No Contest (34 page)

 

HOW TO PREVENT SOCIAL CHANGE
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Making our society less competitive ultimately depends on reducing structural competition. Unfortunately, bringing about structural change of any kind requires overcoming enormous resistance. It is much easier to describe how change can be blocked than how it can be furthered. For those so inclined, then, here are five simple ways to perpetuate the status quo.

1. L
IMIT
Y
OUR
V
ISION:
The long-standing American tradition of ignoring the structural causes of social and individual problems was mentioned in chapter 7. By pretending, for example, that psychological disturbance has nothing to do with the societal forces that shape personality development, you can help see to it that those forces continue unabated. It follows that all intervention should be done at the individual level. It is fine to help, say, homeless people on a case-by-case basis, but inquiring into the policy decisions and economic arrangements that have brought about their predicament would only serve to invite drastic changes—and this is what we want to avoid at all costs. Similarly, if we continue to treat each example of corporate wrongdoing (from illegal dumping of toxic wastes to bribing of public officials) as if it has occurred in a vacuum, then we can manage to preserve the system responsible for these acts.

2
.    A
DAPT:
The best way to keep the status quo intact is to make sure that individuals adjust themselves to serve its needs. Such adaptation once was enforced by crude, authoritarian methods of “reeducation.” Today this is hardly necessary. A wealth of advice is available on how to become successful—what to wear, how to negotiate, and so forth—and virtually all of it proceeds from the premise that you should adjust yourself to conditions as you find them. Adaptation is a critical part of the self-help model: you must succeed within the institutions and according to the rules that already exist. To do well is to fit in, and to fit in is to fortify the structures into which you are being fit.

3.    T
HINK
A
BOUT
Y
OURSELF:
Implicit in any exhortations to succeed by “giving them what they want” is the suggestion that you should be totally preoccupied with your own well-being. The more you limit your concerns to yourself, the more you help to sustain the larger system. But this does not apply merely to material success. Even therapeutic and spiritual enterprises are useful for preserving the status quo because in encouraging you to attend to your own needs, they effectively direct attention away from social structures. Groom yourself and let the rest of the world go on its way—what better strategy is there for perpetuating existing structures? A few people may argue, it is true, that personal growth can be a route to social change. But most of the human potential movement will not require you to wrestle with this question, since social change is irrelevant to its goals and techniques.
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4.    B
E
“R
EALISTIC
”: Fortunately, it is not necessary for you to defend the larger system. You can even nod in sympathetic agreement with someone who indicts it. But it is crucial that this nodding be accompanied by a shrug. Phrases such as “like it or not” and “that's just the way it is” should be employed liberally in order to emphasize that nothing can be done about the larger picture. Such protestations of powerlessness are actually very powerful, of course, since they make sure that things are left exactly as they are. Every person who is encouraged to take such a stance is another person rescued from social activism.

Occasionally a critic will refuse to resign himself to the way things are or to believe that we are helpless to make change. Such an individual should immediately be labeled “idealistic.” Do not be concerned about the vaguely complimentary connotations of having ideals. It will be understood that an idealist is someone who does not understand “the world as it is” (“world” = “our society”; “as it is” = “as it will always be”). This label efficiently calls attention to the critic's faulty understanding of reality or “human nature” and insures that he is not taken seriously. Those who are “pragmatic,” by contrast, know that we must always work within the confines of what we are given. After all, if alternative models really were workable, we would already be using them.

Appeals to realism have the virtue of allowing you to avoid messy discussions about the value of a critic's position (and thus of the status quo). Why bother with such issues when you can dismiss his vision as “well-meaning but unworkable”? Challenging the rightness of what he is proposing will only slow him down; it is the appeal to practicality that produces the knockout. Call someone wrongheaded or even evil and a lengthy discussion may follow. Call him utopian or naive and there is nothing more to be said.
¹⁵
This method of dismissing models of change is uniquely effective since it sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people insist that an alternative arrangement cannot work, they will be right. Its failure then can be cited as substantiation of one's original skepticism. No one uses this maneuver more skillfully than policymakers who are mistrustful of public institutions. Because of their conviction that governments can do nothing right, they divert funds from public schools and hospitals. When the inevitable crisis develops, they say, “You see?”

Appeals to realism can insure that institutions which threaten to promote social change (e.g., legislative bodies, universities, the media) do nothing but reflect the status quo. In the name of democracy, descriptive accuracy, and objective journalism, respectively, these institutions can be tamed and made into powerful instruments for perpetuating whatever is in place. Here, to take a tiny example, is
New York Times
education writer Fred Hechinger:

 

Regrettably, the importance of the “message” has also invaded children's television. . . . [One] episode of “The Flintstones,” a favorite children's cartoon, had a hotly contested baseball game end in a tie, followed by celebrations of brotherly and sisterly love—hardly the real aim in any normal child's view of competitive games.
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This exemplary criticism should be studied carefully. Hechinger is demonstrating how to dismiss as inappropriate any scenario that does not conform to the existing values and structures of our society. To challenge our current practices is idealistic and, worse, contains a “message.” To reinforce our current practices is realistic and contains no message. Most children's programs do not offend Hechinger because they display, and thereby shape, “normal” people—i.e., those who are intent on winning at any cost.

