Competition Vs Compassion? No Contest
By Victoria Pendragon
Compassion is an underrated virtue in the USA. I can’t speak for how it is in other countries, but here, where I live, I am regularly made aware of what seems like a general disregard for the wellbeing of others. This country, governed as it is by a corporate mentality in which emphasis is on the mindless acquisition of material goods, seems to have generated an almost complete disregard for people themselves. Common sense, generosity, and compassion have actually become newsworthy, so rare are they.
I’m imagining that this happened slowly, possibly beginning in the 1950’s when the science of advertising began to promulgate rampant consumerism by vaulting the personal image to a position of critical importance. In other words, advertising specifically designed for maximum effect on buyers, began to make “I” far more important than “we.” “We,” then, became the competition. Add to that the creation and marketing of products on practically perfect bodies – bodies that are natural to perhaps less than 1% of the world population, bodies the likes of which most of us could never achieve even if we wanted to – and you have a gourmet recipe for self loathing, the end result of which is a person totally focused on, yet simultaneously loathing, him or herself. Since a person who hates him or herself is unable to extend love to anyone else, the outcome of this contrived condition is a serious lack of compassion.
This century’s addition to the mix is reality TV which, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity that real life so frequently offers to learn from the human experience, instead encourages the populace to focus on the individual personalities and quirks of the so-called stars of the shows. These “Look-At-Me” programs yield an end result that has members of their audiences feeling themselves worthy of the same attention.
Good parenting, the sort where children are given sensible boundaries, are emotionally supported, praised for good work, reasonably admonished for errors in judgment, and loved unconditionally, could make up for the vagaries of the world outside the family. However good parenting sustained a knee in the groin when the American quest for ‘more and bigger’ demanded that both parents work to support that habit. It’s difficult to have enough quality parenting when the quantity is so drastically curtailed.
In some cultures, children are raised by their villages, a wonderful, sensible idea and a smart way to build a mindset of compassion. Co-operation is a natural breeding ground for compassion. Competition isn’t and America has become the land of the competitive.
Competition forces you to focus on yourself and your abilities to the exclusion of others. It forces you to focus on the ‘less-than’ aspects of yourself because improvement is always necessary if your goal is to be the best, since you have to know what it is about yourself that needs to be improved. This kind of constant attention to self-improvement, married to a mindset that the only worthwhile position in the word is being a winner, is more or less ubiquitous in these days when practically everything seems to be fodder for a contest.
Many years ago The Onion, a satirical newspaper now published online, ran a brief (and bogus, naturally) piece on a meditation competition, possibly because in these United States someone just might be crazy enough to do that. And who’s really the biggest loser in this nation-wide miasma of competition? Everyone.
Human history is dotted with stories of people who have gone out of their way to help people they have never met, people who have sacrificed their own lives to save another. We call those people heroes because those of us who have not experienced that drive – and it is a compelling one – find it difficult to imagine ourselves doing that. But in moments of crises, there is no thinking, there are no decisions to be made, because our innate nature is to save, support and sustain life. It is who we are as a species. As a species also we can and will kill in self defense when our lives are in danger, and that impulse comes from the exact same place, from our DNA, from a drive, not to kill, but to save life. War, the ultimate competition, is born, not of the body, but of the mind. We are, by nature, compassionate beings, designed to support life by supporting each other.
In a world where we have the technology to see to it that no one goes hungry, politics, wars, and corporate greed – all competition based – see to it that millions around the world die daily from hunger. In a world where the resources exist for every person to be educated wisely and well, there exist places where those in power see to it that ignorance is fostered, for only then can they stay on top. In a world where competition rules, billions of us suffer.
Perhaps as we move into the Aquarian age we will begin to see a gradual return to our essential compassionate nature. Perhaps we will see humanity working together as the one tribe that we are, caring for each other, for life itself, and this planet upon which we live.
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