In Praise of Civilized Competition

“The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them. Do you allow arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands?”—Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds (2019)

After years of being an overweight sweetheart, this guy I knew in high school started working out, lost all of the weight and, seemingly overnight, got majorly ripped and thoroughly hot. Before this dramatic transformation, he had plenty of female friends who adored him and confided in him, but never hooked up with him. The girls saw him as a sweet, understanding, empathetic guy. But soon after his manly metamorphosis, he became a total asshole who used girls with the indifference of a sociopath. I eventually confronted him about his nasty behavior after he screwed over one of my friends: “What happened to you? You used to be such a nice guy.” “I’m hot now,” he said, with a sleazy smile, “and you don’t have to be nice when you’re hot.”

That’s when I realized that he was always an asshole. He was just really good at hiding it. The power that came with his newfound hotness afforded him the opportunity to behave in ways that accorded with inclinations that were always there. Taleb’s aphorism—“You will never know if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich”—follows the same logic: money doesn’t make people mean, it just allows mean people to be mean. Or, to put it another way, as Taleb once did on his Facebook page, in a clarifying remark: “People reveal their temperament when they have choices.” Paul Piff’s research into the relationship between social class and unethical behavior suggests that Taleb may be wrong about this. In numerous experiments, he has demonstrated that you can turn a completely normal person into a sociopathic jerk. It’s actually quite easy: just give them some power. If Piff is right, then it’s not so much that latent asshole tendencies are brought out by wealth but that wealth, in and of itself, can turn many perfectly normal people into assholes.

Few episodes in recent history have given credence to Piff’s thesis more than the college admissions scandal that rocked American academia this past year. At least 40 wealthy parents—including actresses Felicity Huffman (of Desperate Housewives fame) and Lori Loughlin (Full House)—paid William (Rick) Singer, head of a phony charity called The Key Worldwide Foundation, to get their kids into elite universities via the “side door.” Singer’s methods included: (1) faking SAT scores (by paying off proctors at authorized test-taking locations, or by having an expert test-taker—usually a grown man!—impersonate your kid and take the SAT for them); (2) fabricating histories of athleticism (complete with Photo-Shopped images of your kid scoring the winning goal); (3) faking learning disabilities to get extra time on tests and assignments (usually with the aid of a therapist who was also on the take); and (4) paying off coaches at places like Yale as much as $400,000 to play along. A society that cultivates competitiveness without balancing virtues like honesty and fair play will reliably produce a steady stream of scandals of this stamp.

We need to remember how to compete in a civilized fashion. There are, to my mind, three main ways to deal with competition: the kindergarten strategy, wherein you try to eliminate it altogether; the ruthless strategy, wherein you give it free rein; and the civilized strategy, wherein you harness the power of human competitiveness whilst reining in its nasty side. At present, we seem to be raising our children with an infelicitous combination of the kindergarten strategy and the ruthless strategy. In elementary school, we teach them that everybody’s special, competition is bad, and everybody gets a medal. Later on, usually in high school, we tell them that they need to do whatever it takes to distinguish themselves from their peers and get into a good college. The kindergarten strategy rarely works in practice. And when it does it invariably leads to dead, boring, stultified societies (e.g., Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War Era, Cuba under Castro, etc.). The ruthless strategy can work in the short-term, but it has proven just as unsustainable over the long-term. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” makes sense only if you’re dealing with a relentless asshole. If you’re dealing with a normal person, being an uncompromising prick invariably backfires. Refuse to give them an inch and you’re sure to lose the mile. Unfettered competition invariably leads to barbarism.

Well-functioning stable societies have almost always been based upon some version of the civilized strategy. In Outliers (2008), Malcolm Gladwell maintains that one of the keys to Roseto, Pennsylvania’s extraordinary success as a community was the way in which it dealt with inequality. Society’s winners were, on the one hand, regularly reminded of their obligations to those less fortunate and strongly encouraged to refrain from showing off. Society’s losers were, on the other hand, treated with a great deal of dignity. The wealthy in Roseto were, writes Gladwell, discouraged “from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.” A civilized society that cultivates the virtues of competitiveness, honesty, and fair-play will produce genuine competence and excellence.