Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Friendly Competition”
Rev. Rod Debs

May 15, 2005

Story: When I was a kid growing up in Ohio, sometimes we would choose up sides to play a ball game. Usually the two best ball players chose the sides. They would choose the strongest boys and girls first and some of us who were not very strong always got chosen last. The story I have to tell is about a little boy Frankie and his father Sam. This is my father’s work jacket, so would you come up and be Sam. Now I need someone to be Frankie. Here’s a ball cap.

Frankie had been really sick, in fact he had had to have an operation at the hospital, and now he was resting at home. But on the weekend, his dad Sam would take Frankie for a walk outside where the kids played ball. One Saturday, Frankie asked the kids if he could play too. You guys be the kids. The kids huddled to talk about it. Everybody get in a circle and put your arms around each other and make a lot of muttering sounds, OK?

Well, after the kids all talked about it, they decided that Frankie could play in the last inning. The score was tied, four to four in the third inning. So Frankie and his dad sat on the grass and watched the kids play. It wasn’t long until the ninth inning came up. The kids said that Frankie could play for the team that was losing. Frankie would bat seventh. Now the score was twelve to eight.

The first two batters made hits and got on base. That was good. Then the third and fourth batters struck out. If the team got just one more out, the game would be over. Then the fifth batter got a hit making the bases loaded, three runners on base! And the sixth batter got a hit, driving in one run.

Now the score was twelve to nine, with two outs and three runners on base. Frankie came up to bat. He wasn’t feeling very strong, but he took the bat. I don’t have a bat, so would you pretend this is a bat, OK?

Everybody knew that Frankie had been pretty sick. They all cheered for him to get a hit. He could hardly swing the bat, but he tried. Strike one. He didn’t even come close. Strike two, same thing. Well, the pitcher came a little closer, and pitched the ball again. All the kids on both teams started to cheer for Frankie, and you know what? Frankie hit the ball.

Frankie stood there holding the bat, and everyone started to shout: “Go, Frankie. Run to first base!” So Frankie started to run to first base. The ball rolled almost to the pitcher’s mound, but everyone was busy cheering for Frankie as he ran to first base. Two runners scored, and as Frankie got to first base, everyone said, “Run to second!”

The pitcher was holding the ball cheering Frankie on while the third runner on base ran home. Now the score was tied, twelve to twelve, but it was too exciting to worry about that. Everyone was cheering Frankie as he ran to second and third base.

What do you think they all shouted to Frankie at third base? “Run home! Run home!” Frankie was pretty tired, but all the stronger boys and girls lined up along the third base line cheering Frankie as he ran home. Even the pitcher dropped the ball and cheered for Frankie to make a home run.

Frankie ran clear to home plate, and his team won thirteen to twelve. Both teams patted Frankie on the back and carried him from the field on their shoulders. Well, they didn’t really carry him. That would be too hard, but they all huddled with their arms around Frankie and patted him on the back for winning the game with a home run. This kind of competition is the most fun! The story is over, and this whole huddle may go to your classes as we sing, “Go now in peace.”

Message: Last month, I drove with colleagues Bob Eddy and David Johnson to the South East UU Minister’s Association Spring Conference at The Mountain in North Carolina. About sixty Unitarian Universalist Ministers gathered for morning and evening programs, and around 9:30 in the evenings some of us gathered in the recreation room for relaxation. Seven or eight of the night owls passed a guitar around the circle, and the music flowed. Wild and amazing music!

I was at the poker table. We didn’t have poker chips, so we divvied out Scrabble letters to whoever wanted to play. What I enjoyed about playing poker with UU Ministers, more than with anyone else I’ve played, was this. As the evening went on, if one of us ran out of chips, those with the biggest pile of chips in front of us would shove a handful of chips across the table so that the loser could stay in the game. In fact, sometimes the ones we assisted had their fortunes change so that they returned the favor. It was fun---a lot of laughs and friendly ribbing. Everyone was able to stay in the game, contributing their personality. I would call our poker game “friendly competition.” It was our Universalist temperament to find a way that no one would be excluded.

It seems to me that a contrast might be made among three types of social relations: enslavement, competition and playful or friendly competition.

