by Julie R Butler

Created on: December 04, 2008   Last Updated: December 17, 2008

American society is obsessed with competition. Often times, parents push their children too hard, in the belief that strong competitiveness will lead them to succeed as adults. What should be fun competitions, such as little league baseball games, have increasingly become taken far too seriously by parents who get into fist fights because of their passion for their children to win. This competitiveness then becomes instilled in their children, and because they have learned from their parents that winning is everything, we now have an epidemic of dangerous and illegal steroid use in our high school sports environment, which has spread there from its use in college and professional sports. Lost is the idea that competition is supposed to instill a healthy desire to better ourselves, and in its place, our culture has put the value of winning over values such as fair-mindedness, good sportsmanship, or simple grace and form. This emphasis on winning instead of playing the game well has become a nation obsession, to the point that this competitive drive is consuming our national character and undermining our ability to find real solutions to our most pressing problems. I believe that if we take a good hard look at how competition has been overemphasized in our society, we might then begin to find better ways to go about solving some of these problems, from dealing with our current economic woes to facilitating more justice to fixing our political system.

As I mentioned, competition is supposed to be a healthy way to bring out our best abilities, and it often is just that. However, over-competitiveness can lead to all kinds of social problems, from causing stress, over-aggression, creating a tendency to cheat to win, instilling a me-versus-you or us-versus-them mentality, and repressing our empathy for others. The greatest problems occur when the emphasis is placed on winning instead of on the process of playing the game well, when the ends outweigh the means. When we focus on the outcome at the cost of the journey to that outcome, we do not give just credit to the more mundane, yet what I see as more important part of the overall process. For life is full of processes, and while these processes are not written down in the record books, they make up the bulk of our lives and, at the end of the day, they make up who we are to a much larger degree than the list of wins and losses do. Sadly, in a society that has become accustomed to instant gratification, the value of

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