Winner-Takes-All: Can We Care About Cooperation?
What do these photographs have in common?
On November 7th, 2020 the Notre Dame Football team won a nail-biting game against Clemson. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of a nail-biting election. On the same day the virus was setting records: 103,657 new cases in a single day, a 60%, 14-day increase. Scott Fowler, ESPN sports commentator, tweets a photograph and asks a simple question: because of the pandemic, should the Notre Dame administration have planned a diversion to prevent the field from being stormed by students? We ask this question: should the Biden administration-elect and campaign have planned an alternative? “Horns blared, fireworks exploded, and shouts of triumph filled the air as supporters of Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) spilled into the streets of Washington and its suburbs Saturday to celebrate the announcement that the pair had won the 2020 presidential election.” READ MORE
New York Times
In sport and politics winners celebrate! They spill onto the streets and fields. Winning produces exuberance, unashamed feeling, and exhibitionism. And then there are the losers. They worm their way off the field, or the hotel election floor, ashamed, exhausted and bewildered. Consequential losses are as emotionally charged for the losers as they are for the winners. Losers feel shame, rage, and revenge: “we will win next time.” The losers are forgotten. The winners-take-all. When there is competition for a limited good—in sport the national championship and in politics the White House—the social context stimulates unrestrained reactions; you see them in the photographs above. Is this inevitable? Is there another way for politics?
The two teams competing in a sporting event and our two-party political system produce similar results: one party wins the Congress or White House (or both) and the other loses. It seems competition is baked into the very fabric of our lives: economically, politically, and in our entertainment. If we could imagine that any specific sporting outcome was merely arbitrary, would sports have its emotional grasp? (storming a field during a pandemic)
Games have prescribed starting and ending times. Time runs out. One side scores more points and another more votes. One might ask: isn’t one side merely lucky? No. The moment my team wins, I bask in the feeling of superiority: we beat them! It is intoxicating. We are the winners! These exuberant feelings cannot be contained (see David Levine’s blog on emotional containment and politics). There is collective emotion, a stampede onto the field. Against better judgement—the Covid-19 surge—the winners celebrate with other winners. One might even argue, along with Greenberg and Solomon, that the gripping anxiety is the fear of mortality, the fear of dying. Losing causes terror and the winner’s exuberance is a defense against the terror of losing life.
Why?: The focus on competition. I identify my sense of well-being, or my self-esteem, with the winner, not the feeling of winning; unfortunately, identification with winners or losers creates polarization: us against them. The winner gets the bragging rights. The loser wonders if the winners cheated; or have they been given unfair advantage (e.g., recall deflategate and the New England Patriot football team). As the “loser,” we defend against our plummeting self-esteem by blaming our perceived foes. We also tend to resist identifying with being a loser—I am not a loser, you are—because we don’t want to feel hurt or damaged; that is natural. Indeed, the first definition of the verb ‘to beat’ is to strike (a person or an animal) repeatedly and violently so as to hurt or injure, typically with an implement such as a club or whip. The second definition refers to winning. In our politics do we not confuse these? Like in sports, the losers in politics often take to the streets and often with violent actions. Instead of the verb form perhaps we should think of the noun, beat: an accent or rhythmic unit in music or poetry.
Winning, losing, and beating a political opponent would be a rhythmic unit in time, always somewhat arbitrary. We might imagine the game not as competition over a limited good—government—but rather, a present moment sandwiched in between past governments (national championship) and future governments (future championships). The present moment would be the hopeful opportunity to build something new and to add to past successes, not just an ephemeral and celebratory winning moment. What if we thought of government and politics as an unlimited “cooperative good.” Can we imagine celebrating cooperation? Instead of Notre Dame beating Clemson, both teams might celebrate a “great” game? Why is this unlikely? We compete for a limited supply of “being” a winner—winner-take-all. What if we did not identify with a winner or a loser? What if we did not compete for the winning position? How would the world of sport and politics be different if we identified with feelings of mastery and excellence when winning and disappointment when striving for excellence but coming up short? Would this not allow us to share in our common humanity? Would this move us away from polarization? Would this allow us to learn about what makes for excellence and how one or another succeeds at doing anything really well. Unfortunately, we don’t identify with our feelings, we identify with the culturally determined and more prestigious position of the winner.
