John D Rockefeller is often quoted as saying that competition is a sin. But is it? Alfie Kohn, American author and lecturer, also tries to make a case against competition in his book ‘No Contest’, and some of his Youtube videos. When I heard about this, I decided to look into the issue, and see if it had any merit.
Nothing to worry about
My initial response was that I don’t think that competition is something that we have to worry about, much less make a case against it, or say we need none of it. It strikes me as a natural phenomenon in any group of humans and I can’t see that it does any harm. On the inter-personal level everyone enjoys sports and team games, and no one is emotionally tormented by the competition element, or harmed by competing. And if any individual is so tormented, is it more often because they need psychiatric help. The need to win, or the obsession with being the best, is a psychological condition that is not healthy, and not a part of normal human functionality, even if it has become widespread.
A free market requires open competition
I also thought that making a case against competition is inherently suspicious, given how crucial free market competition is to capitalism, and to human freedom. Kohn’s argument struck me as disingenuous from the start. Kohn suggests that cheating on a test is cooperation and implies that it is somehow irrational to condemn it, or seek to prevent it! This strikes me as flawed thinking. Competition is rife in nature; every tree in the forest competes for light, and every animal in the wild for life. Competition will always keep occurring in human endeavours. You could even say that competition is an integral part of life.
An argument against competition can only lead to an argument for preventing it. Thus, attacking the idea of competition implicitly suggests that it should be prevented – by law. I know Kohn is not saying this explicitly, however, this is precisely where the argument leads if we follow it to its logical conclusion. Arguing against competition is laying the ground for banning it. Or rather, it is laying the ethical grounds for a political outcome. Lets remind ourselves that every system of politics stems from a specific system of ethics, and the politics of collectivism is what proceeds from the ethics of altruism.
Why ban competition? Cui Bono?
Who stands to benefit from no competition? Generally speaking, its the lazy, the incompetent, the unmotivated, the unthinking. An absence of competition would be a victory for mediocrity. It doesn’t lift up the lowly and exalt them to success, it cuts down the great and the successful and penalises the pursuit of excellence. The argument offers nothing to the functional man, the thinking man, the driven man, the successful human being. To these, it only represents a restriction, a blocking, a negation.
An argument against competition is an argument against freedom. It can only be politically motivated (check out Kohn’s politics) and constitutes an attack on the free market. Politically, the results of a ‘no competition’ culture could only be negative for individuals and represent another blow to our dwindling list of freedoms. It seems to me a disguised attempt to justify centralised control of production, concealed behind the wonderful sounding idea of cooperation. Removing competition in the economy and in industry is the obvious political motive, and this would mean creating monopolies by design. An argument against competition is, in essence, an argument for state control of industry, in which everyone ‘cooperates’ for the greater good (altruism).
I think we also have to remember that competition is inherently voluntary in the broadest sense, and not forced on people. When psychologically healthy people compete they enjoy the challenge, and the standard of that particularly activity goes up across the board as a result. The result is the same whether it is kids running a race, or companies competing to manufacture widgets. Individuals with problems, perhaps fearing “being a loser” is not an appropriate concern of the general public, its a concern for psychiatrists.
Kohn observes that there is no competition in primitive tribes—not much productivity either. No progress in sanitation, home building, technology, agriculture. Hmm. Is this a laudable ideal? Perhaps competition is the very thing, in a context of economic and therefore political freedom, that has enabled our standard of living to increase so massively over the primitive tribes. This looks more like an argument for competition to me!
Kohn confuses various human behaviours with human nature. The essence of human nature is a fundamental question that cannot be explained by patterns of negative behaviour that result from dysfunction. The essence of human nature cannot be found in dysfunctional human behaviour. Yet this is what Kohn implicitly suggests. On the contrary, the essence of the distinctly human consciousness is the rational faculty and our ability to conceptualise. We are in essence rational beings, and this sets the standard for our proper, functional behaviour. I haven’t heard any convincing arguments FOR doing away with competition, from Kohn or anyone else. All the negatives he lists are forms of dysfunctional human behaviour and thus are not valid reasons for eliminating competition. A more legitimate question would be… “What is causing all these behaviours?”
Zooming right out for a moment…
The social sciences have been the biggest casualty of the philosophical sophistry since Kant in the late 1700s. They implicitly (and often explicitly) reject reason as mans means to knowledge, so I am always suspicious of ‘ideas’ coming from sociologists. If one considers the many deceptions that we have come to be aware of, the philosophical destruction of reason and of refusing to recognise reality as an objective absolute knowable to man’s mind, is perhaps the mother of all of them. Chronologically it paved the way towards ending the age of reason and one can trace the effects of Kant through time, through Hegel and Marx.
But the key point is this. Current western cultures predisposition to not recognising the facts of reality (because they do not recognise an objective reality knowable to mans mind) has caused an increasing departure from facts and from truth. Notice however, that the physical sciences are not able to ignore the facts of reality, for the obvious reason that computers, cars and manufacturing processes (etc) only work on logic and the facts of reality. So the physical sciences remain relatively in touch with facts and truth to that degree. Not so the humanities. Unfettered by such constraints, the irrational ideas of men have run rampant in the social sciences, all picking up ‘the ball’ of altruism and running with it. The social sciences are easy areas in which to sow deception and manipulation, and they are very vulnerable to simply being wrong.
