No Contest (18 page)

 

WHY WE COMPETE

 

The reasons for trying to be successful at the price of other people's failure are numerous and multilayered. Sociologists and anthropologists explain this, as they do most things, in terms of cultural norms. These norms congeal into structural competition, and can become so entrenched that noncompetitive alternatives virtually disappear from the workplace, the schoolroom, and the playing field. This structural competition also shapes our attitudes and beliefs, thus encouraging intentional competition. Behavioral psychologists, meanwhile, are less concerned with norms than with the specific ways we are trained to be competitive. We are directly rewarded for displaying such behavior, and we also watch others being rewarded for it. As we saw in chapter 2, the combination makes for an effective learning program. In simple language, we act competitively because we are taught to do so, because everyone around us does so, because it never occurs to us not to do so, and because success in our culture seems to demand that we do so.

It does not deny the usefulness of these explanations to supplement them with the perspective of depth psychology, which is concerned with the unconscious roots of our behavior. Psychoanalysts have contributed incalculably to the way we think about ourselves, but one of their central contributions—whose relevance to competition will shortly become clear—is the idea that we may unconsciously turn a wish or fear into its opposite. This can happen in several ways. Unacceptable feelings of hostility (toward people we are expected to love, for example) may be transposed into exaggerated concern. A dangerous attraction may present itself as extreme aversion, as in the classic case of the latent homosexual who incessantly ridicules gays. Finally, powerful anxieties may be dealt with by exposing oneself continuously to that which is dreaded; thus, the person who is deeply fearful of being alone may avoid other people and make a fetish of privacy in an unconscious attempt to overcome the fear.
^*

Only when we understand these reversals can we grasp one of the most fascinating legacies of depth psychology: the insight that two apparently opposite kinds of behavior can be traced to the same underlying dynamic. If we are faced with someone who makes a fetish of privacy, we may come to see this as a manifestation of separation anxiety. But if we come across someone who hangs on to other people, even refusing to let go of destructive relationships, we may decide that this, too, can be understood in terms of separation anxiety. Very different—indeed, antithetical—personality patterns often converge once we peer beneath the surface.

This phenomenon is nowhere clearer than in the case of selfesteem. Mr. A is usually seen as conceited; he talks constantly about his talents and accomplishments. Ms. B, on the other hand, is almost paralyzed by her enduring conviction that she will fail at anything she tries. Both individuals, as almost everyone in this post-Freudian age will suspect, may have low self-esteem.

But now let us add Mr. C, most of whose waking hours are devoted to seducing women, and Ms. D, who acquires power over others by eliciting personal details about their lives while revealing nothing of herself. Then there is Mr. E, who schedules his day with inordinate precision and is upset by anything that does not go according to plan. Ms. F, by contrast, is always late for appointments, extremely forgetful, and unable to direct her own life. More than any other single formulation, lack of self-esteem can profitably be used to make sense of all these individuals. In fact, we could continue through the alphabet with other personality capsules without exhausting its explanatory utility.

As a concept, self-esteem is extremely useful for those trying to understand why people act as they do. As a reality, the importance of high self-esteem simply cannot be overstated. It might be thought of as the
sine qua non
of the healthy personality. It suggests a respect for and faith in ourselves that is not easily shaken, an abiding and deep-seated acceptance of our own worth. Ideally, self-esteem is not only high but unconditional; it does not depend on approval from others, and it does not crumble even when we do things that we later regret. It is a core, a foundation upon which a life is constructed.
^*

The absence of self-esteem, conversely, is at the root of a wide range of psychological disorders. Karen Homey, a theorist to whose work we will return, described all neurosis in terms of the absence of “basic confidence” in oneself.
¹
Another neo-Freudian, Harry Stack Sullivan, wrote that “customarily low self-esteem makes it difficult indeed . . . to maintain good feeling toward another person.”
²
In his major work, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow similarly observed that “satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary. But thwarting these needs produces feelings of inferiority . . . [that] in turn give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends.”
³
Indeed, as one social psychologist recently concluded, “few psychologists would disagree that positive self-esteem is essential to emotional well-being”
⁴
or that negative self-esteem is integral to our understanding of many kinds of problems—from depression to narcissism, from severe character disorders to alienating patterns of dealing with other people. While we must always be on guard against reducing the complexity of human beings to a tidy theoretical framework, there is very little about our personalities that does not flow from how we feel about ourselves.

I have argued that our behaviors sometimes turn our true motivations inside out, and I have emphasized the crucial role of self-esteem in the personality. When we put them together, these two ideas allow us to understand competitiveness more fully. Specifically, I would offer the proposition that
we compete to overcome fundamental doubts about our capabilities and, finally, to compensate for low self-esteem
.
^†

Let us consider the two components of this formulation in turn. First, competing at a given activity reflects insecurity with a particular facet of ourselves. We try to be the best lover (or have the most lovers) because we fear we are not really lovable. We want to have a more impressive job than others because we suspect our skills are actually deficient. Second, these specific capacities stand for a global sense of inadequacy—that is, low self-esteem. Lovableness or professional skills in these examples can be said to recapitulate the whole self. To say that we become invested in certain qualities is to say that they are placeholders for our very selves.

