Competition became an Ideal

How true!

“While you believed in competition, then competition became not only a reality but an ideal.  Children are taught to compete against each other.  The child naturally “competes” against herself and himself in an urge to outdo old performance with new.  Competition, however, has been promoted as the ideal at all levels of activity.  It is as if you must look at others to see how you are doing – and when you are taught not to trust your own abilities, then of course you need the opinions of others overmuch.  I am not speaking of any playful competition, obviously, but of a determined, rigorous, desperate, sometimes almost deadly competition, in which a person’s value is determined according to the number of individuals he or she has shunted aside.

“This is carried through in economics, politics, medicine, the sciences, and even the religions.  So, I would like to reinforce the fact that life is indeed a cooperative venture, and that all the steps taken toward the ideal must of themselves be life-promoting.”

(The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 868)