Always compete, never cheat

Competition has become a dirty word in recent years.

Either we are told that competing breeds an unhealthy relationship with ourselves and others, such as bringing out the worst in people, that it becomes a barrier to social integration, that essentially conflict and war are rooted in competition at its worst, or we’re being told that a lack of competition is leading to a generation of flaky angst-ridden weaklings, so competition is a much needed way of putting youngsters back on the straight and narrow.

Clearly these are very mixed messages for young people to be hearing. These are also very confusing narratives for adults, educators, and parents.

In what follows, I want to describe exactly why competing is absolutely fundamental to a healthy body and mind, vital to social cohesion and integration, and one of the best ways to teach our young people about the importance of physical and emotional discipline and other values, such as respect, honesty, trust, loyalty, courage, and much more besides.

In fact, the idea for this article was inspired by a close friend, who is a Catholic theology teacher, chaplain, and mentor, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who wanted to get my thoughts on the importance of play and sports for young boys. Knowing the close work I do with young people as a teacher, mentor, and boxing trainer, he was curious what I had to say on the matter.

Such invitations always make writing such articles that much sweeter.

Competing: explicit versus implicit competition

When trying to understand anything, we first need to ensure, that we’re talking about the same thing.

So what do we really mean by competition?

In its most simplest form, competition is the act of endeavouring to win against another or others in a given activity for some specific gain or purpose, or simply to avoid defeat, sometimes at all costs. Usually the act of winning involves an increase in one’s social standing or status, or leads to clear material gain.

However, competing can be explicit or implicit. Competing can be codified and explicit in specific activities especially sports, education, or business, particularly where there are clearly defined rewards for winning. For example prizes for first, second, and third place, recognition for being a competitor, or some reward for gaining a particular grade or percentage, say a university placement, and subsequently a lucrative career, or having a market leading, or most profitable business. These are all well codified forms of competition, where the requirements for winning are clearly defined, and so winners can be clearly recognised, and rewarded.

However, competitiveness, can also be found in more implicit forms in play, games, and other social activities, which are less codified and winning is more implicit. Friends and siblings can compete with each other in innocent play, the first to run to the top or the bottom of the stairs, to win in a board game, or to find more favour with a parent. Young people can compete with their peers over who has the most, or more desirable, friends, or has the best, most fashionable, most expensive clothes, or who has the most achievements and accomplishments.

All these forms of group and social competition are less codified. However, they are implicitly acknowledged by the participants. We know whose the fastest runner, or the best at board games, or who has mummy or daddy wrapped around their little finger, or who is more socially popular, or has more financial, social, or cultural capital. These are some of the ever-present domains and forms of competition and competitiveness, and they result in material gain, increases in social status, or self-standing.

So what’s so wrong with these forms of competition?

Fear of competition

One thing that’s entered the latter day collective consciousness, and subconsciousness, is the very idea that is behind writing this article that competition at its root is somehow negative. It's the very notion of being competitive that seems to be at the heart of the matter rather than any particular form of competition.

However, the reason something is seen as negative, often isn’t the cause for something being negative.

More often than not, fear can render most things negatively. Most people these days regard children playing out by themselves as generically negative, as symptomatic of careless, irresponsible parenting, when a generation ago, children playing outside was the norm, or we regard physical, aggressive play as harmful, or trusting strangers as negative. However, there is very little to suggest these things are negative per se, rather we perceive these things with overriding emotions of fear, and where fear dominates, our minds are biased towards judging things to be more harmful than not, as this is a reliable heuristic for avoiding danger.

I fear that we’re at a point where competition is looked upon with a sense of fear. Adults, educators, and parents have this lingering feeling that somehow competition brings out the worst in human nature, is diminishing to most students, as only a minority can be winners and be rewarded, while the majority must resign themselves to being eternal losers, and that competition creates conflict, envy, resentment and mostly negative states.

