Number 29. The Olympians
Insofar as competition is the measure of oneself against another, it entails
the view that the other is more important than oneself. Otherwise, it would
be sufficient to measure oneself against oneself (a past self, a hoped-for
future self) or against some absolute standard not necessarily related to
any self. Such an other-regarding view usually indicates low self-esteem.
It does no good to claim that one competes, rather, to better one's own
best: it must be asked why one needs to perform alongside another in order
to better oneself - a stopwatch or tape measure or videotape should suffice.
That such competing against oneself is insufficient to bring out one's best
suggests, again, that what matters is what the other does, thinks, etc.
This seems odd, though: most world class athletes have such self-discipline
and have achieved such a level of excellence that for their self-esteem to
remain low, they'd have to be quite out of touch with reality. Bingo.
The hierarchal nature of competitive sport is such that the context for
comparison keeps getting narrower: as one excels, one compares oneself to a
smaller and smaller pool of others who also excel; and the measure of
difference becomes equally smaller and smaller. So unless the competitor
keeps in mind the larger left-behind contexts, or the similarities of
amazing achievement, one's self-esteem ends up depending on a mere ten or
twenty out of six billion people, and a mere two seconds in a four-minute
race or a few hundredths of a point out of ten.
I don't mean to suggest, however, that this display of low self-esteem is
all there is to competition. Surely there is much more, especially when the
competition is as big as the Olympics: a chance for businesses to advertise
unnecessary or exploitive products, a chance for petty nationalism to strut
its stuff, a chance to misspend resources (surely clean water matters more
than whether A can jump 1 cm higher than B), etc.
Nor do I mean to suggest that I won't be watching the Olympics. I fully
applaud the pursuit and display of excellence - but why doesn't sport, like
art, have non-competitive events? True, the arts also have their dance
competitions and their music competitions; but more common are simply the
performances - the pure celebrations of excellence.
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