CHAPTER 3 – THE COMPETITION PARADIGM
Throughout the modern era, religion in general – and Christianity, in particular – has lost much of its primacy as the basis for the dominant paradigm’s theory of reality. However, the belief in a limited or constrained human being derived from religious ideology has not fully waned. The religious belief in human flaws resulting from an inherent sinful nature has largely been replaced by a scientific belief in human flaws resulting from our inherent animal nature. With evolution replacing the creation story as the most likely genesis of the human species, we have come to believe that “hard-wired” into the human being is a natural instinct towards selfishness and defensiveness, aggression and predation, competition and destruction. Although science generated an alternative explanation of the underlying problem, the fact is that the modern theory of reality simply retained the premodern starting assumption that humans are, by nature, selfish and competitive.
In contemporary terms, this notion of the self-interested rational actor is the foundational assumption of the economic ideology that now dominates the worldview shaping the socially constructed reality of global civilization.1 Economic ideology constitutes the theoretical and normative foundation of free-market capitalism, which in turn is the dominant paradigm’s primary tool through which to try to improve the human condition. There is near consensus among the democratic governments of the world that their primary role is to facilitate the creation and effective functioning of a global free-market capitalistic economic system, based on the faith – or at least on the espoused rationale – that people and nations will benefit by participation in such an economic system. What this means, basically, is that the political system at this point operates largely in service to the economic system; economics has co-opted politics to served its ends. The financial ties between corporate lobbyists and elected officials is one of the more troubling manifestations of this cooptation, clarifying that government is essentially doing the bidding of the powerful corporate sector and finance community getting rich from this economic activity.
More generally, economic thinking has diffused throughout modern society, with economic improvement serving as the dominant paradigm’s definition of progress for human beings individually and collectively. Organizations in both the private and public sector are infused with an economic mindset, and much human behavior and interaction takes place in the context of economic production and exchange. Society itself is structured and functions such that most of the time and resources available to humans are devoted to economic activity. The culture, especially through the mass media, continually encourages additional consumption of the products of the economic system, without ever stopping to question whether producing and consuming more is actually a useful or functional strategy for human society and planetary life. The culture doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, but this is the reality human society has constructed for itself. We are living in the product of our own paradigm.
This “competition paradigm” is, as Chapter 2 summarized, the current version of western civilization as manifested in modern industrial culture. This paradigm has, by and large, been adopted by most of the world’s nations. Since it shapes the behavior of and outcomes for most of the world’s individuals and communities, it is reasonable to view it as a global paradigm. This isn’t to say that every person or every culture holds the beliefs or adopts the behavior patterns that characterize this paradigm. But it is the dominant global paradigm because its aggregate consequences affect the overall quality of life for almost everyone on the planet. Grounded in a pessimistic perspective regarding human nature, the competition paradigm reflects a number of basic beliefs which in turn have given rise to a set of primary institutions that are taking global society down a path of development that leads to an unsustainable future (cf. Clark, 1995; Gladwin, Kennelly, & Krause, 1995). The time has come when the logical and natural consequences of this paradigm are too dysfunctional and destructive for human society to continue to bear.
Even though the world safely crossed the threshold into the new millennium, the global political economic system is clearly unstable. The intractable problems associated with resource depletion, population growth, unequal distributions of wealth, environmental destruction, and mass urbanization, combined with the threat of economic collapse, nuclear annihilation, biological terrorism, and/or technological crises, have generated a world that seems almost ready to disintegrate into anarchy and chaos. Society is fractured by racial discrimination and inner city degradation, widespread alcohol and drug abuse, political alienation and a culture of violence, religious intolerance and ethnic hostilities. The dominant paradigm tends to maintain that such problems are unavoidable features of human civilization, and/or that they cannot be overcome because they are the direct and inevitable result of inherent human “programming” to pursue self-interest in competition with others doing the same. From this perspective, selfish and competitive behavior constitutes evidence of the validity of these starting assumptions.
But by arguing that selfishness and competitiveness are “built in” to the human being, proponents of the dominant paradigm fail to understand or acknowledge how this orientation is actually caused by the paradigm itself. The beginning thesis of this book is that the problems of human civilization are the natural consequence of system dynamics that result from the paradigm’s starting assumptions. Put simply, based on its paradigmatic worldview, human society has created political, economic, and cultural institutions that actually develop, promote, and reinforce the self-interested, competitive behavior then wrongly assumed to be inherent and inevitable. The paradigm creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, which its adherents then mistakenly point to as evidence of the accuracy of their starting assumptions.
