No Contest (22 page)

Even if we grant a limited usefulness to the experience of failure, furthermore, it is important to emphasize that this experience need not involve losing in competition. One can fall short of one's
own
expectations and develop all the appropriate virtues of tenacity and discipline. Competitive loss is a particularly noxious kind of failure, one that contains messages of relative inferiority and that typically exposes one to public judgment and shame. “Let it be granted that men should face mortal risks when they are seasoned to it and be schooled to self-reliance under stern adversity,” writes John Harvey. “It may still be found possible to secure these ends without making men, so much as now, the enemies of their neighbours.”
⁵³
To say that failing has its value, then, is not at all to justify competition.

 

COMPETITION AND ANXIETY

 

Its effect on self-esteem, as serious as it is, does not exhaust the psychological consequences of competition. This section will consider the matter of insecurity and anxiety; the following section will touch on still other effects. Many are closely related to self-esteem, but they merit individual attention nonetheless.

A number of psychologists have proposed that optimal human functioning presupposes a sense of security about the world—a confidence that it is a safe place and one's needs will be met. One's trust in the “world out there” is closely related to one's trust in oneself: if I cannot depend on what is around me, I will lack the means to accept myself—and I may even come to blame myself for the world as I experience it.

That the process of competing can threaten our sense of security will be obvious to anyone who has ever competed. One of the reasons competition interferes with productivity, as we saw in chapter 3, is that it can be not only unpleasant but an occasion for severe anxiety. This effect has been noted in several research projects. One study found that pupils performing a motor-steadiness task became more anxious when they had to compete.
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Another experiment, involving undergraduates, discovered that competitively structured discussion sections made students feel “distinctly more tense and anxious than they did in the cooperative sessions.” This anxiety went hand in hand with a “greater incidence of self-oriented needs and . . . [a loss of] selfassurance”—underscoring again the link between security and selfesteem.
⁵⁵
Other investigators, meanwhile, have observed that “athletics can be a continual source of anxiety, even for the most talented players.”
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We can identify three reasons that competition leaves us insecure and anxious. The first and most obvious is apprehension about losing. Regardless of talent or psychological healthiness, the experience of having to prove oneself by outperforming someone else is invariably unsettling, to say the least. The constant possibility of being defeated simply is not conducive to feeling secure. When we do actually lose, this effect is compounded in subsequent competitive encounters. The process soon takes the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the fear of losing makes it more likely that this is just what will happen. Apart from its effect on performance, of course, anxiety is undesirable in its own right. It is one more unhappy legacy of the race to win.

The second reason for our anxiety concerns feelings of apprehension about
winning
. Now this seems most paradoxical given that the whole point of competition is to win. But if we think about it, we realize that it is not uncommon for capable competitors to trip themselves up just as it seems they are about to triumph. Consider the case of athletes who “choke” in the final round, a phenomenon that only recently has become the subject of scholarly interest.
⁵⁷
The psychoanalytic tradition helps us to see that this pattern is neither random nor inexplicable. Rather, such people are recoiling from winning in a deliberate (if unconscious) way.

Why should they do this? Orthodox psychoanalysts believe that the prototype of all competition is the Oedipal contest with the same-sex parent, the prize being the opposite-sex parent. The little boy, Freud tells us, is deeply conflicted about this contest, since he believes punishment (specifically, castration) will result if he is successful. Winning Mommy's love—then, later, the act of winning itself—is terribly threatening because of this anticipated consequence. Unconsciously, the presumed wrath of the father may turn victory into a prospect as dreadful as defeat.

Like many others, I find this explanation both fanciful and reductive. As it happens, there are two other possibilities that also make use of unconscious processes but do not require us to assume that an early childhood event neatly accounts for one's adult behavior. The first is simply that competitors may feel guilty for making other people lose and thus either punish themselves for doing so in the past or take steps to avoid doing so in the present.

The second explanation is that competitors may fear that the people they beat will become hostile toward them. Karen Horney has written at length about this reason for fearing victory. “In many neurotics anxiety concerning the hostility of others is so enormous that they are afraid of success, even if they feel certain of attaining it,” she says. While this can be conscious, the neurotic more often is “aware not of his fear but of the resulting inhibitions. When such a person plays tennis, for example, he may feel when he is close to victory that something holds him back and makes it impossible for him to win.”
⁵⁸
What holds him back is the fear that the person he beats will resent him for this and dislike him. The relationship between the two people may suffer and the winner will feel cast off, disconnected, unwanted. Others may admire his victory, but the more substantial kind of approval that is closer to nurturance and love may be withdrawn, and it is the latter kind of acceptance that matters more. The “neurotic person automatically assumes that others will feel just as much hurt and vindictive after a defeat as he does himself,”
⁵⁹
says Horney. He therefore has a strong incentive to avoid winning.

Horney's analysis is incisive, marred only by her assumption that it applies exclusively to neurotic people. What she describes is in fact very widespread. Hostility and aggression in competitive situations may perhaps be most pronounced in, but hardly are confined to, neurotics. As the next chapter will argue, aggression is intrinsically connected to competition itself, and the fear that one's relationship with others will be changed for the worse by competing with them is, in truth, a very reasonable concern. Horney is referring to the neurotic tendency to project one's own characteristics onto someone else, but in the case of competition, the other person's hostility may be quite real. To expect the loser to be sore is hardly a symptom of ill health.

