Between competition and hypocrisy

Competition has, in the humanities, become a very dirty word. Along with the notion of personal responsibility, it is largely denounced as a somewhat unnatural proscription of neoliberal policies that has been foisted upon academics and cultural workers, who are believed to be more inclined towards collaboration and cooperation. 

Competition is here characterized as a cut-throat practice where individuals engage in malevolent and underhanded tactics to greedily accumulate resources for themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Competition is understood as a fundamental characteristic of free market capitalism; a zero-sum game which atomizes communities and valorizes narcissistic self-interest.

This understanding of competition as the opposite of cooperation is a dire misunderstanding of the concept. It is a misunderstanding that underwrites the social justice activism of many humanities scholars, and the astonishing delusion that they are above such base practices.

First and foremost, competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive values, but rather, are entwined processes. This is demonstrated by all sports, from the impromptu soccer game amongst 8 year old kids in the local park, through to elite-level mixed martial artists. In all cases individuals have agreed to engage in a game with stable set of rules; this requires cooperation. Fair competition between individuals and teams requires a commitment to these rules, what are in effect, agreed-upon social codes. Yes there are winners and losers, however, the value placed on good sportsmanship testifies to the fact that winning is not the only value being performed in such a game.

As scholars like Mises, Hayek and Kirzner have elaborated, a properly functioning competitive free market similarly requires cooperation. Indeed, in order to overcome the zero-sum contest for scarce resources that characterizes a state of nature, submission to the rules of the capitalist game enables people to substitute out-and-out conflict for cooperation. And just like a game of soccer, fair competition between participating individuals is central to the proper functioning of the game. As a consequence, we have a complex and diverse set of relationships to all other participants. Some people are on our team, and others are not. Some people are clearly more talented than others, some waste their talent, and others capitalize on it. There are some star players and a lot of hard workers that go relatively unnoticed, but who are non-the-less successful. But engagement in competition is what facilitates the possibility of win-win scenarios; which might be defined as the freedom and ability to attend to our own welfare, and participate within a community such that we do not negatively impact the welfare of others. 

As these Austrian School economists elaborate, as long as no one is excluded from competing, then competition is fair.

Insofar as career advancement is a highly politicized process, scholars tend to emulate these more underhanded attempts to rig the game by eliminating the competition.

What is interesting to me is that in the university, which is presumably guarded by humanities scholars as a sanctuary safe from the vagaries of capitalist competition, are in my experience significantly more cut-throat. For example, someone recently attempted to have a colleague of mine fired by informing their employer that they were "right-wing".

What this anonymous colleague attempted to do was to capitalize upon the fact that my friend is an ideological minority in their department, they attempted to exercise their political influence to eliminate a competitor in the labour market. This is the cut-throat attitude ordinarily attributed to neoliberalism. 

A more cooperative strategy that this anonymous complainant may have adopted would be to compete for contracts based on demonstrated ability and productivity, or engage in a battle of ideas by challenging my friend to a debate and thereby win favor as a superior thinker.

No, instead of taking the capitalist-competitive-cooperative route, or what might be accurately referred to as the path of integrity, they opted for the cut-throat neoliberal option that they apparently despise so deeply. 

So what is the lesson here? Don’t assess someone's values based on what they say, but rather, what they do. While I am given to believe that this anonymous competitor likely refers to their more favoured colleagues as comrade, their actions demonstrate a proclivity towards underhanded neoliberal practices to work their way up the university hierarchy.