No Contest: The Case against Competition

Abstract

Precisely because we are so immersed in it, competition can easily escape our notice. A fish does not reflect on the nature of water, Walker Percy once remarked, cannot imagine its absence, so he cannot consider its presence.' Even those who think and write for a living have paid surprisingly little attention to the subject. In the last fifty years, for example, no one has written a book that explores the very idea of competition and the way it plays itself out in all the varied arenas of human life. I do not mean a lament about what has happened to sports today or a recipe for being a winner in business or a statistical operation performed on abstractions that issue from experimental games. These roll off the presses regularly. I mean a took at what it really means to try to beat other people, a careful investigation of this arrangement that requires some people to fail in order that others can succeed.