In today’s modern society, many of us, often find ourselves, wittingly or not, competing in school achievements, in job achievements and obtainments, in wealth achievements, as well as in our desire to achieve a good overall status in society. There are a lot of people that believe that competition is healthy for us, and for a certainty, competition can be healthy for people especially when that competition brings out the best in a person in the sense of effort, desire, and throughput. Of course, there is also the underside of competition which is not so much talked about, in which, some of those who compete, find themselves susceptible to doing whatever that they need to do in order to, in their viewpoint, “win.”
The main reason why so many people buy into competition, is the perception that we live in a zero-sum world, and within that world, there is only a fixed amount of goods, or achievements, to go around, and therefore what we so failed to compete and win, is subsequently lost to us, forever. So too, many people are status hungry, and while part of them admires the success of the other; we also find that often part of them, sees that success of the other, as something that if they do not measure up well to, thus labels them as something, less than, which subsequently bothers and irks them.
Yet, fundamentally there is a problem in all the competition that we are participants in, which is the fact that when people believe that they need to get as much as they personally can get; this signifies that the self-centeredness and selfishness of that person’s desire is the driving force of what they so think upon and do, to the basic exclusion of all else. Additionally, a competition, by definition, has winners and it has losers, so that, competition is something that is going to separate us as a society, of which, such separation, serves to place a dividing line between those that are its best achievers, as compared to those that are not. Further to the point, those that are seen as the winners in the competition, have a strong tendency to believe that they deserve it, no matter where they so started the race, when that competition so commenced.
So much of the unease, trouble, civil discord, injustice, inequality, and the like that we see in society, today, reflects that any society that makes competition the be-all and end-all of its existence, is a society in which there will never be civil peace, because it doesn’t take into account, that not only is each of us different, with different motivations, and different circumstances, but also that competition has too often a lot in common with a dog-eat-dog philosophy. On the other hand, those that are wise, compassionate, and are team players, recognize well, that the only societies that will ever be both long standing and just, are those societies that make it their abiding principle, that cooperation is the most appropriate way to conduct human affairs. In other words, we are all in this together, and while we can so decide to race against each other, the better side of our nature, recognizes that we are much better off if we aid and help one another, because the race is not really to the swift, but to those who have the endurance and the strength to persevere and to thereby keep on doing the right thing.