I’ve noticed recently that people are all to happy to trample over others in their desire to get ahead. I’ve noticed this quality (if one wants to dub it that) in myself, and it’s growing stronger every day.
What do you think caused this sudden mad urge to WIN WIN WIN and devil take the hindmost? A booming economy? Simple avarice?
The urge to “win”, to be better than your peers, is a deeply rooted human instinct. It was around long before the modern concept of “civility.” There is no more of a mad urge to WIN WIN WIN now than there has been at any other time in history.
I agree with tracer in the idea that this desire is nothing new. Nobody wants to be last, or even 2nd. People remember the person who was first and the best. Charles Lindbergh was the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, who was 2nd? Jackie Robinson was the first black player signed to the Major Leagues, who was 2nd? American Beauty won the Oscar for best picture last year, but people need to think for a while to come up with the other nominees. The 2nd person to accomplish something is not something to strive for, so everyone wants to win. The concept of wanting to be the best and to be first and, in general, the desire to win has always been around. It’s a form of the self-preservtion instinct, but redirected to fit our new environment. It’s survival of the fittest.
"Competition: An event in which there are more losers than winners. Otherwise it’s not a competition. A society based on competition is therefore primarily a society of losers.
“Competition is, of course, a very good thing. We cannot live in a complex society without it. On the other hand, if the principal relationship between citizens is based on competition, what has society and, for that matter, civilization been reduced to?”
-John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion
This trait is inherent in the animal human. Have you ever watched little kids play? Even non-competetively? At some point some kid is going to want all the marbles. Or dolls. Or trucks and cars. Whatever.
That child will fill his/her arms with all the toys s/he can carry and not let any other kid have them. Even though they can’t very well play with them if their arms are full of them.
Children have to be taught to share. It is the rare child who is altruistic by nature.
Adults have to be taught to share. It is the rare adult who is alturistic by nature.
Civility, manners, and other formal rules of behavior must all stem from this competitiveness. There is some rule of thumb in anthropology that says the size of the group depends of the size of the brain. I’ve only seen it in reference to primates but it may apply to others as well.
Regardless, “civility” or rules of behavior will always exist, we have to have them as long as we live in groups and face it, there aren’t too many places left were we can live in groups of one or two.
WIN WHAT? is there something of substance being won or is it just about EGO.
there is a car commercial that talks about buying a new car and deciding whose house to drive it by 1st. you lose 30% in depreciation in the 1st year on a new car. so is this WINNING at a trivial EGO GAME and LOSING at an ECONOMIC GAME?
i think our schools help train us to compete with each other. we are supposed to compete for grades. had some class in college where the instructor walked in and said “i’m only going to give 3 A’s, 5 B’s, 12 C’s…” the numbers might not be exact, it was 20+ years ago, but that was the idea" this was some elective course that had nothing to do with my major, i didn’t give a damn if i got a C, but i’m thinking “is there some limited amout of knowledge where someone has to learn less for someone else to learn more?”
Dal TimgarDal_timgar, You’re right, it often doesn’t seem to be the WHAT but the ME that counts. Getting two cars ahead in traffic near DC had got to be more about ego than getting home any sooner than anyone else.
Seems to me that this, “I’ve noticed recently that people are all to happy to trample over others in their desire to get ahead. I’ve noticed this usuality (if one wants to dub it that) in myself, and it’s growing stronger every day.”
decreases with age. I noticed a decline in men ages 23-26 and again around 35 years of age.
Women do this too, but it’s looks more subtle.
I think winning matters more to Sanguines and people with strong Sanguine secondary temperaments. It is the game itself (its nature and analysis) that most interests the Melancholy. And I think the Choleric is more interested in what opportunities might arise from the game, making for a sort of indirect interest in winning, I suppose, since winners usually have more opportunities, though the Choleric would function just as happily to represent the winner in some capacity.
And Phlegmatics? Surely, they couldn’t care less.
More and more I see the education system trying to remove the competition from schools, as evidenced by the bumper stickers about honor role disappearing in favor of the more PC “I’m proud of my kid” stickers. Someone, at some point, has decided that competition shouldn’t be inflicted on our children. People seem to think that, because students identified as gifted and given a special classroom perform better, all students would perform at that level if given the same opportunity.
