No contest.....

There is one place where I believe competition is useful. Voluntary sports.

There is simply no other venue where it seems to add anything. In fact, it seems destructive.

I become hyper-aware of its presence in so many things. And there are very few others aside from a few obscure authors like Alfie Kohn and, to a degree, Jonathan Kozol who has touched on the topic without actual indictment. He sort of mugwumped on the issue.

Alfie Kohn says this though: Competition can be defined as "mutu­ally exclusive goal attainment": my success requires your failure; our fates are negatively linked. Put differently, two or more individuals are trying to achieve a goal that cannot be attained by both or all of them. The all too ­familiar pressure to be number one grows out of this arrangement. We have become accustomed to living with it and quick to defend it. We have been trained, in effect, not only to compete, but to believe there is value in doing so.

He goes on to say that success and competition are not necessarily interlinked. There are plenty of things I can succeed at that have nothing to do with taking anything away from you. I can write a book, knit a scarf, grow a garden, run, swim and any assortment of things that never require even a passing glance at what you are doing.

I believe we can engage in cooperate activities that benefit all of us. Blogging is a good example of that. We share information with one another, support one another, teach each other and entertain each other. It can be done without competition.

I believe that or I wouldn't be here.

There are times when it seems that competition winds its ugly web through this, too. All of us know the ways it does that so I won't bother reiterating them. It's just an example anyway. I'm not ready to level that indictment yet... although I've seriously considered it.

My primary point is that I believe competition leads to stress, disrupts families, ruins friendships and turns nearly every human experience into an exercise in trophy-gathering instead of something joyful or unifying.

This is a topic that has fascinated me since I was a kid. In fact, it is the topic that led me to choose Sociology as a major in college. I wanted to eventually show through academic study that we can live cooperatively rather than seeing each other as opponents for resources that are certainly plentiful. There is no scarcity in this world and we don't need to fight for a bigger piece of the pie than anyone else. We don't need have power over others to validate ourselves. In fact, I believe it is community that validates us most.

Your thoughts?

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