16 COMPETITION
As I said before, our reality is a battle between the Machine and our humanity. which is the equivalent of instinct versus high intelligence, or intellect. Competitiveness is an instinctive drive - an impulsion, like hunger, which is necessary to animals for the survival of species. It includes one species attacking another for food, and defence against such attack. It also includes the practice of members of the same species dividing into groups and fighting (but rarely killing) within and between these groups for food, mates and territory.
Thinking of life as that of animals rather than plants, it is necessary for humans to defend themselves against, and sometimes to attack, kill and eat other animals. But it is not the true nature of intelligent humans to fight and kill each other, nor to strive against each other for advantage. The reason is that as a maxim, survival of the fittest is not appropriate to the human intelligence. Evidence of this is that we aspire, by way of medicine etc., to having all humans survive to old age, fit or unfit, and we try to ensure, up to a point through various welfare schemes, that people do not die of starvation or neglect. But we have long been divided into national and cultural groups and harnessed to conflicting functions of the money economy, and this holds us to competitive ways despite our true nature.
So we behave competitively because it is our established way, to which we instinctively respond. Our structure is moulded round instinctive competition so that our personal lifestyle, if not our very survival, presently depends on it. We have first to compete in educational examinations, then for jobs, for a place to live, for possessions and promotion. Much of our work is for industries which have to compete for contracts and against which workers' interests have to compete in setting the levels of wages to be paid. But the fact that competitiveness is so firmly established is not the only reason why we generally accept it. We commonly believe that progress is not only inevitable but desirable, and that competition encourages progress. We believe competition keeps down prices by increasing efficiency. We are adjusted to it, to the point where we rely quite largely on the excitements of competitive sports, games, and struggles depicted in books and films for much of our satisfaction. For these reasons we normally oppose radical reform, feeling that it would rob us of these satisfactions and put nothing in their place.
It is necessary to put aside the norm and keep a clear and open mind in order to see the effects of competitiveness on our society. It is a reason underlying the establishment of such undesirable values as possession, status and rank, for it is the principle and practice of competition which has helped to create inequalities and equated them with degrees of advantage. It creates insecurity and the need to seek security by defence against the threats which competition itself causes. Because it is a feature of the Machine which we serve but not of the morality which automated people can only pretend to, it leads to secrecy, deception, and it provides both reason and excuse for selfishness and treachery. Worst of all, competitiveness calls up and breeds aggressiveness, results in conflict, culminating in international war. The present day climax of competition is the threat of nuclear and germ war.
The fact that conflict, weapons, war, violence and inhumanity are common words of our basic vocabulary and concepts which occur in our daily news and entertainment is the measure of our familiar acceptance of the unacceptable.
It is true, of course, that it was by following the competitive urge that we gained our intellectual potential. But if we are to fulfil that potential, we have first to seek then to follow truth, in the light of which we shall see that competition is now unnecessary to us, because it is supportable only by instinct, not by reason.
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