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 how competition narrows our faculties and causes us to perform at sub-par levels.
Today, he discusses how competition generates a brood of vices. He also shows why competition is not the “basic fact of life” that many people believe it to be, but cooperation is.
Shall we examine his arguments after the billowing orange furls?
Mr. George begins today’s installment by noting that the Myth of Competition has become so dangerous become it has become so generally accepted.
Too many people have come to believe that competition is the matrix of all human activity. When reinforced by uncritical acceptance, competition begins to breed vices. . . .
Competition, once it is no longer seen as one choice among many, begins to play along with the fear inherent in the Myth of Scarcity and the Myth of Self-interest. And fear, as we have seen, is the source of treating others badly.
When you begin to distrust everyone, when you suspect that everyone is angling to screw you in some way, then you begin to justify unjust behavior on your part. After all, you’re pretty sure, aren’t you that they will screw you if you don’t screw them first?
In fact, so many people have come to believe this that most of us grow up hearing the gospel of competition preached by authority figures close to us. If not our own parents, some close relative; if not our own employers, the employers of our family and friends. This reinforces the other Conservative Myths, and increases the Fear that is the true driving force behind conservatism.
[T]he Major Myths are like different vignettes depicted on a immense tapestry—but the whole is woven from the single thread of fear.
Then Mr. George goes on to show why competition cannot be the fundamental fact of life that so many seem to think it is.
In fact, it’s pretty easy to see that competition cannot be fundamental; it is derivative, dependent on something else for its very existence. . . . The thing that competition is dependent on—believe it or not—is cooperation. Cooperation is more fundamental, more important, and more empowering than competition could ever be.
George goes on to say that the behavior of all business enterprises confirms this fact: although every business starts out to compete in the marketplace, the first thing they do when the get their team together is insist on teamwork. A similar situation applies in sports, in politics, in war—indeed, in all aspects of social life. It’s just not true that competition is fundamental. It’s quite the opposite: Cooperation is fundamental.
Thus the Myth of Competition, the conviction that competition is necessary for survival, is not the Great Secret of Life that many of its adherents think. Since it just isn’t true, those who believe it are deluded about the most basic thing in life: The Great Secret of Life, the secret on which competition and everything else depends, is cooperation.
Those whose belief in this Myth is so deep that they treat every life situation as a competition are terribly weak compared to those who can navigate all situations. Most life situations are not competitive. To treat them as if they are is to falsify reality, and to create strife where there need not be any.
You can read the whole post
here.
On Monday, Mr. George will show that the Myth of Competition poisons life unnecessarily and generates a great deal of needless pain and suffering, both for Mythers and for the people with whom they interact.
I’ll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.