What is the point of winning? It clarifies the mind in an ongoing way: the goal is to edge out the competition in a way that creates a forced ranking. To be number one of two takes the kind of focus that brings one into the moment, creates engagement, and moves groups of people to work together. Few things create group coherence in the same way that another group to work against does this (hence the bipartisan American agreement that China is to be arm wrestled with). Winning and its pursuit carries a lot of baggage, though. The act of competing often loses out to the outcome of winning or losing in the minds of competitors. Something that could have been beautiful, even artistic, often becomes legalistic and unsightly. There’s also the expectations cliff that competitors are always driving next to without a railing: winning meets with approval and losing is the equivalent of driving over the edge, keeping the mind in a clarified and cortisol-ed state.
What’s the alternative? Isn’t all life a competition, with the winners happy and satisfied and the losers miserable and resentful? Perhaps in the reductive brains of middle school football coaches. But leave aside the platitudes not fit for 12-year old children and there’s a whole world out there that isn’t keeping score between the teams. Natural selection, the analogy at the heart of the win-or-don’t-play pedagogy of these football coaches and business strategy makers (not to mention anyone who fought that cold war), is not actually a referee/scoreboard. Living things find niches and spaces to live and eat and reproduce, and in environments where this is enough of the necessities, lots of living things thrive. Things die out not because they lost, but because circumstances arrived that they could not survive. This is not “kill or be killed” or even “survival of the fittest”. This is a world of lots of things surviving for lots of different reasons, mostly not at the existential expense of other species or organisms. Clearly some things still eat other things, but when a fish gets scooped up by an osprey, it didn’t lose in a competition. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time, from the fish’s perspective, just as when a pedestrian gets hit by a car, the driver can’t be said to have won anything. Fish can still exist in a world with ospreys and cars and pedestrians can mostly cohabitate. And even though that pedestrian and that fish are still bound to die by fender or talons or otherwise, their lives don’t have to be defined in competition. The fish might feast once a day and relax the rest of the time (hopefully too deep to be seen from the sky). The pedestrian might walk for miles a day and never play board games or sports. Are these examples of losers?
The problem is that childhood and adulthood, particularly in American society, are framed so often in terms of winning and losing. This zero sum dichotomy plays out in the form of class rank, sports, college admissions, competition-oriented companies, and the way geopolitics is framed in the news. One would think that every American of a certain age should remember the lessons of Vietnam and look for personal and national purposes elsewhere. But we are creatures of culture and habit, and we have both a culture and habits that isolate winning and losing as the two possible outcomes of just about everything. Those same forgetful Americans of a certain age (who probably coach middle school football in the afternoons) will complain about trophies for everyone, regardless of the outcome. How are these kids supposed to learn how to deal with the real world if they aren’t punished or rewarded based on their competitive outcomes? They must get used to being ranked and successfully being ranked at the top! More false choices, though. Surely attempts to rank writers and artists as if they were in competition should fail to satisfy, as should efforts fail to rank learning and parenting and living. Stephen Jay Gould rejects ranking in Full House when he describes evolution as a process of increased variability over time. Here is the analogy we’ve been looking for to replace winning and competition. Some sectors of the economy get this: variability in craft beer is a far more interesting metric than rank (though many still can’t help but rate even this). Food and art and fashion each are valued for variability (usually) more than winning. Just because middle school football coaches fulfill their spoiled childhood dreams when their teams win doesn’t mean we have to model our society off of their insecurities. Next time you’re thinking about winning, consider a few other options.
Roman Ryan 