Olympics YES, Peace Forum NO

The choice of our leaders to embrace the competition of the Olympics and disdain the cooperation of the Peace Forum shows the debilitating path we are on

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

It’s interesting to compare the reluctance of the Non-Partisan Association and Vancouver’s business community to host this summer’s World Peace Forum with their enthusiasm for hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. If the Olympics symbolize global competition, then surely the World Peace Forum symbolizes global cooperation. By praising the former and disdaining the latter, our city’s powerbrokers have unwittingly revealed a dangerous bias at the heart of North American culture.

No one analyzes this bias with as much clarity as Alfie Kohn. In his seminal book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition—Why We Lose in Our Race to Win (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), Kohn reviews hundreds of studies on the effects of competition and co-operation. Based on his research, Kohn believes that our obsession with competition is dangerously wrong-headed; indeed, he believes that competition itself is fundamentally harmful. He uses a series of arguments to make his case, arguments that are support-ed by the work of a number of other scholars.

Kohn points out that competition focuses people’s attention on external motivators, such as grades, status, and money. External motivators erode intrinsic motivation—that is, the motivation created by the simple pleasure we take in the things we do. The more we do something to gain a reward, the less likely we are to do it when the reward isn’t present. Our desire for rewards damages the simple happiness we take in our activities; external motivators are consummate killjoys.

Besides impairing intrinsic motivation, competition also compromises our self-esteem. It does this by tethering a competitor’s self-esteem to external sources of validation. Competitors begin identifying their personal worth with the number of people they’ve beaten, and soon develop chronic anxiety over the possibility of losing. To maintain their self-esteem, they have to constantly compete and constantly win. After their winning streak ends, as all such streaks inevitably do, die-hard competitors can suffer profound existential crises. For people who need to be “winners,” it’s hard to live in the ruins of past glories.

These existential crises are compounded by the way that competition promotes social conformity and obedience at the expense of genuine individuality. It does this by pushing people to pursue culturally accepted goals that can only be met in culturally prescribed ways. The more determined we are to win, the less we question the rules and the value of the game. This can be seen in the history of modern sports. In The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (University of Toronto, 1999), Professor Varda Burstyn shows that these sports have long been consciously promoted as vehicles of socialization into hierarchical social structures, often with the explicit intention of preparing young men for military duty. Similarly, in Body Fascism: Salvation in the Technology of Physical Fitness (University of Toronto Press, 2002), Brian Pronger argues that the modern fitness movement tempts us to treat our bodies like machines, forcing them to conform to life-denying ideals. In doing so, we support the status quo at the expense of our most basic physical and psychological needs.

Competition doesn’t even improve our performance. Rather than promoting and developing excellence, competition focuses us simply on winning. Typically, the qualities necessary to win are either unrelated to or are actually opposed to the qualities required for excellence in a given field.

For example, the Republicans have learned how to win American elections, but the very qualities that bring them victory have corrupted the GOP so badly that they’re increasingly incompetent at the task of governing. In a comparable fashion, athletes often do long-term damage to their bodies in order to achieve short-term victories in sporting events. Conversely, those who lose in competitions may abandon pursuits in which they have a real aptitude. This often happens to children, whose memories of early humiliations may dissuade them from pursuing excellence in their later life.

Because competitive environments force rivals to horde their knowledge in order to get a competitive edge, they diminish performance and learning relative to cooperative environments, which encourage people to exchange ideas and share skills. This point has growing significance for the global marketplace. Jeremy Rifkin, in The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (Tarcher/Penguin 2004), argues that the emerging global economy requires extensive information sharing and business networking. By embracing a cooperative ethic, the European Union is better prepared to meet the challenges of this economy than the United States, which remains mired in a thoroughly competitive ethos.

Finally, by encouraging us to develop a zero-sum mentality, and to see other people as obstacles to our personal success, competition creates defensiveness, hostility, and bitterness. Even competitions that require people to cooperate in groups generate these psychological dynamics, only this time on a collective level. We cheer for our home team only as enthusiastically as we curse their rivals. In contrast, by working towards resolutions benefiting every participant, cooperation cultivates openness, empathy, and playful delight.

If competition is pathological at the best of times, then these days it can only be the Plague. The world is heading into a cata-clysmic era. Our survival depends on unprecedented levels of co-operation. This, in turn, requires a fundamental change in our cultural priorities. We must learn to value reciprocity more than victory, and to find happiness in our colleague’s delight, rather than in our rival’s defeat. Events like the World Peace Forum are necessary elements of this transformative process, while competitive spectacles only slow it down, with potentially devastating consequences. I fear that by celebrating the Olympics, we’re saluting the disease that’s driving us to our deathbeds.

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