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 showed that cooperation, not competition, is the key to all social activities, and that it can often replace competition—with better results.
Today, Mr. George discusses the widening group of thinkers who are challenging the Myth of Competition, and what we can all do to resist the influence of this very powerful Myth.
It’s all on the other side of the elegant orange tracery.
The first part of Mr. George’s installment for today notes the research that has been done on the superiority of cooperation to competition.
More than twenty-five years ago, Alfie Kohn published a book entitled No Contest: The Case Against Competition. (Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition, [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986 and 1992.]) Kohn drew together the results of hundreds of research studies done throughout the twentieth century in order to show that our obsessive orientation toward competition fails to produce good outcomes in every area of human life. His fundamental question was: Do we perform better when we are trying to beat others than when we are working together with them or working alone? And he found the evidence to be overwhelmingly clear and consistent that the answer had to be: almost never. “Superior performance not only does not require competition; it usually seems to require its absence.” (Ibid., 46-47.)
And he also cites a short list of other scholars who have become convinced of the defects of competition.
Since the publication of Kohn’s book, a small but growing number of scholars have begun to question the unquestionable Myth of Competition. Among them are Robert Axelrod, Herbert Gintis, John McMurtry, and Michael Tomaselio.
Then he turns to the question of how each of us can resist the powerful pull of the Myth of Competition. Here are some of his suggestions.
[H]abits of thought are very difficult to change. Changing our presuppositions about competition will take will power and lots of attention to your daily habits of thought. . . .
[Y]ou need to bring into your mind at the start of every day, and remind yourself as often as you can during the day, that competition is not the matrix of existence. You need to remind yourself that, in fact, very few situations in life actually demand competition. . . .
Never engage in competition unless you choose it. It does not matter whether you choose it it as a tool for improvement, or as a game, or even as a prudent response to an implacable adversary; it only matters that you choose it as one of an array of possible activities, rather than letting it choose you. . . .
You can become creative in non-competitiveness simply by refusing to engage with someone who attempts to set up a competition with you. If there is any way you can help the person get what he or she wants without compromising yourself or your values, offer to do so. This will disarm most competitors. . . .
[W]hen someone is determined to attack you—which, by the way, is not competition, but violence—even then you can learn to turn their violence against them. Study the psychology of the martial arts. In the last resort, if fighting is necessary, you should fight. But learn how to do it while losing the minimum amount of your own energy and extracting the maximum amount from your adversary.
Finally, Mr. George comes finishes up his consideration of the Myth of Competition:
We can remove most competition from the world by learning not to see everything as some sort of struggle, and by not responding in kind to those who want to compete with us. Less competition will make the world more pleasant and more satisfying for us all, and will free up lots of energy for the cooperative creativity that we desperately need in order to free ourselves from the debilitating effects caused by belief in the Major Myths.
You can read the whole post
here.
Tomorrow Mr. George will begin a new topic, a consideration of the fourth Major Myth of “Conservatism”—the Myth of Independence.
I’ll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.