Andrushka

It's not so much that I don't like competition, there's a delicious taste of adrenalin and blood to it that appeals to the repressed carnivorous in me. And that's just the point. I don't hate competition, I hate the parts of myself that emerge when I'm competitive. I can watch myself act like a true red-blooded jerk as though it were an out-of-body experience and I see and hear each and every nerve-grating gesture and inflection without being able to stop myself. This distaste for the competitive has led me to enjoy what I call "cooperative games." For example, I like ping pong when the players try to keep the ball going back and forth as long as possible rather than scoring points. The downside of enjoying cooperative games is that there are so few of them. As I've been getting older and watching my body mass change to jello, I've started regretting the lack of physical exercise that comes along with avoiding competitive sports, but I think I'd rather be a jiggly bum than a competitive prig. There are ways around the problem of competition even in competitive sports. One way is just to train for them and not play them. You have exercise, team work, and all the other positives without ever defeating anyone. Another way is to play bean bags with Daniel or soccer with Sergey. It's liberating. I know I have absolutely no chance of winning save divine intervention, so I just do my best and have fun. But this doesn't really address the central problem of competition: it's simply an early acceptance of defeat. So what is the problem? Games are usually win or lose with no middle ground and amount to zero-sum systems. What you take from the game hasn't been made through the process of playing, but taken from others, the same as most economic systems really just redistribute wealth rather than creating it. I've also been thinking a bit about Lackoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (a line of thought no doubt inspired by the names of stations in Union Market, the college cafeteria). I keep remembering some truthy-ism I heard as a child about Americans strategize for war like it's a football game and Russians strategize like it's a chess game. True or not, there is a preponderance of game metaphors in our military conflicts. And here we have a life and death problem. If we go to a country looking to save lives (like Somalia or Bosnia) or to ostensibly free the people from a dictator (as in Iraq), we need to use win-win metaphors that our socialization has ill-equipped us to conceptualize. And so the THEY in question are all enemies, terrorists, combatants of some sort because the metaphors we use don't allow for the THEM to be on our side. We are predestined to failure as long as keep thinking in terms of opposing teams. This afternoon, Jacque and I talked briefly about my lack of nationalist fervor in a conversation stretching between my parent's anniversary and her recent return from Italy. The problem with overt shows of patriotism is that the self I see reflected is the same self that emerges during competition. I win. You lose. I cringe.

Posted by Scott on 02 June 2006 at 6/02/2006 07:57:00 PM | Permalink