I\u2019m not a huge football fan, but since I live in the New York area, I couldn\u2019t help but get swept up in the enthusiasm for the underdog NY Giants over the past few weeks. What a great comeback from a team that barely made the playoffs. They came back to knock off three powerhouse teams, and then beat the mightiest of the mighty, the previously undefeated New England Patriots, in the Superbowl. This year\u2019s Superbowl finally earned its name. And the NFC playoff game in Green Bay was also a classic, being played in minus 3 degree weather (an \u201cIceBowl\u201d, as some have called it) and won in overtime with a dramatic field goal right after the kicker had blown two easier attempts. That was probably the one NFL football game that I\u2019ll always remember.<\/p>\n
Being a reflective sort of chap, however, I\u2019ll not dwell too long on the athletic and spiritual achievements of the Giants over the past 6 weeks (as well as financial ones), great though they were. Instead, I\u2019d like to ponder two social themes that are quite prominent in a football game, especially a high-powered, big-money game like the NFL. Those themes are competition and cooperation. Professional football is mix of both. There\u2019s plenty of competition on every level; competition to win the game, competition between players to make the team, competition for TV ratings, etc. There must also be a lot of cooperation. E.g., cooperation between team players throughout the game; cooperation of teams with the rules of the game, and with the decisions of the referees; cooperation with the fans, who pay good money to watch; cooperation with the capitalist and governmental institutions who provide and maintain a stadium, provide traffic control for the crowds, sell commercial air time on the media, provide for a team\u2019s logistic needs (uniforms, travel, game scheduling, training facilities), etc. Although the main point of an NFL game is to win and to make money in a capitalist economy, there is plenty of cooperation going on behind the scenes.<\/p>\n
For me, though, it\u2019s sad that competition is king here, and cooperation is the handmaiden working in the shadows. Football says a lot about our social priorities and assumptions. My second grade teacher told me and my parents that I was \u201cdifferent\u201d. Part of the difference that she was referring to, I believe, regards my unwillingness to just accept things. Not that I\u2019m any great rebel, but I think that I was born with an instinctual ability to notice and question things that many others take for granted. One of those things is competition; back in grammar school I knew early on that we were being encouraged to compete with each other, because that\u2019s just how life in America is. But why is that, I wanted to know. No one had a good answer. Just shut up and take your lumps in dodgeball and \u2018steal the bacon\u2019.<\/p>\n
I still wonder why we have to be so competitive. The Ayn Rand capitalist theory is that competition brings out the best in us. If we didn\u2019t have to compete, if our needs for security were met, we\u2019d all be lazy. Such laziness would eventually lead to rampant poverty and social collapse. Competition makes things as good as they are. Even the losers are better off in the long run because of it. <\/p>\n
And yet I wonder. Is that really the main choice for us human beings? Competition versus laziness? That sure seems to be what we assume here in the USA. Cooperation is just a side-effect that\u2019s sometimes necessary to enhance competition. It\u2019s like that with mother nature herself. Families are the bastions of cooperation, but only such that each family can better compete for money, land, and opportunities for their children; this applies to almost all creatures. Putting competition first is in our nature.<\/p>\n
But do we have to be slaves to mother nature? Isn\u2019t it the human heritage to do something different, based on our ability to reason? My reasoning would say that cooperation is the better part. I would envision a human race where cooperation is king, where people truly strive to cooperate, where cooperation brings out everyone\u2019s best. Yes, some competition would still be necessary; I myself enjoy having a choice of supermarkets and department stores to go to. And yes, competition makes the NFL so occasionally entertaining (but only occasionally; most football games are pretty boring to me). So why can\u2019t we all assume that it\u2019s cooperation that can make us better off; on every level, even to the level of nations deciding how to split up land, oil, seaways, water, minerals, wealth, etc. <\/p>\n
Yea, I know, we\u2019re a long, long way from that here on Planet Earth. For now, the most significant manifestation of international competition, i.e. war, continues on and on. We\u2019ve kept it out of America for a long time now, although 9-11 showed that it could come back. Yes, I do look at (pseudo) Islamic radical jihad and al Qaeda as an exercise in competition, in the same vein with capitalist, species evolution, the \u201cmagic of the market\u201d, and conservative politics. Imagine if we could turn down the competition instinct and do away with war. Imagine all the economic resources that would be freed up for better uses if the many nations of the world stopped building and buying jet fighter planes and tanks and destroyers and missiles and machine guns. Despite all of the wealth created by economic competition, there is also a huge economic drag created by military competition. When you balance these factors, is the average citizen of this world better or worse off?<\/p>\n
I still think that humankind could make it different; we could make cooperation the prime directive, without losing our iPods and all of the magic that we saw from the NY Giants over the past few weeks. But that will probably take centuries of time and many more hard lessons. I won\u2019t live to see it, but I\u2019d like to think that every dream of a better world somehow helps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m not a huge football fan, but since I live in the New York area, I couldn\u2019t help but get swept up in the enthusiasm for the underdog NY Giants over the past few weeks. What a great comeback from a team that barely made the playoffs. They came back to knock off three powerhouse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5248,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/5248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}