1. Regarding enslavement, I have never experienced total domination by another person because I have always enjoyed personal rights guaranteed by law and social convention. However, the world’s greatest empires were built on the backs of slaves. In Western history, Egyptian Pharaohs built architectural wonders by conscripting desert Habiru and conquered nations as slave laborers and soldiers. The Golden Age of Greece with its social organization and great philosophy was a slave culture. The Roman Empire thrived with 80% of its adult population consisting of women and slaves. The United States in the nineteenth century was built by indentured and destitute immigrant laborers in the North and by slaves in the South.

The architecture of Southern plantations with their Greek columns reflects nostalgia for the Golden Age of Greece, a slave culture. Southern politicians including our own Unitarian John C. Calhoun were deeply offended that Northern abolitionists should criticize Southern slave society, which had brought to blossom the greatest in human potential among whites, as evil. Slave labor freed up time for the elite to pursue arts and sciences, politics and culture, philosophy and invention---though many of the inventions patented by Southern masters were really the work of slaves who did the actual exploratory experimentation, creative thinking and mechanical design.

Though relationships of enslavement took many shapes, legal slavery transferred all human rights from the slave to the master. Slavery consisted of threats and punishments. Any rewards were incidental.

2. Competition, on the other hand, has both rewards and sanctions, both the carrot and the stick. In school, there was the shame of D’s and F’s and the glory of A’s. The economic system of free enterprise rewards capital accumulation to businesses that succeed in maximizing profit. At the same time, failing business ventures close down, often forfeiting the investment capital, workers losing their livelihood. In short, if you don’t beat the competition for the consumer’s dollar, you starve. The stick and the carrot.

Have you ever heard of the term “wage-slavery”? From 1976 to 1986, I worked several blue-collar jobs: a short time as grocery clerk, a year as a band saw operator cutting polyurethane foam for furniture fabrication, a year as a machine operator in automatic assembly of electronic components on printed circuit boards, and finally seven years in quality control and auditing of printed circuit boards, cables and cable harnesses for Amphenol America that subcontracted for IBM, HP and other providers of electrical products.

I remember working my way up to a dollar over minimum wage with no health benefits. I remember spending much of my income and time off in just doing what it took so that I could make it to work the next day. My money went to housing for sleep, food for energy, automobile for work transportation. My time off from ten-hour days went toward being ready to work another ten-hour day.

Although I can’t say it was as bad as the plight of meat-packers or garment workers or miners back before the legislation of labor laws and unionization, even so, I felt like a wage slave. I felt far more slave-like threat of destitution and punishment than reward for working my life away in the factory. I thought I was a “lifer” in the factory, economically trapped from accumulating funds sufficient to get skills for better employment, or to afford a family, let alone become a homeowner. Competitive employment, wage slavery is almost all stick and little carrot, almost all threat of destitution and punishing unemployment and little economic reward. But competition as we see it in games and personal relationships generally has both rewards as well as sanctions.

Our dominant Western economic system of free enterprise celebrates competition as promoting excellence productivity. Actually, economists celebrate greed. They claim that greed is good because the desire to defeat all business competitors so as to accumulate wealth results in competitive excellence in product quality. They say greed motivates greater efficiency and subsequent lower market prices. If competition brings lower prices and higher quality, that’s good for the consumer, they say.

Frankly, in an unregulated or deregulated marketplace, profitability depends less on superior productivity than on out-sourcing production to the lowest-cost labor around the globe regardless of child labor and worker pay that is lower than living wage. For all the claim of competition producing excellence, the advertising message of being the best product is more important for marketing than actual product excellence. More important than product excellence is gaining exclusive access to vulnerable markets, like soft-drink venders in schools, infant formula and banned pesticides dumped in the third world. There are countless ways that the un-level playing field of competition encourages everything but product excellence in winning market share.

I’ve been speaking about competition in the marketplace, but I want to speak about its reality in the lives of individuals. Our culture celebrates competition for building individual character, excellence, team spirit and fun! (Alfie Kahn, “The Case Against Competition” in Working Mother, Sept.1987) I whole-heartedly agree if you are talking about the kind of friendly competition like UU Ministers playing poker. Our playful competition had only rewards and no threats or punishments. In friendly competition, no one suffers sanctions as a loser. If competition were indeed friendly, there would be no shame, no unemployment sanctions, no threat of destitution---only rewards. But that’s not the competition in our free enterprise system.