I say bring on the competition. Prepare our children for a life of competition. Keep score of tee ball games and give trophies to the winner and not to the loser. Reward success. Rewarding success is NOT the same as punishing failure unless there are more winners than losers. When you start developing more and more prizes so that only a few get left out you have a problem and you have to reward everyone. I also agree that effort should be rewarded. This should take care of itself in most situations. Many times success will follow effort.
I remember my father saying to me once when I got 2nd place in a 2 mile run, " Wow, that 1st place guy was really amazing hunh?" This did not bother me. It meant that I was beat by someone who was exceptional at a certain event. I was always good at that 2 mile distance and I had figured on winning. I had run at about my average but even my best would not have sufficed on that day. I was very disappointed but I knew that the other fellow deserved the win. My father’s praise of his performance made me realize that I should praise him too. I made a special effort to approach him and tell him that he had impressed me.
I felt better about the whole day and learned many lessons from that experience, far more than I would have by not knowing who won and patting everyone on the back and saying, “Way to go. You looked good out there.” I think if I’d been dead last and humiliated by the whole experience I would have learned something too. Perhaps that I was a slow runner or maybe that more training was needed. What’s wrong with that? I agree that a long series of losses can be frustrating, maybe horribly so. Get your kids in an appropriate league and this shouldn’t be a problem. If your kid really has no talents which could result in winning something, then they need to be prepared for a life of being on the bottom. I have seen people who live happy lives though they are aware that they are not very talented. Hard, honest work can get you through and is something to be proud of. It is frequently rewarded by consistent paychecks, a very tangible reward. Even those of us with many strong talents must sometimes buckle down and work.
Better to learn about competition in a footrace than in the workforce when a loss may be more important. Trampling on others? Well, if the event is wrestling you’ve got to try to pin your opponent. Cheating is another issue. Cheating happens, it sucks, and you need to learn to deal with that as well.
As I see it, society is becoming LESS competitive. -By design. Not by much, and I think this will reverse again before it goes very far. I see my niece play basketball (she’s 6) and there is no score kept, but she keeps score in her head. In my opinion the best thing about not having a scoreboard is that every player attempts to keep track of as many statistics as they can. This is great exercise for their brains but it is discouraged by the league, as if they could stop it. 
(BTW Libertine I think my niece is a Melancholy. I am Sanguine.)
In modern industrialized countries we don’t have to compete for scarce resources to survive. When so much wealth is offered us so easily, it is difficult to determine when you have enough such that you should be content to enjoy what you have, instead of striving to acquire more.
Cars, income, houses, or even the kids’ grades and athletic accomplishments are ways of keeping score. And they are so much easier to measure and compare than happiness. Easier to aim at as well. (If only I get that new car/house/bonus, THEN I will be happy!)
Go on, folks. Battle it out between yourselves. I’ll just kick back and enjoy myself here.
what exactly does being an honor student mean? my senior year in highschool, a kid that had gotten straight A’s until then got a B in math. he cried in class. i almost burst out laughing. then i thought about the hundreds of hours he spent doing idiotic homework assignment from which he learned absolutely nothing useful. i got straight D’s in religion my freshman year. plenty of times i didn’t do all the math homework, just the 3 hardest problems. i’d get an A on the test but a B grade because i didn’t do the homework. History was only worth C’s because it’s nowhere near cynical enough to be accurate.
our schools are partly propaganda machines not truth machines. being an honor student means following orders without thinking.
Dal Timgardal_timgar - I disagree strongly.
You can answer the questions how you know the teacher wants them answered and still think freely. A good teacher, when you get lucky enough to find one, will give credit to any well thought out answer anyway. Getting good grades is valuable in getting scholarships and such, as well as earning immediate rewards. After I had developed a strong reputation as an A student, I was no longer required to do the tedious, repetitive parts of my homework as long as I maintained my A test grades.
I learned much more from reading novels than I did in history class. Propaganda of another sort but a variety of views that I could sort out on my own. Because of my grades I skipped 3 years of school and went to a good university (that would have been tough for my parents to afford) on full scholarship.
