Outsiders against competition
From the moment you were conceived your life has been one big competition. Of all those 100 millions of sperm, only one managed to fertilize the egg. Congratulations, you won!
But you can't put your feet up just yet. You were born into a planet already teeming with life and have to compete with eight billion other human beings for survival, recognition, and mates. Furthermore, since the advent of civilization there's a secondary layer of competition in the form of exams and games designed to estimate your worth.
Everything that can be quantified will be quantified. Intelligence, aptitude, skill, physical ability: all can be rated and assigned value in the game of life. Those who fail or drop out are deemed to be losers. Indeed, in a supposedly meritocratic society, wealth and status become equivalent to moral worth, meaning that the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich.
The last thirty years have seen competition cemented into the official policy through the ideological position called Neoliberalism. Briefly put, Margaret Thatcher, following Friedrich Hayek, put forward the view that the market always knows best and that competition helps avoid the inefficiencies of societies like the Soviet Union. Indeed, in what was perceived as a vindication of Neoliberalism, by the end of the 1980s socialism had virtually collapsed leaving free-market global capitalism as the only game in town.
From that moment the idea of competition seeped into everything. Schools, police forces, and hospitals were all assigned targets and placed into league tables. And by the 2000s it felt like every television programme had become competition, whether it was baking, dressmaking, dancing, or singing. We were incapable of seeing the world outside of the idea of winners and losers according to some often dubious pre-existing ideal. To succeed in this world you must play the game and accept the rules no matter how narrow or unsuitable they seem.
The outsider is, fundamentally, a person who doesn't want to play the game or, at the very least, wants to change the rules. Maybe they know that so much of what we believe is entirely contingent on where and when we were born. Maybe they are physically sickened by a game of mindless consumption, cars, the 9-to-5, industrialised animal slaughter, Faustian pacts with technology, click bait news articles, rampant inequality, information overload, and stress. If that is the game, the outsider will not play. Most people accept the world as it is because they are just one person amongst billions, inheritor to thousands of years of progress; who are we to dispute the way things are?
Going along with the herd is a good survival strategy if you want to avoid being trampled, but what if the herd is about to run over a cliff? Consumerism is destroying the planet and making people unhappy. Climate change threatens to bring an end to civilization through a combination of hurricanes, floods, drought, and disease. A world based on the principle of competition becomes so efficient at making money that it forgets that money cannot buy clean air or repair complex ecosystems. This domination of the planet by humans is not real success because don't know what random events the future will bring. A finite planet cannot support infinite growth: this is why we must break the rules or quit the game altogether.
A further problem with making competition an end rather than the means is that success often brings perverse side effects. Take policing, if you reward the number of arrests you tend to get an increase in arrests for minor offences and undermine serious criminal investigations. Take schools, if you judge schools by exam results you encourage narrow teaching about the subjects that will appear in the exam rather than the kind of teaching that might provide a love of learning. By enshrining competition as the ultimate arbiter of success we are assuming that we know what success actually looks like and can be quantified, when it is often far more complicated than we thought.
In his book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, the computer scientist Ken Stanley demonstrates that predetermining the outcome of research via specifications in grant applications leads to less innovative results than if you just pursue what you find most interesting. In practice, this means trusting to people's intuitions and allowing them the space to play.
Stanley offers the example of Steve Jobs who "dropped out of college with no clear objective" and then sat in on a calligraphy class "that led to the idea of screen fonts in the early Macintosh computers, which revolutionized the computer industry." By measuring yourself against pre-established objectives you are shielded from all the serendipitous discoveries that you could never have conceived at the beginning of your investigation. The same thing happens with competition: it is success as Procrustean bed.
In all cases—on an individual level, on a societal level, and on a planetary level— competition as an end in itself is counter-productive. This is not to say that competition should be outlawed, but it should be a side-effect of pursuing things that interest you and encountering others who are doing the same.
The relentless, pointless cycle of work and consumption must be abandoned. Only by withdrawing from it can you hope to hear the voice of intuition. Follow the voice, pursue it wherever it goes, judge decisions by what outcome most interesting, not what accords with what you think the world wants to hear. What the world needs is more diversity, more local ecosystems, more places where serendipity can take hold. Now, more than ever, we need to innovate and co-operate to make the world livable for the next generation.