When it comes to building character, competition that labels us winners and losers teaches us to gloat and teaches self-doubt, the shame of losers. If we evaluate persons, not on inherent worth or even on personal accomplishment, but on whether others are beaten, we do not teach the unconditional value of our own lives or the inherent value of others’ lives. I’m constantly amazed at how social shame or pride of accomplishment determine how I feel about myself. It’s terrible to feel like a loser. It’s terrible to be driven by fear that whom I am is never good enough or what I do might fall short. Most everyone judges, and they judge your value on whether what you do is better than others, no matter what you accomplish.

Right wing ideologues ridicule “self-esteem” as an educational goal, describing it as a philosophy promoting mediocrity. Children, they claim, should not have self-esteem until they deserve it. Tolerance of diversity and multicultural education are also ridiculed as dumbing-down of education, abandoning the superiority of Western culture as found in the Great Books. We should not waste our time on inferior, primitive, doomed cultures. I would not wish on anyone, whether losers or winners, the judgmental character nurtured by competitive standards and sanctions.

Excellence in personal performance declines with the anxiety of threatened sanctions for failure. Both rewards and threatened punishments distract concentration. Competition falls short when it comes to collaborative sharing of talents and resources, and performance suffers.

Relationships of team spirit are often celebrated as the result of competition, but quite the contrary is true. On a team it is not the competition among team members that breeds mutual concern, communication skills, an appreciation of differences, and trust of one another. These are the fruits of cooperation, not competition. Competition instills mistrust of the opponents who are seen as obstacles to success. Everyone is suspect because anyone could be a future rival. Competition creates envy of winners and discounting of losers. The spirit of competition is less empathetic and less generous than the supportive, even loving relationship of comrades. To be clear, team spirit is the proof of non-competitive relationships, not of the effectiveness of competition.

Finally, exactly how much fun is competition in its threats and sanctions? I know that competition is sacred in our culture and that cooperative games seem pansy to those raised in the competitive culture of sports like basketball, American football, prize fighting and war. That is why I am not advocating an elimination of competition as inherently evil. Rather I am advocating for “friendly competition,” competition weaned of its sanctions and threats, competition that no longer stigmatizes anyone as losers, competition that no longer does violence to any participant.

I grew up playing Musical Chairs. I hated it. We started with just one chair fewer than the number of kids, and when the music stopped, one kid who wasn’t fast enough to find a chair became a loser and had to sit off the playing field. Each time the music played there was always one too few chairs, and when the music stopped, one more loser joined the growing number of losers sitting off to the side. More and more kids became losers until there was only one kid left a winner. I hated it. Everyone was a loser. Even the poor kid that won suffered the envy and hostility of all the losers who had been eliminated. No fun whatsoever!

Yet Musical Chairs can be adapted to eliminate the threat and sanction of being a loser. Rather than each other being the obstacle to success, the challenge of the game could be refocused from opponents to a shared task. Each time the music stops and there is one less chair, the game could be for all the kids to climb on to whatever chairs are left. (You will need sturdy chairs!) When the music stops for the last time you will find a gaggle of giggling kids clinging to one another, all piled onto the one remaining chair. What wonderful fun! Why couldn’t we organize society as friendly competition of fellow travelers as if we were all on the same team?

Let me close with a story. Two fishing partners were out in the bay in a small boat, one of those with two pedestal swivel-seats. They were very competitive and each time one caught a fish, they had to pull out all the others in the ice-chest to see whose was the largest. And they always notched each fish on the tail fin to identify who had caught it. As the fishing day wore on, one of the fishing partners began to smile, and the smile turned into a huge grin, and the grin turned into spontaneous chuckles. The fishing buddy glared at the partner who finally burst into uncontrollable laughter. “What in God’s name is so funny?!” snapped the fishing partner. Hardly able to control his laughter, the fishing partner finally spit it out: “There’s a hole in your end of the boat!”

Our lives are inextricably entangled. May we come to realize how we share the same destiny as winners or losers because we’re all in the same boat.