Joe Kelley
Administrator
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"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition
is to divide people into winners and losers." -- Hobbes
Patricia,
I like that quote except it may be a good idea to discriminate between voluntary competition and the ‘divide people into winners and lowers’ on purpose competition. The word ‘divide’ can mess things up if the idea is to ‘injure’ people by ‘making’ ‘them’ losers.
Please bear with me here.
Some people (as you point out) see life as ‘us’ and ‘them’ from day one as they grow up. Machiavelli was one of those. He considered ‘them’ to be all the people except him (and other ‘princes’ like him) and therefore ‘they’ needed him to make things ‘right’.
That viewpoint (us against them because they are bad) can turn competition (and everything else) into a quest to make ‘them’ obey, conform, win/lose, etc.
Natural (for lack of a better or more accurate word describing what is) competition helps people find where they fit into the scheme of things better and that creates winners at some things and winners at other things; where the losers are the ones who refuse to ‘see the writing on the wall’.
Example:
Suppose I tried to be a good worker for 25 years of my life and one day I wake up and realize that I am a loser at the job of blindingly following orders that I find to be counter-productive based upon 25 years of experience and my status as loser is realized in time to begin seeking some other vocation like, perhaps, writing?
If I learn from the past competition, then, I may not stay too long competing in the writing business (vocation or ‘competition’) longer than required to either figure out that I am a winner or loser. See?
Joe
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