How might competition in sport and politics be linked to our economy and materialism? In our economic system, we largely win by competing to accumulate the most wealth. Competition in economics and politics fuels the engine that produces extreme wealth inequality, resulting in a few winners and many losers. In short, we manufacture competition to distribute limited goods, and then wonder why so much wealth inequality.
Read the Oxfam report.
Paul Gomberg offers a convincing argument for contributive justice, a form of justice arguing against destructive competition. Listen to our Podcast with Paul Gomberg, November 2020.
If good jobs, good pay, good working conditions, and sharing routine and complex labor were in unlimited supply, Gomberg argues, there would be no need to compete for a limited supply of prestigious social positions. If limited, then we’d better train our children to compete for them; otherwise they will not be prepared to win the limited supply of complex labor jobs: doctors, architects, engineers, computer software programmers, etc. Economists who argue that market-based economies must have competition link this belief to the social darwinist view: the fittest ascend through competition. But is this true? Must we accept this idea. Surely it is not in nature that our destiny is rooted: to compete for fame, for stardom, or for the celebrity position? Indeed, seeking fame may lead to emptiness and longing, as Pink Martini has so eloquently articulated in their song: Splendor in the Grass.
Against the dominant view, Jim Tamm convincingly argues that competition and conflict are not as productive as collaboration and cooperation. Competition breeds defensiveness. As we first defend against our emotions of fear and shame (and perhaps existential dread, the fear of annihilation) when losing, then our thought processes and attention fade to the background. We project our fears onto others and blame them for our perceived failures. (see on our website David Levine’s blog and his elaboration of the psychological mechanisms Jim Tamm describes in his Ted Talk).
Tamm and Levine both argue that our defensive (unconscious and unconscious) processes act to protect us from the fear of losing: we project this fear onto the “bad” other. We moralize defeat by hating the opponent. In sport it is common to find hate for the rival team and to demonize them: we burn the opposing team’s mascot before the homecoming or rival games.
Is it possible to disarticulate competition from economics and politics? Is it possible to stop identifying with losing and start cooperating over goods that could be in unlimited supply? What might these goods be? What might constitute a common good that wouldn’t require the winner-take-all? And how might this be done without appealing to an identity of being Number 1 in politics? Can we care about political cooperation in ways where success and victory are shared?
About the possibilities for cooperation, Richard Sennett and Michael Tomasello offer sociological and anthropological perspectives. Sennett describes how social norms can be structured so that cooperation emerges; and for Tomasello, we are biologically wired to cooperate. Psychoanalytic attachment and child development theories also explain how interpersonal relationships contribute to our becoming cooperative, caring human beings. It’s not that we can’t cooperate, it’s that our imagination is lacking. We accept competition because we have naturalized a social determination and have thereby baked it into everything we do.
Competition over the earth’s limited resources has led to destruction of our planet. To emerge from the crisis of the novel coronavirus and the pandemic we will have to realize that it is our way of organizing economic life that has made cooperation almost unimaginable.
And it will take global cooperation to solve the crisis, well beyond the urgent moment of the pandemic. To save the planet we will need to change, fundamentally. There is no returning to the past, for liberals or conservatives.
150 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election. It was a record. Republicans and Democrats competed for votes. When time was called at midnight November 3rd—well, there was a bit of an overtime—one candidate was ahead. This election is a jolting reminder that competition in politics will divide us. It may even destroy us. It’s time to question our two-party competition and think more about forms of government which promote sharing, learning, and cooperation. What is to be done?