Most people have grown up in generations witnesses to the fact that most codified competitions, sport, education to some extent, business, politics, finance, are all domains in which there is a strong bias to a winner-takes-all effect. Most adults and parents hail from generations where their school experiences were defined by sports being about producing a select group of winners, making the school team, or becoming professional. Rarely has anyone been rewarded for being average, or mediocre in sport, or just enjoying it.

The same goes for many activities though. As a society, we don’t reward people for just putting their head down and running a business well. We give exponentially larger praise and exposure to businesses that have the greatest impact, make the largest profits, or are able to inspire attention-grabbing headlines. The same goes for those other domains, such as education, politics, finance. We reward students for getting the best grades, but not necessarily just because somebody enjoys learning or doing something.

This coupled with the fact that competition is about opposition, sometimes conflict, can be aggressive, unkind to the losers, and often unfair, has led to a shift away from competition, as it has come just at the time when other significant socio-cultural shifts have arrived. The increasing digitisation of society, fuelling a steep decline in interpersonal relationships and skills, increased levels of social anxiety, personal complexes, and a sharp awareness of diversity, enlivened rights-based movements, has meant that people are more sensitive about endorsing competition at all costs, or at all for that matter.

Fear, as we know, once it takes hold can be the greatest inhibitor.

At the same time though, there is an implicit, more often than explicit, understanding of the undesirability of competition.

Professional sports stars can be criticised for being obsessed with winning, winning at all costs, or caring for little else but winning, while the sole purpose of some forms of competition has become money prizes and social status. And this is being done at the worst possible cost. Some would argue we are very far from resolving doping and drug use in sport, which is at the root of the frantic nature of competitiveness in professional and even amateur sport.

In a different, but similar vein, people opine that competing with peers in examinations and tests, creates toxic atmospheres and relationships, or that competing with siblings creates lasting sibling rivalry and resentment, or that other implicit forms of competition over friends, looks, or possessions breeds conflict, envy, and resentment, rather than positive emotions such as cooperation, acceptance, and openness.

No such thing as bad competition — only unfair competition

While much can be said about the negative sides of competition, much can also be said about the merits of competing.

What we most often find is that competition itself is not corrupted, but the way it’s conducted or encouraged certainly can be.

I can talk at length about the competitive nature of boxing, as it’s something very close to my heart. In boxing we can find the very best and the worst of competition. Often, this has much to do with those who are authorities in the sport, from trainers, organisers, and promoters. The sport when it is authorised in the right way embodies the very best spirit of competition. A simple example is from boxing gyms. In a boxing gym the nature of competition is often left to be implicit. I argue this is an example of an unhealthy competitive environment.

Rather a trainer must talk about the nature of competition openly and set out the rules and character needed for competing. The trainer should lay out how he expects a fighter to engage or not engage in competition. A hot topic these days in boxing gyms is sparring. Very often, believe it or not, trainers don’t school their boxers on the way to compete in the constraints of sparring. Good sparring is all about learning the art of boxing, slowly cultivating your confidence as a fighter — it’s not about knocking seven bells out of each other.

I always tell fighters, if you hurt your opponent in sparring and sense you can knock them out, you must show restraint. There is no honour as a fighter in beating a weaker fighter. That honour can only be had in beating a true equal or outfighting, outsmarting, or outlasting a better fighter. Boxing in this way teaches young people respect, honour, courage, emotional restraint and discipline, physical discipline, and much more, in one inspiring and uplifting, yet challenging package.

You have to be brave enough to step into the competitive arena, risk losing or humilation, being shown to be weaker, respecting your competitor, showing trust and loyalty to your trainer, humility and grace in strength and success — all this we can learn through healthy competition. This principle can be extended to many other domains of life too.

Thus, it’s the role of an authority in any domain to define the nature of the competition — what is deemed fair competition and what certainly isn’t. This should be set out clearly, and conversations should frequently return to this subject, as even authorities get things wrong. In fact authorities, need to be receptive to the changes and needs in their environments and adapt accordingly. Things left to be implicit usually are implicitly understood, and this can be far from how they should be understood.