This anxiety based on interpersonal tension (or the anticipation of it) is not confined to neurotics, then. What is more, it does not manifest itself only as a fear of winning. It is the dynamic of competition itself that elicits anxious feelings, and, to this extent, interpersonalbased insecurity should be understood as a third, independent reason that competition engenders anxiety—alongside fear of losing and fear of winning. The psychoanalyst Rollo May, in his pioneering interdisciplinary study of anxiety, came to the conclusion that
competition is “the most pervasive occasion for anxiety” in our culture
.
⁶⁰
Given the scope and rigor of May's work, such an unqualified declaration is very powerful; it is not merely a careless generalization or a rhetorical flourish. His assessment should give pause to the most enthusiastic defenders of competition. The reason for competition's generation of anxiety, May continues, lies not in the psychopathology of particular neurotic people but rather in the very nature of competitive individualism, which he takes to be one of the defining features of American society. This competitive philosophy “militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contempora[ry] anxiety.”
⁶¹
When people are defined as rivals, it is difficult to build an overall sense of community or establish a genuine connection with a particular other. “Anxiety arises out of the interpersonal isolation and alienation from others that inheres in a pattern in which self-validation depends on triumphing over others.”
⁶²

May then makes another point about this process: like so much else about competition, it works in a vicious circle. Not only does competing make us anxious by threatening our relations with others, but it sets up a scenario in which we try to solve this problem by returning to the very strategy that gave rise to it.

 

The culturally accepted method of allaying anxiety is redoubling one's efforts to achieve success . . . [so] the anxious individual increases his competitive striving. But the more competitive, aggressive striving, the more isolation, hostility, and anxiety. This vicious circle may be graphed as follows: competitive individual striving → intrasocial hostility → isolation → anxiety → increased competitive striving. Thus the methods most generally used to dispel anxiety in such a constellation actually increase anxiety in the long run.
⁶³

 

In sum, the security that is so vital for healthy human development is precisely what competition inhibits. We are anxious about losing, conflicted about winning, and fearful about the effects of competition on our relationships with others—effects that can include hostility, resentment, and disapproval. Today there is no shortage of articles, books, and, most recently, workshops to help us with these insecurities. Any hesitations we might have about beating other people are seen as problems to be managed, not unlike overeating.

This makes perfect sense. In a hypercompetitive society, resistance to competing naturally is defined as a weakness (albeit a treatable one). In a nation bent on waging war, soldiers who seem reluctant to kill people similarly are candidates for psychotherapy so they can be returned to normal. The analogy really is not farfetched because compassion, too, can be construed as a weakness if it is experienced in a competitive situation. Here, for example, is Stuart Walker's reaction to the appearance of generosity during a competitive encounter: “Nowadays, whenever I hear myself say, ‘Well, let's give him a break,' I pull up short and ask myself, ‘Are you surrendering?' . . . Whether deliberate or accidental all forms of surrender represent regression—relinquishing the joy of self-demonstration for the solace of protection and passivity.”
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Coaches and sports psychologists alike teach athletes to conquer their fears of losing, to overcome their apprehensions about winning, even to equate helping behavior with “surrender.” And after a while we do not need to be ridiculed and dismissed as a “quitter”: we internalize the message and savagely attack ourselves for our anxiety and our reservations.

But is a reluctance to make other people lose (with the attendant guilt)—or, for that matter, an unwillingness to put victory before friendship—really something to be gotten over? I would contend it is more correctly viewed as an incipient sign of health. There is an important message in our recoiling from competition, just as there is in the coughing fit of a first-time cigarette smoker. Our task is to reflect on those anxieties, to weigh the values involved, instead of simply setting about the task of anesthetizing our sensibilities so that we can more efficiently triumph over others.

***

The link between anxiety and performance has been documented. I have also said that anxiety or insecurity is undesirable in itself. But there are other manifestations of this psychological state—behaviors and physiological effects—that bear some mention. May, for example, notes that “the high incidence of ulcer has often been related to the excessively competitive life in modern Western culture.”
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The psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, an expert on suicide, names “competitive pressures” as a prominent contributor to the alarming rise in suicide rates among young people.
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Elsewhere, he suggests that drug abuse is another consequence of our culture's “voracious competitiveness.”
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These informal—though informed—observations tend to substantiate our own intuitions, but the hard data are still missing. It is difficult to isolate either structural or intentional competition as a variable, since competitive situations and people often are defined by other features that might also contribute to stress. In any case, I am not aware of any researchers who have attempted to test these hypotheses. One provocative exception is an experiment involving monkeys. Scientists in North Carolina have shown that “aggressive monkeys eating a high-fat diet developed more atherosclerosis (clogging of coronary arteries) than did submissive monkeys, but only if the monkeys lived under stressful social situations that encouraged competition.”
⁶⁸
More research on competition clearly is required, including longitudinal studies that test for the effects of switching to a competitive environment. The seriousness of the consequences and the strong likelihood of their relationship to competition unquestionably justifies such research projects.

 

FURTHER CONSEQUENCES OF COMPETITION

 

P
RODUCT
O
RIENTATION:
Play, it was argued in the last chapter, is activity for its own sake. It reflects a “process orientation”—an inclination to do something because of its intrinsic value. Such behavior is rare among adults in our society. We are product oriented. Our work is governed by the demands of the “bottom line” and often is justified as an onerous necessity of life. The time we spend in school similarly is construed as valuable only insofar as it contributes to later employment, with the pleas for relevance in our universities having evolved into a demand for marketable skills. Even leisure activities have come to resemble work: results are what matter.