I also noted with interest that Kohn wrote The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life.
Also, Kohn cites Frederick Engel – a communist, and Eric Fromm, who wrote “escape from freedom” 1941.
Kohn is a statist of the socialist/communist variety.
I have to say I remain unconvinced of his case, and consider his proposal against competition to be going in completely the wrong direction. That is, away from individual freedom. Therefore not part of any solution but, dare I say it, part of the problem! And do we really think that Rockefeller is a mouthpiece for truth? Competition is not a sin, it is healthy component of human life and helps to build a meritocracy, lifting standards across the board.
What do you think?
Nice post! Thanks for sharing.
Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Competition is a sin, if your goal is to reduce humanity to an obedient and dependent slave class. The correctness of the statement depends on your context and goal.
However, I completely agree that if we try to keep a neutral perspective, in general competition is not only very useful, but rather essential for progress in any way.
2. Competition, and the rewards associated with ‘winning’, and the selection based on these rewards, is an essential part of natural selection. These principles have been used to generate machine learning algorithms for example. (See evolutionary algorithms.) So the principles have been proven to work not only in nature, but also in a technical and ‘innovative’ environment.
3. To a massive company competition is a sin as well. As that directly threatens its status quo. At any moment a new idea might spring up somewhere in the world, and completely ruin the business. As such, big companies are often eager to destroy the ‘level playing ground’ by: convincing politicians to approve regulations, buying up startups, and other –often illegal– means.
Do you think statements like ‘competition is a sin’ can be objectively treated as being true or false, or that they depend on the context / morality of the person expressing them?
A wolf might say that protecting little lambs is a sin. The farmer might want to object.
Thanks for the comment man. I love your intelligent engagement. You get me thinking deeper about something just when I think I have covered all the bases! (lol). I wish I lived in a culture among men where this was commonplace!
1. The question ‘is competition a sin’ addresses the question ‘is the action of competing inherently wrong’. In answering this question, I think it can be helpful if we compare it with the action of, say, using a knife, or a gun. Clearly the use of either of these can be wrong if they are used to harm people, but they could be perfectly OK if they are used to chop vegetables or for the pleasure of target shooting. So I would say that the action of competing itself is never wrong, if we separate the action from the intention or specific use. The question of our intention in any activity should properly be considered as a separate issue from the action itself. Some might say this is splitting hairs, but it points to an important thinking skill of separating the issues in other topics of discussion.
2. Thank you for that additional point I had not considered.
3. The third point you make raises the question of the ‘level playing field’ and its distortion by government. In a free society, i.e. one without legislation that prevents competition by force, any business is always vulnerable to someone coming up with a better idea or a new an improved way of doing things. And this is a good thing, its how improvements are discovered. However, when established business team up with government to prevent this competition, that is the crime, or the sin. The risk of having ones business out-competed by new and improved production techniques is (and should be) an inherent part of the ‘risk’ of investing in and running any business.
In answer to the last point you raise, I think the answer is yes, questions like ‘is competition a sin’ can be addressed objectively, and should be, Farmers have the ability to use their thinking skills to out-compete the wolf in protecting the lambs.
The issue of morality doesn’t strictly apply, and is a separate issue as mentioned above. This is because being out-competed, or being the victim of competition, like the business owner who goes bankrupt as innovations make his production methods obsolete, is ultimately a gain for everyone. In other words, it can never be ‘right’ to prevent others from coming up with a better way of doing things just because one individual (or group) is inconvenienced by this innovation.
Thanks for your interesting points Loosetooth. Much appreciated. N
I still have some thinking to do about the whole ‘moral relativism’ idea.
I appreciate the point you made about splitting a statement up into the ‘action’ and the ‘intention’ though. Because else, where do we end up? When combining the statement/action with the intention, anything can be right or wrong depending on a certain context, a certain intention. I’ll have to give this some more thought. I don’t like relativism really, as I would like conceptual clarity, if that’s even possible.
> The question ‘is competition a sin’ addresses the question ‘is the action of competing inherently wrong’
I like this translation. Rephrasing it clears up any doubt of what is meant with the word ‘sin’. Another translation could be ‘The action of competing results in negative consequences.’ At least, that’s how I interpreted it when I first read it.
The opposite statement would be ‘The action of competing is inherently good.’.
I believe this statement is correct.
I would like to explore this a little bit more. For that, take the following counter statement:
“It is possible for there to be too much competition.”
Or perhaps in another way:
“A very strong competition can inhibit progress”
I think both of these counter statements are also correct.
In evolutionary algorithms you can see this effect, where a whole population converges on a single solution. Because of the strong competition, there is no space for any of the ‘individuals’ to ever be ‘free enough’ to explore any other solution.
In the real world this would be something like a population of squirrels never making it to the rich forest on the other side of the river, because they just have to spend all their time finding acorns. No time for swimming.
Where I get “stuck” is finding out if any of these counter statements disproves the “competing is inherently good” statement.
My gut feeling would be to say that they do not disprove it. As without competition, the squirrels wouldn’t achieve much at all. They just have to change their competition so to speak 🙂
I’m curious to hear what you think of this train of thought.