Our second present belief that we have carried to the extreme is Competition. Where some competition, in some things, is a good and necessary thing, we have turned the whole world, and all of life into an ugly dog-eat-dog lifestyle that is pulling the very fabric of our humanity apart. Adam Smith, a philosopher, first formally introduced competition to Western cultures in the mid 1700s. He put together a system of economics, which was published in 1776, the same year that the U.S. was formed, and thus the U.S. adopted it as their economic system. Smith’s economics is based on a simple idea, which says in effect that the base, innate character of humans is selfishness. This idea was then reinforced in 1859 when Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, which was quickly called the “survival of the fittest” i.e., the selfish one wins. Then in 1976 Richard Dawkins, a biologist, wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene.” And now we have infected the whole world, and competition is spiraling out of control, becoming the primary rule lying under all our activities. “Nice guys finish last,” “no one likes a loser,” or the rule that came out of the Chicago Business school: “It is your responsibility to have the best bottom line possible, even if you have to lie, cheat and break the law to do so.” But even worse than this is the fact that extreme competition leads to preference for short-term gain over long-term thinking and sustainability.  

But it does not need to be that way. In the new worldview cooperation will replace competition as the primary system of choice, and this shift has already started. As early as the 1950s a mathematician, John Nash, showed that a cooperative economic system was not only possible but would be superior, but he was not recognized until 1994 when he received the Noble Prize for economics. Also as early as the 1970s a new movement within business emerged referred to as “CSR” or corporate social responsibility, and this movement has had new and growing momentum over the last 15 years.

Another trend can be seen in the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize given to Muhammad Yunuss for his microlender Grameen Bank. The Grameen bank also underscores a growing number of cooperative sub-economic systems referred to as alternative currencies. “And finally, economic measures such as gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP) typically used to gauge how well a country is doing, are being challenged by a new generation of indicators, including the United Nations Human Development Index (HNH), Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index (GNH), the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, and the Happy Planet Index.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com