots.”
⁷⁴

This is quite logical since one can speak of outdoing others only if one is doing the same thing they are. Apples are not better than oranges; one can make relative judgments only about like quantities. As Arthur Combs put it, “Competition can only work if people agree to seek the same goals and follow the same rules. Accordingly, as competitors strive to beat each other's records, they tend to become more alike. If total conformity is what we want in our society, worshiping competition is one effective way to get it.”
⁷⁵
Notice that this is not simply an empirical observation (“people tend to act alike when they compete”) but an analysis of the nature of competition. Unique characteristics by definition cannot be ranked, and participation in the process of ranking demands essential conformity.

This is not to say that competition is the sole cause of conformity in American society. There are many other social, economic, and psychological forces at work that cannot be explored in this book. But competition at the very least tends to support and reinforce this process of standardization.

In chapter 3, I noted that competition dampens creativity. This is partly because the pressure to outdo someone else tends to make us conservative. We do not want to risk anything that could endanger our victory. Thus the music critic Will Crutchfield finds that piano competitions result in interpretations that are “all too similar to one another.” In trying to win, performers concentrate on making no mistakes but “shy away . . . from the big technical risks, the truly astonishing effects.”
⁷⁶
Creativity is anticonformist at its core; it is nothing if not a process of idiosyncratic thinking and risk-taking. Competition inhibits this process.

The word
conformity
implies something more than acting like others, of course. To conform is to go along, to accept a situation as it is. Its opposite is not only individuality but the acts of questioning and rebelling. In this broader sense, too, competition seems to promote conformity. If winning is the goal, one naturally tries to avoid doing anything that could jeopardize it. It is true that skillful tennis-playing is all that matters on the tennis court; one can act like a petulant child and still win important tournaments. But in most arenas victory is at least partly subjective. Attitude toward authorities and general conduct do count in the kinds of competitions that take place in the office or the classroom. If I want to get the highest grades in class, I will not be likely to challenge the teacher's version of whatever topic is being covered. After a while, I may even cease to think critically altogether. “In order not to fail most students are willing to believe anything and [not to care] whether what they are told is true or false,” writes Jules Henry.
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If people tend to “go along to get along,” there is even more incentive to go along when the goal is to be number one. In the office or factory where co-workers are rivals, beating out the next person for a promotion means pleasing the boss. Competition acts to extinguish the Promethean fire of rebellion.

The inclination to take risks is stifled by competition in other respects, too. Not only does the competitor try to play it safe within a given activity, but the matter of which activities she gets involved in will itself be affected by the need to win. It is common for people to try to “cut their losses” by abandoning activities and environments in which they are less likely to win. A student who is driven (structurally or intentionally) to have a superior grade-point average will avoid exploring subjects in which he may not succeed. A competitive sports enthusiast will stay with the games at which she is proficient. “Anything I couldn't be the best at, I didn't do,” one writer confesses, adding ironically, “Vocational guidance counselors call this ‘getting focused.'”
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Again, the tendency to specialize and, more specifically, to play to one's strengths is not exclusively a function of competition. But competition exacerbates this tendency, with the result that the need to win (which is to say, the fear of losing) will result in narrowing our lives, failing to experience new challenges. Competition thus can have the effect of discouraging healthy risk-taking—precisely because, psychologically speaking, so much is at risk when we compete.