Sometimes, though, there are no such placeholders—no mediating qualities or skills. Some competitive desires (to earn more money, for instance, or be judged more attractive) can be understood immediately in terms of low self-esteem. This is even more evident with people whose competitiveness is not restricted to a particular activity—those who turn almost every interaction into a contest. Here we see most sharply how the need to be best at anything at all, which is to say at
everything,
actually represents an attempt to stave off a persistent and pronounced sense that one is fundamentally no good. The important point, though, whether or not there is some mediating quality involved, is that competitiveness eventually comes down to selfesteem.

Doing well, as we saw earlier, is different from doing better than others. This is nowhere clearer than in the case of their respective motivations. All of us enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from being particularly good at something. Sometimes it is convenient to assess that performance by comparing it to those of other people. But the individual who feels good about herself and is simply interested in doing well does not go out of her way to outperform others. She does not seek out relative judgments. She is content with a sense of personal satisfaction, sometimes buttressed, depending on the activity, by a consideration of absolute standards. (She can check out the number of questions she answered correctly or see how long it took her to run the mile.) The desire to be better than others feels quite different from this desire to do well. There is something inherently
compensatory
about it. One wants to outdo in order to make up for an impression, often dimly sensed, of personal inadequacy. Unlike the joy of flexing one's muscles or intelligence, which is sufficient unto itself, one wants to be stronger or smarter than others in order to convince oneself at some level that one is a good person. If competition has a voice, it is the defiant whine of the child: “Anything you can do, I can do better.” A competitive society is a chorus of such voices. And the energy of such a society (to switch metaphors) is provided by a combination of “obsessional thinking, anxiety over personal inadequacy, and hostility requiring an outlet,”
⁵
according to Lawrence Frank.

It is not quite accurate to talk about “wanting” to beat others, however. Because one is responding to the push of self-doubt rather than the pull of accomplishment, competition is more a need than a desire. Maslow has distinguished between “B” (for Being) and “D” (for Deficit) motivations with respect to love and cognition. B-love, he said, is characterized by an almost aesthetic pleasure, an admiration for a specific person. D-love is experienced as an urgent need, a drive whose object is generic. We can think of psychological growth as the process of moving from D to B: only after our basic needs are met can we proceed to a higher level of loving and thinking and living.
⁶
Notwithstanding the finery in which it comes dressed, competitiveness is in reality a deficit-motivated trait. Being good at an activity is something we choose to do; outperforming others is experienced as something that we
have
to do. Our self-esteem is at stake.

The obvious way to verify that competition is more a need than a desire is to see what happens when a competitive person is deprived of a chance to compete. Or, since the need to compete is really the need to win, we can watch what happens when such an individual loses. The result is more reminiscent of depriving a hungry person of supper than of removing a choice dish from the gourmet. One extraordinarily competitive businesswoman, who was transferred to a noncompetitive work environment, described her situation to me recently as being like “suffering a slow death.” This sort of reaction suggests that one's very self is on the line. Lending further credence to this is the fact that the original urge to compete may be experienced as a fear of
not
competing. “Whenever I enter a competition,” said one marathon runner, “I'm fearful and apprehensive to try it. It's hard to go to the line. But I'm fearful and apprehensive not to try it.”
⁷
To do something because the psychological consequences of not doing it are too painful is quite different from doing something because of the gratification it provides. When the opportunity to alleviate that pain is removed, we would expect a reaction of anxiety or panic or rage. Thus, the actual reactions of competitive people support the proposition that it is low self-esteem that motivates them. For many, competition feels like damage control. The point is not so much triumph as vindication, not so much winning as not losing. To lose is to have one's inadequacy exposed. It is dreadful confirmation of precisely what was feared in the first place. One struggles to win, to be better than everybody else, in a desperate, vain effort to convince oneself of one's value.

But how can competition be deficit-motivated if so many very competitive people are excellent at what they do? We sometimes need to be reminded that actual competence has little to do with self-esteem. No matter how many times they hear it, many talented or attractive people do not truly believe in their talent or attractiveness. Their quest to be noticed, rewarded, acknowledged is endless; it is like pouring liquid into a container with a hole in the bottom. This is because the source of the need lies not in the specific characteristic but in the underlying matter of low self-esteem. Recognition for some particular ability doesn't address the matter of overall worth. There is nothing surprising, therefore, about the fact that even some very capable individuals need to prove how much better they are than others.

If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete.
^*
The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with “immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport.”
⁸
Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down these activities.

To all of this one might object that deficient self-esteem does not in itself cause competition. This is quite true. Whereas many psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, tend to inspect the individual in a vacuum, the neo-Freudians have emphasized that human development, intrapsychic conflicts, and everything else take place in a particular environment. In order to do their job adequately, psychologists must be students not only of the individual or the family but of the culture as a whole. Thus we return to the sociological emphasis on norms and structures with which this section began. Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. In our culture, which is wedded to the assumption that life is a zero-sum game, one of the chief mechanisms is competition. It is America's compensatory mechanism of choice. Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself
and
the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. When we have both, we have millions of people who try to feel better by making the next person feel worse.