No Contest (24 page)

This phenomenon, too, shades into the matter of performance, since risk-taking is a prerequisite for many kinds of achievement. It is true that winning at some kinds of activities requires that competitors take risks. But the pressure to win generally has the opposite effect, and the quality of work suffers. When an artistic task is turned into a contest, children's products reveal significantly less spontaneity.
⁷⁹
When television networks have to scramble frantically for ratings, they tend “not to innovate but to imitate, because innovation requires risk-taking, and risk-taking is antithetical to winning in the shortterm.”
⁸⁰
(It is not a coincidence that the three major American commercial networks, operating within a competitive framework, produce virtually interchangeable programming, whereas the BBC channels in England, which do not have to compete, offer a real choice.)

Besides its effects on performance, a sterile kind of safety is also a good deal less fun than risking, exploring, daring, challenging. But here the point to be stressed is that competition affects the personality. Turning life into a series of contests turns us into cautious, obedient people. We do not sparkle as individuals
or
embrace collective action when we are in a race. We are less likely to take advantage of a new opportunity when we know that it sorts participants into winners and losers. In fact, the more one appreciates the values that stand in opposition to conformity, the more skeptical one will be of competition.

6

INTERPERSONAL CONSIDERATIONS

 

That trophy is the truth, the only truth. I told him to get mean, punish some people, put some fear into them, you have to hate to win, it takes hate to win. I didn't tell him to break anybody's ribs. . . . I told him there is no such thing as second place.

—The Coach in Jason Miller's
That Championship Season

 

POISONING OUR RELATIONSHIPS

 

The bug that is
going around the office doesn't remain confined to the office for long. Someone brings it home, and the whole family comes down with it. The disease that starts in the workplace is carried into living rooms and bedrooms.

The disease is competition. In a society that trains us to regard our workmates as adversaries, we find no sanctuary in the private sphere. “Industrial man, consciously or unconsciously, often considers not only his business rivals as competitors but also his sex partners, siblings, neighbors, and peers of his group,” wrote Walter Weisskopf some thirty-five years ago.
¹
Never mind the office; the race to win is under way where you live.

The pursuit of a lover is a competitive game in which success is called “scoring.” Would-be suitors jockey for position to take the prize, and they regard each other with suspicion or outright animosity. A couple forms, and the two find their love frayed by the need of each to outdo the other: Who has the bigger paycheck, the most friends, the sharper wit? Who is giving more to the relationship, is more skillful or selfless in bed, has sacrificed more to be with the other? “It is quite sufficient for one partner to see life as a zero-sum game . . . and one may rest assured that things will go all to hell,” says Paul Watzlawick.”
²
Let one lover be concerned with outdoing the other in some respect—any respect—and the relationship will be dragged down.

A child is born and with it two questions: Who will be the better parent and whom will the child prefer? “The ancient competition for the children between mother and father gains renewed vigor,” said Jules Henry, “and the competitiveness in our culture from which the family is supposed to give shelter enters through the back door.”
³
Another child arrives and is subtly encouraged to compete with the sibling to be Mommy's or Daddy's favorite. Affection becomes a scarce commodity, something one must obtain at the expense of someone else.

The parents socialize with other parents and trot out their children's accomplishments. Whose infant walked first, whose toddler came out with the most precious remark, whose teenager was admitted to the best college? The couples also compete to prove they have the best marriage, as Mary-Lou Weisman observes:

 

It seems we are so essentially a capitalistic society that we can't even refrain from trying to sell one another our marriages, or at least we can't resist advertising them. We are after all a highly competitive society. We compete at work, at school, in sports and on television game shows. All of these are but pale imitations of the competitions that are played on Saturday nights on a field of hors d'oeuvres.
⁴

 

The measure of our domestic untranquility is the number of articles in the women's magazines on the subject.
Seventeen
and
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
tell of competitions with best friends and boyfriends;
Redbook
and
McCall's
warn of familial struggles. The headlines read “Can You Bear It When Your Best Friend Gets Ahead?” and “The Marriage Superbowl” and “How to Cope with ‘Friendly' Competition.” Even if we are not involved in the marketplace, these articles remind us, our personal lives are rife with rivalries. In an essay on the relationship between neurosis and American culture, Karen Horney summed up the situation:

 

The character of all our human relationships is molded by a more or less outspoken competition. It is effective in the family between siblings, at school, in social relations (keeping up with the Joneses), and in love life. . . . The genuine erotic wish is often overshadowed or replaced by the merely competitive goal of being the most popular, having the most dates, love letters, lovers, being seen with the most desirable man or woman. . . . Marriage partners, for example, may be living in an endless struggle for supremacy, with or without being aware of the nature or even of the existence of this combat.
⁵

 

This state of affairs, Horney notes elsewhere, is all the more tragic since the same competitive forces in our society that generate anxiety, making our relationships so important as a coping mechanism, also undermine these very relationships.
⁶
In a competitive society, there is nowhere left to turn.

Competition acts not only to strain our existing relationships to the breaking point, but also to prevent them from developing in the first place. Camaraderie and companionship—to say nothing of genuine friendship and love—scarcely have a chance to take root when we are defined as competitors. In the workplace, one tries to remain on friendly terms with one's colleagues, but there is guardedness, a part of the self held in reserve; even when no rivalry exists at the moment, one never knows whom one will have to compete against next week. I was recently told that extended training seminars for computer programmers are sometimes set up as contests: one's ultimate status and salary are determined by how many programs one produces. The result, according to one reluctant participant, is that friendships are nipped in the bud because each person must try to outdo the others. Performing artists similarly find it hard to enjoy each other's company since they may audition for the same part or position. Says one actress: “I keep a distance from everybody because I know one day”—she snaps her fingers—“it's all going to be gone and you're going to be working against each other.”