When competition is organised and led in a fair and transparent manner, the benefits certainly outweigh any ills. This can also be illustrated by how most people’s experience of competition at school can put them off competing for life. Often, someone can struggle in a sport or activity at school, they can be left feeling defeated, deflated, and without any hope.

This isn’t the failure of the individual. This is a failure of a community, of guides, and mature adults. When we fall short in competition when we are young, the role of the elders around us is to show us how to come back from defeat stronger, not to get downhearted by loss, but how to take loss gracefully, and come back brighter another day. More often than not, this missing ingredient can be the sole reason some people are put off competing for life.

This is also why abominations such as the recent Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fight do so much harm to the notion of fair and healthy competition. Here we see a great boxing champion, well past his prime, after having overcome several life threatening illnesses, get into the boxing ring with a social media star, who has used the status and fame of a former champion as Mike Tyson to elevate the status of his own boxing credentials. I have seen all sorts of false justifications for this fight, but I won’t even waste ink responding to such spurious arguments, seeing most people have debunked those arguments elsewhere.

In short, such money-fuelled competitions offer a very distorted picture of reality for a younger generation of aspiring sportspeople. They are teased with the allure and mirage of easy success. There is no chance in hell that Jake Paul could have fought Mike Tyson in a fair competition during Tyson’s prime. If the rumours turn out to be true, and the fight was a set up, and scripted, then the public have been cheated twice. Jake Paul had no chance of winning, unless Tyson agreed to throw the bout, and Tyson had no chance of winning, otherwise the fight would never have been agreed. I have no idea what valuable lessons the younger generation could learn from such a farce.

Where does this leave us with competition?

Happily unequal — the need to compete

One of the most important roles of competition, I would argue, is teaching young people the deep essence of human nature and how to have a balanced body and mind, as part of a community.

Competition is the way that we learn our limits, our potentialities, learn to embody specific values, build character, and learn how to build social standing and earn respect. Imagine kids never competing with each other at any level emotionally, intellectually, or physically. Apart from this being completely hypothetical, the reality is that there would always be a natural level of competition. A kid seeing that they were bigger than other kids, is an implicit and unavoidable from of competition, as other kids can’t but help knowing that they’re smaller and weaker, and the bigger ones can't but help leverage the fact that they're bigger. This principle would work across domains. In short, implicit competition would take place, even if we outlawed explicit competition.

But let’s just go with that thought experiment, where we outlawed competition and discouraged it in all respects. It’s fair to say, that most people would never really discover their strengths and weaknesses relative to others. We would be detached from the true potentiality and reality of the humans around us. We would neither know our potential, nor the reality of our limits. Again, I think the Tyson-Jake Paul fight was a good illustration of this. When Tyson was the world’s best heavy weight boxer, it’s unthinkable that someone like Jake Paul could fight him. Now we are in a society where such fancies and delusions are becoming a reality and they are creating the delusion of equality.

In the past, we were better able to accept that inequality is a natural difference, and part and parcel of life. Neither bad nor good per se, but open to our judgement if we were to regard it one way or another. I for one was happy in the knowledge I couldn’t be a Tyson. Maybe that’s the wrong way of putting it. I loved the Tyson phenomenon and it was more a phenomenon because I understood I couldn’t be like him, not even remotely. Anyone who bothers to do even a little research into Tyson’s background, his training, his regime, will be stunned. Most talented boxers can’t repeat the workouts he performed in his prime. He was a Maradona of his sport.

We’re headed into absurd waters if we continue to push the idea that competition is a perverse way to self and collective knowledge.

Rather competition keeps us rooted in reality, facts, and truth. The body doesn’t lie. Either I’m capable of something or not. Either I can run that fast or not, that long or not, that I can lift something heavy or not — you get the idea.

The body doesn’t lie.

