The complexities of competition
Things like The Bachelor are great, if you love snotty, conniving drama
Comments (...)When did everything we do become a competition? Perhaps Charlie Sheen said it best: “Winning. Duh!”
I mean, I get it, when it comes to certain types of things. During the Super Bowl, someone asked who I was rooting for, so I asked who they were rooting for. I didn’t care who won, but I took the opposite team that they wanted. That created competition between us as well as on the field, which led to some fun banter followed by insults, hurt feelings and fisticuffs. But that’s sports and sports are all about competition.
Competition has spilled over into almost everything we do. I think it’s partly an American tradition in the spirit of free enterprise. Perhaps it’s deeper than that — survival of any species relies on competition.
Only the strong survive. Or maybe the smartest survive. Or maybe those most adaptable to change survive. Or maybe those who cheat best survive. Or maybe it’s the prettiest, the funniest, the richest?
We were watching TV the other night, and my wife flipped over during commercials to The Bachelor, a show where young women compete for the affections of one man. Now, there’s some riveting television, I guess, if you like snotty, backbiting, conniving drama.
Dating in the real world, I reckon, is a sort of competition. If you’re single and looking, you try to smile and say funny things; anything to get attention and shine above the others. But that competition involves natural selection.
The Bachelor is an artificial selection process. Candidates are selected and compete weekly; new candidates are never introduced midstream as they would in real life. Plus, no one on the show would have any trouble dating on their own. The guys are always chiseled. The women are all slender and attractive. Do they really need a contest? In natural selection, half the women would have moved on after the first episode.
In real life, you might date someone awhile, and if it doesn’t click, you move on to someone else. On TV, the guy dates 25 women simultaneously and weeds them out one-by-one. I find the whole process to be insulting. Love is an area where we don’t need to take sides and form teams.
You could take the word “Bachelor” and replace it with “candidate” and you’d have the presidential election process. We choose sides and team loyalty becomes more important than the candidates themselves. We can pretend that it’s the strongest and smartest who survive, but let’s face it, being pretty doesn’t hurt. Nor does the ability to lie and deceive. It’d be interesting to know the percentage of people who vote based on party affiliation, the percent who vote on gut feelings of trust, the number who make random choices in the voting booth and how many vote based on false assumptions perpetuated by the other candidate.
In Illinois, you can see the problem with our team spirit in both politics and in baseball. Here, you’re either a Cubs fan or a Cardinal fans with a handful of imports who like teams from their native states. Clearly, the St. Louis Cardinals are a better bet. The Chicago Cubs haven’t won a World Series in more than 100 years; yet there are thousands of die-hard Cubs fans who just know that this is gonna be their year. It doesn’t matter to them whether the team is any good. They cast their vote in defiance of sound logic.
That’s fine, even fun, in baseball and football. I just think the presidency and personal love — aka The Bachelor — deserve more complex consideration than team loyalty and our natural desire to win despite the costs of winning.
A loser who can lie, steal, cheat and deceive his way into a win is still a loser. It’s more than a hollow victory; it’s a sham that we’re often all too willing to place on ourselves. We deserve better for ourselves.
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© Copyright 2012 by David Porter, who can be reached at david@ramblinman.us. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Go Cubbies.
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