On the competitive playing field, the story is much the same. The occasional real friendship that develops is the exception that proves the rule. One article about professional tennis paraphrases an official as follows: “If it comes down to choosing between winning and maintaining a friendship . . . successful players sacrifice the friendship.” He adds: “There's no place for sentiment. It's a matter of survival.”
⁷
The win/lose structure inevitably affects the priorities and temperaments of the individual players, according to sports psychologists Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutko. A personality profile administered to fifteen thousand athletes revealed “low interest in receiving support and concern from others, low need to take care of others, and low need for affiliation. Such a personality,” the researchers conclude, “seems necessary to achieve victory over others.”
⁸
Another study found that characteristics such as “kindness, sympathy, and unselfishness” are notably absent among
successful
athletes.
⁹
Psychotherapist Lillian Rubin describes how such a personality likely takes shape:

 

To win for his team a boy beats his best friend . . . [so] winning means also losing something precious in the relationship with a friend. For it is not likely that the two will compete on the football field and have a close and loving relationship off it, not likely that they can put on a show of invincibility during the game and share their fears and vulnerabilities after it. Not very different, is it, from the world of work for which he is destined? . . . Not very good training, is it, for the kind of sharing of self and emotional support friendship requires?
¹⁰

 

The assertion one sometimes hears to the effect that competition need not interfere with friendship assumes that our orientation toward someone can switch from supportive to rivalrous and back again as if we were changing television channels. It is simply unrealistic to think that the hostility engendered by and experienced during a contest will evaporate into thin air, leaving the relationship between the two individuals unaffected. I do not mean to say that no one has ever had a satisfying relationship with a competitor, but that competition inhibits such relationships, just as it corrodes the relationships we have already developed. This chapter is concerned with the reason this happens and the consequences it brings.

 

ANATOMY OF A RIVAL

 

Simply from knowing that competition damages self-esteem, we can predict that relationships will be in trouble. This seems to follow from Harry Stack Sullivan's comment in the last chapter to the effect that it is difficult for me to feel good about others when I don't feel good about myself. I feel my worth is in doubt—it is contingent on winning—so I am unable to extend myself to you. From her research with children, psychologist Carole Ames concluded that just such a connection between self-esteem and relationship exists: “The experience of failure in competitive settings that resulted in depressed beliefs in their own ability . . . is likely to affect negatively the child's own feelings of competence and self-worth and potentially interfere with future relationships with others.”
¹¹

But the interpersonal consequences of competition do not depend solely on the psychology of the individual. Competition by its very nature damages relationship. Its nature, remember, is mutually exclusive goal attainment, which means that competitors' interests are inherently opposed. I succeed if you fail, and vice versa, so my objective is to do everything possible to trip you up. This attitude does not reflect a neurotic or sadistic orientation on my part. It is the heart of competition itself because competition decrees that both of us cannot succeed. This effect is easiest to see where we compete face to face, but even where the contest is indirect, such as the diffuse pursuit of a consumer's dollar in which market share is gained at the expense of anonymous competitors, I will regard others—and correctly so—as stumbling blocks on my path.

Under conditions of competition, “the failure of others has the same relative effect as one's own success,”
¹²
so the failure of others is devoutly to be wished. It is a small step from wanting someone else to fail at a particular task to wanting bad things in general for that person. I come to associate your disappointment with my pleasure, even when we are not in a zero-sum situation. It is another small step to adopting an adversarial posture all the time. One fails to distinguish between those others who are rivals and those who are not (at least for the moment). Put the two tendencies together and the pattern of behavior that emerges is one of treating virtually everyone as inimical to one's own goals and wishing them ill. “In a competitive culture,” writes Henry, “anybody's success at anything is one's own defeat, even though one is completely uninvolved in the success.'”
¹³

Earlier I referred to a study demonstrating that American children often choose to take away another child's toy despite the fact that they have nothing to gain from this. The experiment, with seven- to nine-year-olds, found that 78 percent of the Anglo-American children (who presumably had become well accustomed to competition) “took the other child's toy away for no other reason than to prevent the other child from having it.” Mexican children, whose socialization had been less competitive, did so only half as often.
¹⁴

Indiscriminate rivalrous behavior can be explained according to simple principles of learning theory. Baby Albert, the hapless subject of John B. Watson's classic 1920 experiment, was exposed to a loud noise every time he saw a white rat. He thereby learned to fear the rat—but also (though unexpectedly) to generalize this fear to everything furry. It is much the same for the rest of us: when we repeatedly encounter people under competitive conditions, we will spontaneously begin to regard
all
others as rivals and treat them accordingly.

Learning theory cannot capture the full import of this point, however. We need a model of human relationship—its potential richness and significance to our lives—against which to understand the effects of competition. The philosopher Martin Buber spent his life devising such a model. For him, the fulfillment of human life was relationship, the realm of the “interhuman.” Buber described the wondrous possibility of treating another person not as an “it” but as a “Thou,” not as a means but as an end, so that “each becomes aware of the other and is thus related to him in such a way that he does not regard and use him as his object, but as his partner in a living event.”
¹⁵