The Failure of Competition

"Never Compete. Every competition damages your reputation.
Our rivals seize occasion to obscure us so as to outshine us. Few wage honorable war. Rivalry discloses faults that courtesy would hide. Many have lived in good repute while they had no rivals. The heat of conflict revives and gives new life to dead scandals, digging up long-buried skeletons. Competition begins with belittling, and seeks aid anywhere it can, not only where it should. And when the weapons of abuse do not effect their purpose, as often or mostly happens, our opponents seek revenge and use them at least for beating away the dust of oblivion from anything that is our discredit. People of goodwill are always at peace, and those of good reputation and dignity are of goodwill. " - Balthasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"

Who here feels edified by having our fine citizens, both Democratic and Republican, dig lower and lower into their beings to beat the other team (being addicted to sport) in this lifelong attempt to finally reach bottom?

Competition is not the only avalable option...

(More below the fold)

Competition is not the only available option. For visionary candidates, it's ludicrous. A visionary is best served by keeping his or her mind on the vision, and on reality, in its true and current state. Bullshit doesn't help. Bullshit visions don't help. Focusing on the other candidate doesn't help. It only serves to divide one's attention, which would be better spent elsewhere.

This is why I love John Edwards. He is the true visionary. His normal mode is that of focusing on the better solution, the better vision, as well as being most in touch with reality on the ground.

Hillary and Barack benefit from his ideas and visions, and should be glad that he is so generative and generous. I can relate to him, and the way his mind works. We both know how to achieve large effects with small causes -- often called the Butterfly Effect. That said, he still could use your donations...and use them to good effect...a butterfly effect.

Were John to be silenced, or shoved out, America and the world might well miss all the amazing ideas and visions that John, his lovely wife, Elizabeth, his amazing team of idea consultants, creatives, seers and visionaries bring to the table. Then its back to Dullsville.
We need to evolve our ability to cooperate in meaningful ways for that, instead of destroying each other in the competition, we are healing, ameliorating, edifying, educating, and raising one another...and each candidate.
They ALL should be thinking with the tops of the heads, and from the depths of their hearts and consciences.

We can evolve this thing, but not through this adolescent and vitriolic warring.

The ultimate solution to the election might be a matter of "Which two?" rather than "Which one?"
But we would never get there through competition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...

david k beckwith
anonyMoses Hyperlincoln III

•  You're confusing competition with conflict.

  Competition is a mutual striving for a common goal.  Whoever gets there first savors success.  Mutual striving is mutually beneficial because it is difficult to pace oneself against oneself.

  Conflict is a contest between mutually opposing forces in which the purpose is for one to weaken or destroy the other.

  Our elections are being represented as contests or conflicts and are, in essence, creating an unreal situation.  This is a negative because in allowing themselves to be distracted, the candidates are all weakened.

  by hannah on Sat Jan 19, 2008 at 08:55:16 AM PDT

  •  Beyond the point of confluence

    He (or she) who wishes to experience gratitude from his contemporaries, must adjust his pace to theirs. But great things are never produced in this way. And he who wants to do great things must direct his gaze to posterity, and in firm confidence elaborate his work for coming generations. No doubt, the result may be that he will remain quite unknown to his contemporaries, and comparable to a man who, compelled to spend his life upon a lonely island, with great effort sets up a monument there, to transmit to future sea-farers the knowledge of his existence. If he thinks it a hard fate, let him console himself with the reflection that the ordinary man who lives for practical aims only, often suffers a like fate, without having any compensation to hope for; inasmuch as he may, under favorable conditions, spend a life of material production, earning, buying, building, fertilizing, laying out, founding, establishing, beautifying with daily effort and unflagging zeal, and all the time think that he is working for himself; and yet in the end it is his descendants who reap the benefit of it all, and sometimes not even his descendants. It is the same with the man of genius; he, too, hopes for his reward and for honor at least; and at last finds that he has worked for posterity alone.

    Who said that?
    (Hint: His works have lasted hundreds of years.)

    Visions rarely admit committee. This competition for the same ideal has built within itself a braking mechanism that may hinder the most profound visions. Dull minds think alike.

    by anonyMoses on Sat Jan 19, 2008 at 09:25:08 AM PDT

    •  That would be Schopenhauer, yes?

      Theologian Paul Tillich warned that, eventually, all the bonds of original, organic community will be sacrificed in favor of a free, capitalistic society.

      In the politics of our capitalist society, the meaning of creative life is sucked away with the competitive drive. The corporate media controls the message because of pure profit-interest.

      The process becomes independent of source of life's core meaning. Held together only by economic needs and purposes, human community disintegrates into isolated individuals whose relationships are defined by merciless competition.

      Social justice and ethics die when competition is at its most merciless.

      Curiously, I see the emergence of the substance of Professor Tillich's warnings right here at Daily Kos these past few months.

      by Iddybud on Sat Jan 19, 2008 at 10:11:15 AM PDT

      •  2 points!

        She shoots. She scores! :)

        by anonyMoses on Sat Jan 19, 2008 at 10:41:05 AM PDT

      •  A perversion is a perversion.

        IMHO, both competition and capitalism have been perverted.  Competition into conflict and capitalism into the behavior of a predatory cannibalistic pack rat.

        What I would argue is that while trade and exchange is the dominant behavior by which humans get what they need to be sustained, predation survives as a sort of default in case the social structure required for exchange breaks down.

        On the other hand, perhaps these modes are gender specific.  Perhaps males are naturally predators whose instincts have to be modified in the interest of succesfully reproducing themselves.  That is, they have to learn to give as well as take.

        by hannah on Sun Jan 20, 2008 at 02:54:23 AM PDT

  •  In our society's politics, the two are brothers

    Competition and conflict. Asfaras politics are concerned, they might as well have grown in the same unfortunate womb as the fraternal twins they are in this society. Hard money is their mother's milk. Visions are easily lost.

    See my comment below in this diary.

    by Iddybud on Sat Jan 19, 2008 at 10:14:31 AM PDT