We Need a Word for Success Without Victory

The American infatuation with being No. 1--conspicuous at work, at school, at play and at home--has lately begun to manifest itself in talk about how our businesses need to become more “competitive.” Virtually every economist, educator and politician chants this annoying buzzword as if it were a mantra, but few seriously consider its implications.

Its use suggests a confusion between excellence and higher productivity, on the one hand, and the desperate quest to beat people, on the other--two concepts that are not only distinct in theory but often antithetical in practice. From such sloppy speech comes sloppy thinking: If we have no language to talk about success without victory, then the very idea ceases to be real for us.

In practical terms, our veneration of competition also leaves us with no way of establishing relationships with others, including other countries, outside of a zero-sum game. As politicians continue to genuflect before the god of Competitiveness--which these days refers chiefly to trying to beat the Japanese--the conditions are established for the needless creation of a new enemy to replace the Soviets.

In fact, the real lesson of the Cold War is not that “we” beat “them” but that both sides have been crippled as a result of an adversarial perspective. The solution is not to compete with the Soviets or the Japanese in non-military matters, but to move beyond competition itself. The concrete question we should be asking now is how, in trade and in other affairs, we can be working with other nations to produce mutually beneficial results. In the long run, we are all losers because of our obsession with being competitive rather than cooperative.