The main purpose of this chapter is to outline in more precise terms the basic beliefs of the competition paradigm. The discussion below is organized into four categories of beliefs – the fundamental orientations, primary objectives, core themes, and underlying motivation of this paradigmatic worldview. Clarifying these different facets of the modern worldview will provide a point of contrast for the new, emerging paradigm described in Chapter 5. After summarizing the competition paradigm, the chapter concludes by returning to the question implied above, namely, whether these starting assumptions should be automatically accepted as valid, or whether they might reflect a misperception of the world. This is an important issue to address when considering the possibility of a paradigmatic transformation.
Fundamental Orientations
There are two fundamental orientations in the competition paradigm, one of which, not surprisingly, is competition. This reflects the basic assumption that living systems are predominantly competitive, i.e., that life itself is an ongoing competition for scarce resources and, hence, for survival. This competitive orientation is believed to exist within as well as between species, at any point in time as well as across the eons of evolution. Competition, in essence, is seen as an inherent and inevitable condition of existence. As a result, we have designed our various institutions to take this competition into account. Collectively, our political economic institutions promote competition, regulate it, address its negative consequences, and make some of it illegal. Underlying all of these approaches is the basic belief that competition is a given and thus we should take advantage of it where we can and restrict it where it is problematic.
This leads naturally to the second fundamental orientation. Since competition is often harmful, to the individuals involved as well as to the broader collective, it becomes imperative to control the forms of competition that are believed to bring undue harm. Control – through rules and punishment – is the most apparent method to use to prevent people from competing unfairly and hurting others in the process. Control is also viewed more generally in the competition paradigm as the most effective mechanism through which to limit or eliminate behaviors and activities considered to be harmful, sinful, or immoral.2 In other words, reliance on various control tactics is the primary means of preventing people from doing anything viewed as inappropriate by those in charge of the control system. While the authority to decide what to control is vested in the state, religious institutions have, over the years, exerted considerable influence on our collective definitions of what kinds of behavior should be controlled.
Ultimately, this orientation towards competition and control permeates families, schools, organizations, and governments around the world. In each of these institutions, competition among individuals is implicitly and/or explicitly encouraged, with successful competitors rewarded with more love, better grades, higher profits, and greater power. The process of socialization through childhood and adolescence is designed to instill the competitive mindset necessary for success as an adult. Likewise, parents, teachers, managers, and politicians implement a whole host of control mechanisms intended to constrain the undesirable behavior of children, students, subordinates, and citizens. Since much of the problematic behavior in the world is exhibited by those who are “losers” in the competition sponsored by these various institutions, all this control quite naturally breeds further alienation and rebellion among those who already feel like they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. Their dysfunctional behavior leads in turn to a broader array of social problems that justify the implementation of additional control mechanisms designed to repress the problems and mitigate their effects on society. The “us versus them” mentality generated by these dynamics exacerbates the competitive orientation among people as they strive to salvage whatever self-esteem and material well-being they can within the constraints of a harsh, uncaring, “dog-eat-dog” world.
Primary Objectives
Two primary objectives drive the bulk of human activity in the dominant paradigm. The first of these is economic growth. This objective is based on the assumption that improvement in the economic or material standard of living of individuals and communities is the most important or direct means of enhancing quality of life. In other words, “progress” for human civilization is viewed as being achieved almost exclusively through economic development. With economic growth thus widely viewed as the key indicator, if not definition, of our collective well-being, the world's political economy is designed to promote such growth. The fall of communism has resulted in nearly universal consensus among the nations of the world that free-market capitalism is clearly the best system through which to achieve economic growth and the attendant societal improvement. Thus, the policy agenda of the developed world is to open up the markets of developing countries in order to expand the operations of multinational corporations into these countries and thus spur further economic development.
This growth objective in turn drives the actions of nations, communities, organizations, and individuals. At each of these levels, actors in the political economy are encouraged to compete for a greater share of the pool of material resources and wealth available for use in human civilization. The resources themselves are believed to be scarce, thus requiring a competitive marketplace through which to allocate or distribute them efficiently. In contrast, a somewhat paradoxical premise is that the efficient transformation of natural resources into the myriad products and services available for human consumption will increase the overall level of wealth in the world. However, since the distribution of this wealth is also determined through the competition-based political economy, those with the most power and money are able to secure for themselves a disproportionate share of the wealth created by the system, exacerbating an already unequal distribution of the world’s basic necessities.