I don’t know about your school but I didn’t see people getting straight A’s in my school that weren’t smart enough to think for themselves. We worked for those grades because they got us privledges and awards. If I wanted to go out for a smoke, no one even stopped me in the hall because they knew me as one of the A students. If I wanted to spend homeroom time in the library reading J.R.R Tolkien, my homeroom teacher would save me a copy of the announcements that I could pick up whenever I happened by. Yeah, some of the ‘rebels’ looked at me as a brown noser and ridiculed me, but I pummeled them on the football field and held my own socially through sports. I took the first opportunity I had to get out of high school and into college, but not because of some propaganda. Because I wanted to learn at a faster pace.
Another thing, learning how to follow orders is not such a bad thing. You need to also learn how to decide whether the person giving the orders is trustworthy. And, how to act independantly.
Being an honor student means you either learn very quickly and easily or work very hard. Either one deserves reward.
You had other priorities, that doesn’t mean you should scoff at someone else’s achievements.
VileOrb, I think you meant your coda to be addressed to Libertarian, not Libertine. A small but large difference. Although, I don’t know how Lib feels about it; he may prefer the new handle.
I have to agree that society is changing wrt attitudes towards winning, and not for the better. And it’s not just the educational system: There’s a commercial around now for… some product I haven’t made note of, but the commercial itself sticks in my mind. It runs along the lines of “You may shake the other guy’s hand, and act mature, but inside you’re going (in a nasal, childish sing-song voice) ‘I’m better than you are’. There’s no such thing as a good winner.” Then, of course, being a winner - presumably a bad one - is identified with the product. What an offensive advertisement! I hate to think little kids may be forming ideas of social behavior from this stuff.
Again, not too long ago, there was a commercial for the candy bar Twix. Apparently they decided that a good motto for their candy bar (which has two intertwined pieces) was “Twix. Two for me, none for you.” Marketed heavily at children, of course.
Now, I’m not one of those people who would censor tv on the grounds that kids learn all their behavior, or even most of it, from the idiot box. But advertising is certainly the most pervasive system of sending cultural messages, and I have doubts about the idea that these things have NO effect on kids. I would HOPE that the companies putting these ads on the air would have the sense to see that they are contributing to the decline of sportsmanship, civility, and just the general expectations people have of themselves and of others in their competitive interactions: It has become fashionable to consider as naive any assertion that honor or integrity is more important than the immediate win.
BratMan007 wrote:
Leroy “Satchel” Page.
He was one hell of a pitcher, too.
Call me Lib, please. (As in Libertarian, i.e., someone who opposes the initiation of force and fraud.)
I am a Melancholy with a fairly weak, but undeniably present, Phlegmatic secondary temperament. My wife, Edlyn, is almost the exact reverse. As a Sanguine, you might enjoy the Pit area here at SDMB as a distraction from time to time. Lots of ego jockying there.
That’s “Paige”, tracer. Don’t mess with Ol’ Satch’s “i”!
Ackshally, Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black player signed by the major leagues. 1884.
See, sometimes we forget the first, too. Anyone wanna hazard the year the first black representative entered U.S. Congress?
Gadarene wrote:
I’d say, right after the beginning of Reconstruction. (Lessee … Congressional elections are held in even-numbered years in November … Reconstruction started right after the end of the Civil War … the Civil War ended in 1865 … and Congressmen usually take office the year following their election … so … I’d guess 1867.)
I believe that’s correct, Rog. Reconstruction was a surprisingly progressive time–South Carolina and Louisiana were possessed of black legislative majorities, three Southern states had integrated schools, Southern black men became policemen, lawyers, jury members, judges…only to see all that progress crumble away, beginning with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. Then the Supreme Court began chipping away at the Civil War amendments, in 1883 overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Institutionalized segregation didn’t begin until 1890, and the USSC sanctioned it (in Plessy) in 1896. Sharecropping left Southern blacks in nearly as bad a condition, in many ways, as they had been ante-bellum. Despite all this, though, the last Reconstruction black congressman didn’t leave office until 1901.
:waking from reverie:
Whoops, I’m about as off-topic as you can get. Sorry 'bout that, tiggeril. I’m just so fascinated by that whole era…
:slinks back to the political threads: