Our societies love competition or at least we pretend we do. We are told competition is the driving force behind innovation, and that it spurs people to produce better results. We are told competition fosters higher quality products for a better price, that it brings forth more ideal solutions for existing problems and that it is basically a healthy necessity for any society to excel.

But while these notions have been taught to us from a young age and most people of older generations have fully made it their own, what would you say if I claimed the opposite? Is competition really as beneficial for success as we have been led to believe? 

![hugs.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmcErJoKe16paeYJhLiY6u3Deuwp6VB4v7x4sedUNjckDD/hugs.jpg)

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## <center>Conflict vs. Competition (Apples and Oranges)</center>

<br>So what exactly do I mean by "competition"? It's the notion that other participants in your chosen activity are your adversaries. They are seen as obstacles to what you want to accomplish because in a competitive society, their success is a guarantee for your failure and vice versa.

This does not mean that we should want to avoid conflict as human beings. Conflict can be healthy to reach a more informed concensus. However *the method* of conflict solution is what is on the testbed here, namely the notion that competition is the prime framework for solving conflicts in the human realm.

But does society really have to be a zero-sum game?

Well, I used to believe that competition is a requirement for the success of societies in general, but as we will explore today there are numerous *very good* reasons to doubt this narrative fundamentally.

By definition, any environment where competition reigns - cooperation is absent, discouraged or stifled.

In the spirit of referring to someone who knows his field of expertise we will consider a marvellous lecture by Alfie Kohn today, author and educational researcher who has devoted his life's work to lay open the myth of the necessity for competition in life, work and schooling, and who shows us how in fact ***the absence of competition*** is required for true success. We will explore some of Alfie's points here in the article, but I highly recommend you check out the one-hour lecture to get a thorough insight into why competition can never be as successful a framework for human endeavors as cooperation has proven to be.

Bear with me ;)

![cooperative.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZZjapGYCEyNJdzpozqjwvaiTNAcSb8S5ZXVtLtTag3A3/cooperative.jpg)

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## <center>Distraction</center>

<br>One of the prime issues with competition is that from a psychological standpoint, it distracts from the goal at hand. Not only does the constant threat of "losing" heavily impact our performance as human beings, it can cause enormous amounts of pain and deprivation.

The competition mechanism keeps alive the interpretation of a scarce world where - despite all our technology, advances in science and insights into the human mind - we just can't trust anyone out there, nor can we seem to overcome the constantly increasing pressures on our monthly expenses and the slowly increasing curtailments of our freedoms. The debt-based money ridden hang-up that - at the end of the day everyone else is potentially an obstacle to my own success - will leave deep scars in our mind, from the time we are very young. 

Competition punishes - always. The only question is: who is the one being punished this time? If you have ever played the game musical chairs you totally know the feeling of being left out due to the sheer structure and rules of the game, not because of your mean competitors.

As people have said in the past: "Don't hate the players, hate the game."

Reminiscent of the Pavlovian dog, the notion of "competition as prerequisite for success" has engrained itself into our behaviors so deeply that we confuse our pathologic relationship with competition with its actual necessity.

Sure, a football match wouldn't be the same without competition (and it the fact that most people can't name any *non-competitive sports* only goes to show how deeply we are conditioned into believing in its necessity), but then a football match doesn't quite carry the same importance as securing the basic necessities of life, achieving our dreams or to become successful in what we do.

If you have ever been envious at what somebody else got for a similar performance that you have delivered you will know what I mean when I say "competition distracts from the point of the activity".

Similar trends can be seen in most work environments. Your boss may not be your direct competitor, but the competitors of *his company* will put so much pressure on his whole team and yourself that the stress will eventually emerge and be passed on to the workers, investors and participants. Just like in any other company of the same field. It's a giant stress tornado born out of the mere game rule that *somebody will end up empty handed inevitably,* and to prevent it pressure is put on our own team.

Instead of a play-to-win mentality, we often find a play-to-not-lose mentality that has made countless people depressed and burned out in recent decades as the pressure increases due to the omnipresent scarcity of everything within modern human "economies".

![boss.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmR2iHMY8SmhoMWmDXiX2hyRuq24oJ2GR7p8a4rY3FiNcw/boss.jpg)

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## <center>Redundancy</center>

<br>In a competitive corporate environment there is a lot of wasted energy, specifically in terms of human brainpower. The reason for this is that any company will do its best to innovate and at the same time keep their competitors from benefitting from said innovation, as it would turn into a financial loss for the company in question.

It's the sole reason there are patents today - legally obstructing people with their own insights and ideas from "copying" ideas of other people. Patents are such an arbitrary hangup as well, as we all learn from those who came before us and nobody starts from zero. The prime reason patents exist goes back to the same root of scarcity: If I don't protect my idea, my competitor will steal it from me.

The result isn't only that the rate of progress is slowed immensely as companies aren't sharing what they have learnt in research... there is also huge redundancy, simply because other companies are trying to solve problems our company has long solved and vice versa.

Often times, so-called "proprietary products" solely exist in the way they do to justify their being patented and "exclusive" while the technical problems solved remain largely the same from a customer standpoint. Only that we get annoyed by the proprietary decisions that limit the product's versatility *uneccessarily*.

I have already written about this extensively in my article [What I Learned in the Zeitgeist Movement | Part 2: "Waste = Profit"](https://steemit.com/monetary-system/@paradigmprospect/what-i-learned-in-the-zeitgeist-movement-or-part-2-waste-profit)

When sharing ideas is discouraged and punished financially, and it has become our ideological backbone of interpreting success... is it any wonder why scarcity prevails in the human realm of "adults"? Not really ;)

![kids.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdgoaFVcMm9qDWAXpoBZskQL6cfTpChDp4SAEaZMyZ3ER/kids.jpg)

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## <center>Mythology</center>

<br>The "funniest" thing is, the notion that ***cooperation pertains to success way more than competition does*** is not a new idea by any means, it has just become hugely unpopular in the political realm because the system needs to preserve itself. We have a huge stack of scientific studies that have been done on the subject and maybe you have even heard about some old Asian proverbs such as 

***"Who competes adds, who cooperates multiplies"***

There are so many things I could say here, but as I mentioned, Kohn makes a great case for you to consider, even and especially if you feel that competition is healthy, needed and necessary. One hour of your life to maybe glimpse a totally fresh perspective on what most people hold to be true, despite all the evidence to the contrary and their own experiential array of disappointments and letdowns due to this structural pattern we can't seem or want to look beyond.

This lecture has done wonders for me in reconsidering competition altogether, and maybe it will do the same for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4si1HaDmLg

<br><center>*More Paradigm Prospecting:*
[#1 - Stunning Discoveries & Mindblowing Considerations (feat. Veritas Radio)](https://steemit.com/truthseeking/@paradigmprospect/paradigm-prospecting-or-1-stunning-discoveries-and-mindblowing-considerations-feat-veritas-radio)</center>

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<center><br>Thanks for stopping by <3</center>