5. R
ATIONALIZE:
It is easier for critics to oppose existing institutions when those who defend and profit from them are obviously opposed to social change. You can make it more difficult for these critics—and salve your own conscience at the same time—by claiming that your real reason for acting as you do is to “change the system from within.” Like most people who talk this way, of course, you do not actually have to
make
change. On the contrary, even if this really were your goal, you would be permitted to work only for insignificant reforms that never come close to challenging the structures themselves. By becoming part of these structures, you can proceed to seek personal aggrandizement while at the same time contributing your talents to something you profess to find problematic. (A variation 011 this maneuver is to claim that you are going to do so for only a short time—as if it were a simple matter to leave the fast lane and get over to the exit ramp.) If you are audacious enough, you can even rationalize your participation as the
most effective
way to change the system. The more people who accept this reasoning and follow your example, the more secure is that system.

 

TOWARD A NONCOMPETITIVE SOCIETY

 

Whether employed deliberately or not, these mechanisms for frustrating change have been devastatingly effective. My point in reviewing them is to make it easier to anticipate and deal with such maneuvers. Having considered some of the issues that arise with respect to “generic” change, we can return to the specific case of competition. If competition is indeed unhelpful and destructive, and if attitudes and personal goals are shaped by the win/lose structure, then we need to set about the formidable task of undoing the arrangements that set us against one another—from parlor games to geopolitical conflict.

While working to dismantle existing structures, we should also be careful not to produce new occasions for competition. This means taking pains to avoid creating scarcity. Most scarcity is artificial, I have argued, because a prized status has been set up where none existed before. As parents and teachers and managers, we are constantly transforming situations into contests. In fact, the widespread assumption that
“someone's
got to lose” arises only because we keep making goal attainment mutually exclusive. Every time we make salespeople try to outdo one another, every time we display the best homework assignment in class on the bulletin board, every time we call out to our children, “Who can set the table fastest?”—we are contributing to the unnecessary and undesirable competitiveness that suffuses our culture. The real alternative to being Number One, as I have already noted, is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether. Starting immediately, we can stop contriving contests and we can urge our friends and colleagues and children's teachers to do likewise. At the very least, we can present the case against competition to them so they understand the implications of what they are doing.

All of this applies to the vast number of cases where scarcity is created. But even where scarcity seems to be real, we need to look at the bigger picture to determine whether certain assumptions or policy decisions (which can be re-evaluated) lie behind competition and give it the appearance of necessity. Consider a familiar example: When cars prowl the city streets in search of parking spaces, the shortage is not invented and the quest is clearly competitive. But the number of spaces to be had downtown was not decreed by God. It is the result of a decision that can be changed. The same is true for the availability and convenience of mass transit, which indirectly causes or eliminates the frustrating race for space. Instead of taking competition for granted, we ought to be asking what broader arrangements might be altered so as to present us with a structure that does not require winners and losers. Sometimes the search for these broader arrangements will lead us to the very foundations of our economic and political system.
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This does not mean we ought to drop the matter and resign ourselves to competition. On the contrary: whatever we encounter, however large the stakes, is open to question and, perhaps, transformation.

There are quite a few thinkers whose work is useful in beginning to think about reducing structural competition. Terry Orlick offers noncompetitive games as a way of reconceptualizing recreation. “Why not create and play games that make us more cooperative, honest and considerate of others?” he asks.
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David and Roger Johnson propose noncompetitive alternatives in the classroom as a way of improving education. Robert Paul Wolff sketches a plan for severing the ties between high school performance and college admissions, and again between college performance and graduate admissions.
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Both moves would allow genuine learning to replace the awful competitive scramble that now preoccupies students. On the political scene, Benjamin Barber has argued persuasively that the adversarial and individualistic underpinnings of politics as we know it are actually inimical to democracy; in their place he proposes a consensus-based system that is similar to the cooperative resolution of conflict discussed in chapter 6.
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With respect to global rivalry, Morton Deutsch, among others, emphasizes that “the old notion of ‘national security' must be replaced by the new notion of ‘mutual security.'”
²¹

In each case, the revolt against competition is wedded to the affirmation of an alternative vision. This is a practical necessity, since we can hardly tear down one set of structures without offering something in its place. But the alternative also is the very reason for objecting to competition in the first place. It is because we value human relationship, among other things, that we found competing to be problematic. The motive for opposing competition and the arrangement to replace it are one and the same: cooperation.

Despite the productivity and sense of fulfillment that come from working together, we often act as if cooperation is something for which we must sit passively and wait, like a beautiful sunset. In fact, there is scarcely an arena of human life which cannot be transformed into a cooperative enterprise. I have hinted throughout this book at how this might be done, from leisure activities to workplace cooperatives, but I have not laid out anything like a comprehensive guide for coordinating our efforts. Having concentrated my efforts on a critique of competition, I leave that task to others, confident that there will be no shortage of suggestions once our energies are freed from planning and participating in competitive projects. Once the myths justifying competition are behind us, the prospects are good for changing the structures that perpetuate it.

So long as we remain a competitive society, however, it will be possible to insist that one has got to compete to survive. This argument is heard most often from those who actually have no inclination to stop competing and often from those who, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, are really invoking “survival” in order to justify their desire to beat others. But let us assume that this objection is offered not as a rationalization but as an expression of genuine discomfort, arising from the inability to reconcile one's own values with the competitive demands of our culture. What can we say in response?