Pondering #3:Competition, Power and Self-Development

This is another of a group of imponderables to ponder in trying to understand the human condition, relationships and the development/fwlf-realization of the individual.


Competition is a fundamental element of a free enterprise, entrepreneurial society, but is competitiveness inherently a quest for power? If power is a zero-sum game, as a graduate school colleague claimed, then one must be competitive in accumulating power merely to maintain free agency, and probably to do some good to and for others, if that is an inclination. A zero sum game is one in which, in this case, power is neither created nor destroyed, it is moved around. If I lose power, someone else picks it up, and vice versa. Thus, if one does not accumulate power for self, someone else has that power to use, becoming, to some degree, a compelling influence on those over whom the person with power holds sway. Tactical falsehoods are a device for collecting and maintaining power. Is it likely that if there were no competition for power there would be little need to deceive or mislead (even with harmless white lies)? That is, if power were not a player in relationships, the need to deceive others would be minimal since deception tends to be a tool for collecting or maintaining power.

Such deceptions tend to be a routine part of individual lives. A person is inclined to show friendliness, for example, toward others whom he/she either dislikes or is indifferent toward. This may be largely a tactical device to maintain a relatively cordial relationship with that class of people, therefore reducing the necessity of being wary of them while concentrating on other efforts at building or consolidating beneficial relationships (which are exercises in the accumulation of power). A person with political ambitions, for example, generally tries not to alienate secondary groups while courting favor with primary groups of interest. The advent of instant-message television has made it infinitely more difficult to be an effective politician because one's selective messages to a single group is now capable of broadcast immediately to all other relative groups. Previously, a candidate could, for example, present one message to one group and move geographical locations to present a message somewhat inconsistent with the first to another group. The likelihood of the two groups hearing both messages was slight and thus both groups could be courted without a great deal of worry over the inconsistencies.

It seems a peripheral effect of power accumulation is that it breeds insecurity (the more power one has, the more one is concerned about others infringing on it, or attempting to wrest it away) and that insecurity leads to actions designed to consolidate the power one has while also accumulating more. At an extreme, it leads one to attempt to denigrate others (hence reduce their power). This insecurity also leads to the increased formulation of rules by those who hold power in order to maintain discipline. At its extreme, the effort to retain power distorts the individual's performance and pulls efforts from advancement of the entity to a retention of power at the expense of the entity.

Perhaps one way of maintaining power is to deceive with “expected answers,” as a means of relieving pressures on us as we develop. That is, we are conditioned in a variety of circumstances (from school classrooms to church classrooms to the home in our developing of children) to know what answers are expected even before the question is asked. Thus, social equanimity is maintained and the surprises are minimized. Those are the benefits. The down side, of course, is that we learn to be deceptive and that deception is acceptable for the sake of convenience and that we may be able to maintain our inner control (agency) when we give the expected answers, thus hiding our true responses. That protects us from assault when our true responses might not fit with what is expected.

These strategies tend to fall under the category of learning to be competitive, which requires that the individual recognize the desirability of being competitive in the social and professional marketplace. It is that competitive nature that pushes them toward accomplishment. Working against the competitive drive is the convenient fiction that competition is somehow bad and must be avoided if one is to develop a Christ-like attitude. This may be true, but if competition is required in a secular society, the secret for an individual is to develop an appropriate (whatever that is) competitiveness and temper it will a compassionate and altruistic attitude toward others. This recalls Louis Pojman's notion that his single identified absolute is that one must not unnecessarily harm other human beings. The accumulation of power by nature creates some harm (even if only psychic), but it seems to me that battlegrounds may be identified in which is is appropriate to be conpetitive (others in the field are competitive also, so there is much more leeway and combatants expect to either gain or lose power according to their strategies.

Still, those who do not enter the field and do not compete may expect, by virtue of their isolation from the field to lose power, therefore free agency. In this situation, they find themselves at the mercy of the power holders.

It perhaps is no coincidence that the conditioning we provide for children makes them impatient with, and intolerant of, competition that counts; thus they chose not to lower themselves. Athletic competition may be a red herring in this equation, since it creates an illusion of serious competition and becomes the major acceptable competition, particularly for boys, but increasingly for girls in recent years. However, that competition is largely a physical activity accomplishing nothing except for a sense of physical competition, which is less and less valuable in the modern world. It does, however, create an illusion that one is competitive.

Competition in the meaningful sense is cerebral and fed by intuition, experience, education and a sense of urgency.