Competition Kills!

By Izzat El-Hajj

Sometimes we hear stories that can be uncomforting about students giving each other wrong information or withholding resources from their classmates in preparation for an exam. The phenomenon doesn't make things any better, but sets the stage for students to hope that their colleagues don't do very well, thus lowering the average and making their own grades higher. Such a competitive atmosphere is not a very healthy one in a place where people come to learn and become positively active members of society.

And this is merely a microcosm of the professional world out there where the same things happen in different colors. Colleagues spread rumors about their fellow colleagues to ruin their reputations and gain competitive advantage. Employees withhold helpful information from their teammates to rise ahead of them in the ranks of the company. This should not be the way people treat each other!

Competition on its own is not inherently a bad thing. One of the biggest mistakes earlier regimes committed was eliminating competition from peoples' lives; the result was a devastating loss of incentive and a decline in society's productivity and economic growth. Competition can be channeled in two different directions: it can be constructive, and it can be destructive.

People who are constructively competitive compete with others by trying to improve their own performance and do a better job, yet still wishing the best for others. Meanwhile, people who are destructively competitive enjoy watching others trip and fall behind, and may even try to cause them to do so themselves. Maybe such feelings emerge from our increasingly materialistic perceptions of life - the perceptions that humans seek to maximize their profits and increase their utility from resources which are scarce (two basic assumptions in ECON 211). This fuss about scarce resources is very peculiar in a world that produces enough to feed its entire population six times over!

With such an attitude, or with that of wanting to maximize the welfare of society as a whole, we can come to view the people around us in two different ways. We may view them as our opponents who will beat us to those scarce resources and take them out of our way. This is the destructive type. We may also view them as our partners in this world, all working towards trying to make it a better place for us and for those around us. With such a disposition, we would like to see our "competitors" succeed just as much as we would like to see ourselves do so. This is the constructive type. Prophet Muhammad once said, "None of you truly believes until you love for your brother what you love for yourself". In the global scope of things, the success of an individual will contribute to that of society, and that of society will contribute to the wellbeing of every individual in the society, so it will always come back and benefit us all.

Enough with people viewing each other as opponents of one another, and enough with them trying to hold each other back. Poverty is our opponent. Jealousy is our opponent. Hatred is our opponent. As for us people, we are all partners.