Competition teaches and reminds us of this fact. Competition tethers us to reality in this way. And when competition pits us against our peers, in the form of play, it’s an attractive way for life to keep us in check. We learn what we are suited to, where our flaws lie, and our strengths, the things we need to improve in, the way our peers regard us, how we may or may not win their respect, admiration, loyalty, and all these things in turn naturally prooffer us our place and station in life. All this leads to a healthy balance of body and mind.

For some time now the idea that we may have some preassigned place or station in life has come to be regarded as an affront to our civil liberty, or more to the point, individuality. But as I write in an upcoming article The mirage of individuality, there isn’t much reason to put our trust in the idea of individualism being the panacea. Rather individualism is likely to become the reason for an ever steeper decline into false sanctities.

Many young people instinctively understand that having a place is crucial, it’s the very rite of passage that they’re hunting for but is being denied them. They hunt for it as knowing one’s place is the way that we can find firm ground to lay our roots into. Not knowing one’s place leads to a constant sense of uprootedness. I see this daily in my training work.

What’s more, most young boys and young men understand that when they compete while coming to terms with their innate inequality, their innate differences, they must find natural ways to compensate for those deficiencies in themselves, and this generally comes in the form of competitive grouping.

Young boys learn from a young age, that by grouping together they can compete with others. This is best understood with the being-picked-for-the-football-team trope which is ever present in the collective consciousness. We know that when we’re kids and playing games such as football, we naturally select optimally for the best team. We want to choose the best players, the strongest, biggest, fastest, most skilled, and so on, and it results in the the least desirable player being fobbed off or foisted onto the weaker team. This phenomenon is most likely close to universal. In it, we find the reality that most young boys learn very quickly that one way we can naturally compensate for the inequalites of life is by pairing and grouping together. Even in boxing gyms, a sport regarded as an individaul sport, a good boxing gym naturally tends towards behaving as a team of fighters.

A team embodies the best qualities of all the given individuals to make up for individual flaws and shortcomings of the individuals. If we were all equal we would hardly if ever observe such grouping phenomena. I go into this idea more deeply in an upcoming article Happily unequal — why we are not equal.

But I will briefly add here, those weaker individuals, who can be scarred for life for always being left behind, never being chosen to play — they need the guidance of elders, on how to return stronger, how to never give up in the competition, and become someone who will be desired on the team. This doesn’t mean they need to magically become talented, but say if they learnt to never give up and complain, to show weakness less easily, to fight to the bitter end, sooner or later people would want that person on their side, as people like that can lift a whole team’s spirits.

What all this means is that competition at its heart is a response to our unequal natures and predispositions.

By confronting the reality of our capacities and limitations, what we learn is the natural root of inequality. This isn’t something sinister or maligned. It just is what it is. As by parity is the root of most human equality. We are equally insignificant in the greater scheme of things. This is why mass cooperation is one of the most effective ways to mitigate for that inherent cosmic insignificance. An individual in the vast wilderness hasn’t much to hold onto sitting in the knowledge that they are some how equal to all. Yet by knowing the ways they are unequal is a call to action to form alliances, build cooperation, form bonds. This is the very glue that holds all groupings together from families, tribes, communities, societies, nations.

A parting note — never cheat

And when all is said and done, competition is unavoidable, that’s why it’s ever more paramount that we ensure it’s fair. The last thing we should be encouraging, whether explicitly or implicitly, is a culture of cheating.

More than anything else it’s a culture of cheating that eats away at the inherent value of competition. The epidemic of drug taking at the amateur and professional level is a case in point, and it’s a silent epidemic, just talk to people involved in amateur level boxing or cycling. This is a depressing reality to initiate our youth into. I would have to write a separate article on why I'm opposed to drugs in sport at any level, for want of a better expression, spiritual reasons. The same can be said for drug taking for examinations, which has exploded in recent years.

Rather the value of true competition lies in the very fact that we must face up to our limitations, our limited talents and abilities, and compete all the same, not solely for the purpose of winning, but rather to face the facts and realities of what we are, so we may strive to be useful in the eyes of others for the qualities that we do bring, not the qualities we deludedly hope we could bring.