What's the value of competition?
Competition is one of the main values of a capitalist society. It’s so ingrained in everything in America. It’s really the only thing that we believe in here. We often hear that money is our only god, but it’s more accurate to say that competition is. Competition is how elites, CEOs, tech assholes, etc. justify the objectively awful world they’ve made and thrived in—that they have competed the best and won at life, so everything is automatically good, because competition is good and fair and produces good outcomes.
But of course, since competition is a central value of society, and society is failing on every level, it must be rotten at its core. Examples of pristine competition are very prized in capitalist society—hence the function of professional sports, standing as this bastion of competition that we can all witness playing out in real time. It’s ideologically important to have this simulacrum of “real” competition functioning, as a real-time example of how competition works.
I've noticed a lot more people in and around the NBA, media, players, coaches, commissioner Adam Silver, using the word "competition" to describe what the league is about. And they refer to other players and teams as "competitors." This wasn't the case a few years ago. Wonder why? The word "competition" implies some kind of fairness, a level playing field where equal opponents compete to see who is better. It seems like the more the game is clearly rigged, with blatantly bad officiating, and gambling plays a bigger role, they want to make it seem fair. And it is ideologically important to have this cultural entity where "fair competition" is seen in objective form, where guys are just giving it their darned best shot! And that ideology is supposed to permeate throughout the economy, as the economy is more blatantly rigged. The more that nobody has any chance to live a meaningful, worthwhile life, the more “competition” is invoked as this ideal where everyone can be free to gain whatever good things in life they can—if only they “compete” well enough.
It’s worth remembering one of Marx’s remarks on competition: “It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.” This makes it a little clearer why competition is so valued in our social discourse today, doesn’t it? Freedom for capital—to move around the world, to take on new, strange forms—and less freedom for actual people, who increasingly live paycheck to paycheck. How much freedom can you have if you live paycheck to paycheck, and only have a few hundred bucks left over after paying your rent, month after month, year after year, until you die? I think we all know that a lot of Americans live paycheck to paycheck…but do you know how many? Take a guess. I’ll wait.
Okay, the answer is…78% in 2023. Probably higher than you thought, right? And that’s a 6% increase over the previous year (2022). Just about 8 out of 10 Americans living paycheck to paycheck. That means they are extremely limited in what they are able to do. You are essentially locked into a very narrow routine forever if this is your life. You have no freedom. The remaining 20% of Americans who don’t live paycheck to paycheck, however, have greatly more freedom—they can do whatever they want. If they can imagine it, they can do it. Their excess of freedom compensates for the lack of freedom the 80% have.
And this lack of freedom negates competition. Competition only makes sense as a social value if there is a general amount of fairness for everyone to engage in competition against each other, to try to win at life. So the more that freedom dies, the more that the ruling class propaganda system talks about “competition,” which is essentially a dead value. They want us to place all this focus and importance on a value which has no meaning or reality anymore, to misdirect us and waste our time.
Lastly, and maybe most important—competition doesn't really do what everyone in capitalist society think it does, which is to reward hard work, intelligence, and so on. It mostly just makes everyone stupider, because you only communicate in controlled, suspicious ways; nobody ever really understands anything, because communication is used only as a tool or weapon. If everyone around you is a competitor, you will always regard everyone with suspicion and distrust—nothing will be understood, nothing will be explained or communicated. We see this increasingly today—nobody knows how to do anything, even basic things that we took for granted a couple decades ago. In the 90s, we never had problems with airplanes breaking apart. Now it happens all the time. Why? Lots of reasons, but one reason has to be the lack of understanding or communication in how to manufacture, operate, and design them. Nobody can be bothered to explain anything in any detail, or with any patience—and everyone is afraid to ask questions, because if you ask questions, it can be taken as a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing, and since everyone is so disposable now, you can be fired.
The fetishism of competition also masks the decline of love in the world. People don’t love each other like they used to—that’s really what the declining birth rate thing is about, along with so many of the other social psychopathologies today—so “competition” has been emphasized more, as a way to make the individualism that rules the world now seem somehow healthy and good. As if it has a positive function that can hold society together—as if we can somehow outcompete the death of love. A good sign of the lack of love in the world—the growth of acronym use and abbreviation use. People can’t be bothered to spend three extra seconds spelling something out for people—because they don’t love other people enough to do it, and because everyone has to be viewed as a competitor.
Competition is our new god—and not a good god; not a spiritual god at all. In some Gnostic traditions, it is said that our world is ruled by what’s called a demiurge, a vengeful and malignant god—punitive, jealous, materialist, who seeks to destroy anything spiritual, including love, most of all. Competition is what passes for value in a world without spirit—a world ruled by a demiurge, a jealous, vengeful, malignant world.