I'm continuing my reporting on the next installment from Conservative Estimate, the recently founded website that is devoted to demolishing Conservatism.
Yesterday, Alfred George finished up his treatment of the Conservative Myth of Self-interest, showing it to be a total sham that just harms everyone associated with it.
Today, Mr. George begins his attack on the next Conservative Myth to meet his wrecking ball—the Myth of Competition—with a consideration of the nature of this Myth, how it has been turned into a principle that seems benign and even beneficial, and why this principle is actually a weakness rather than a strength.
Join me on the other side of the orange spiraling whisks for a look at George’s argument.
First, Mr. George defines the Myth of Competition as this: Competition is necessary for survival. This Myth is supported by familiar and extreme images of human selfishness:
[P]eople will act viciously to take your nuts away from you. They will always do this, because they are selfish by nature. Hence, you must either overpower them by possessing more force, or outsmart them by having more ingenuity. In order to keep this up, you need to be in constant competition with everyone, so that no one can ever get the upper hand over you—or else they might kill you or starve you to death.
These violent images appeal to the fears of many people, making the Myth plausible to them. But, as Mr. George will show in the next few days, there is an alternative vision to the Myth of Competition, and this vision makes the Myth completely unnecessary.
Before proceeding to the alternative vision, however, Mr. George shows that the Myth of Competition has been tamed in order to make it palatable to fearful people:
This domesticated version of the Myth of Competition is based on an analogy that seems quite plausible. The idea is that competition is like fighting. In accordance with this analogy, when you engage in a fight and come out the winner, you have attained your goal. If you come out the loser and are still alive, then you have benefitted from the experience, and you may use this experience to win next time. Either outcome, provided you survive, can be seen as profitable, so both contenders can be see as winners.
When this is generalized to any sort of human interaction, fighting is replaced by competition and winning is replaced by improvement. The resulting story that we tell ourselves is this: Engaging in competition is a great benefit to society. The immediate winner produces a benefit at least for himself and perhaps also for his companions. The immediate loser gains experience and perhaps wisdom for future bouts of competition. It’s a win-win situation.
Does this seem a bit Polyanna-ish to you? It does to Mr. George as well.
[W]hen any actual competition does manage to rise to the level of the theory, it is often praised as an ideal example of competition. When something is that rare, one has to ask whether the story being told isn’t more of a theoretical possibility than a practical reality.
Indeed, it is not a practical reality. Instead, faith in competition is a weakness rather than a strength:
[I]f you are dependent on competition to improve yourself, then you are not self-determining. This is obvious. The self-determining person doesn’t need competition or anything else to attain his ends. He simply decides what he wants to do and sets about doing it. It may be that he chooses to use competition as a means, but he certainly could think of other ways to achieve the same ends without competition. . . .
[Therefore it] is a weakness to believe that competition is the only path to improvement. To the extent that people believe this, they give up self-determination, become dependent on a competitor, and limit their own freedom. Such people can never be as free as they need to be in order to become Creators.
You can read the whole post
here.
Tomorrow Mr. George will show how competition constrains, rather than expands, our faculties, and that continual competition is a mark of functioning at a low level.
I'll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.