The system’s unquenchable thirst for continued economic growth also remains the primary objective despite mounting evidence that it is causing irreparable damage to human and natural environments and threatening global sustainability (Cobb, 1995). Growing collective recognition of the costs of unbridled growth has resulted in the emergence of various constraints (e.g., environmental protection regulation) designed to mitigate the problems and thus protect our collective well-being. However, the creation and implementation of these constraints is a difficult, costly, and largely ineffective process because, ultimately, the competition paradigm honors and rewards self-interested accumulation of money, resources, and power more than it does the promotion and protection of the shared interests resulting from humanity’s collective interdependence.
The second primary objective in the competition paradigm is consumption, which is manifested culturally as the aggregate set of ideas and activities associated with the development, production, marketing, purchase, and use of consumer goods and services. Consumption is the primary modality through which economic growth can occur, and thus is a necessary counterpart to the growth objective. As a result, the most important roles individuals play in the dominant paradigm are as producers and as consumers. As consumers, people are continuously encouraged by the corporate media-delivered mass-marketing system of the free market economy to maximize their purchases and expenditures and to increase their debt to do so. As producers, on the other hand, individuals are treated as job-seekers whose pay and benefits are viewed as the reward for contributing to the process of economic growth. Unfortunately, the incentives of capitalism are designed to keep wages as low as possible so as to improve bottom-line indicators of profit and growth. This profit is then distributed to the suppliers of financial capital, those same institutions (and the individuals who own them) which provide the consumer credit that helps to support consumption, i.e., the “demand” side of the equation needed to spur economic growth. Essentially, humans have become simply the means through which to pursue the growth objective and thus insure the continued wealth accumulation and power maintenance of the richest people on the planet.
All in all, the “borrow, spend, and grow” pattern generated by the dominant political economy constitutes a rather vicious cycle for individuals, organizations, and nations. At the national level, the financial crises exhibited by developing countries around the world are due in large part to the high levels of debt they have incurred by borrowing from financial institutions in developed countries in an effort to stimulate economic growth. Organizations are caught up in an increasingly competitive economy in which they have to sell more and more in order to acquire the capital needed to expand operations so as to insure their ongoing profitability and ultimate survival. Individuals become slaves to their jobs in order to afford the large mortgages and/or credit card payments that pay for the material objects and personal services which the dominant paradigm extols as the primary determinants of a high quality of life. What is apparently overlooked in the whole process, however, is that any competitive system has losers as well as winners, costs as well as benefits. By definition, not every nation, organization, or person can win, and not all “growth” improves societal well-being. Unfortunately, under current economic policies and accounting methods, resources allocated to addressing the personal and social costs of competition are simply tallied as additional economic growth (Hawken, 1993).
Core Themes
Four core themes generate and reinforce the dominant paradigm's emphasis on competition and control, economic growth and consumption. The first of these is scientism. Scientism can be thought of as the assumption that the “rules of science,” i.e., the basic beliefs defining the nature and focus of legitimate scientific endeavor, generate ultimate truth. Historically, science has come to be defined partly in terms of its contrast with religion, and the corresponding distinction between fact and faith. The validity of religious beliefs is suspect from a scientific perspective, since they cannot be verified by the scientific method. In the dominant paradigm, knowledge is, for the most part, accepted as true or real only if it has been gained through a scientific process. But this process is based on additional starting assumptions which create inherent biases that limit its scope and thus circumscribe our collective definition of reality.
First, the general purpose of science is to understand the universe. This is accomplished by identifying patterns in the activity of the subject of study (cf. Stewart, 1995), making the subject more predictable and thus, ultimately, more controllable. A key aspect of this effort is the identification of cause-effect relationships through an iterative process of generating hypotheses and testing them with data. Second, the only legitimate data are those which can be measured, which basically means that the only evidence accepted by science is that which can be obtained through the five senses (including technological “extensions” of our sensory inputs). In essence, this limits the focus of legitimate scientific study to the material world, which means in turn that only the material world is defined as real in the competition paradigm. Third, the scientific process is grounded in a mechanistic worldview, in which scientific efforts to explain the nature of reality reflect reductionist thinking, i.e., the notion that “wholes” are best understood only in terms of their “parts.” Reductionism in turn leads to fragmentation, i.e., the whole is divided into smaller and smaller parts for more and more specialized study. Fourth, science is inherently skeptical and thus conservative, in that new ideas, theories, and explanations are not accepted as valid until they have been adequately confirmed through testing and/or the accumulation of data.