Win Or Lose

 Sometimes I ponder what it is about the way Americans are socialized that makes us so self-destructive of our relationships. One of the things that occurs to me is the American preoccupation with winning and competition. On the one hand, being part of a team and winning is a heady experience. On the other hand, it really does foster an "us versus them" mentality, and it starts young in America.

One of the big differences between school anywhere else and school in America is the school sports team. If you want to go back even further, you see children as young as four or five being introduced to team sports. At that age winning and losing are largely the product of luck, but it gets them used to the idea of winning and being praised and taking pride in that. For some of them it might be the only time they ever get praised or given attention. 

The reason there are school sports in America is tied in with the leisure time idea. At one point economists were predicting that the average person would be working less in the future, and that they would have more time on their hands and thus would need something to fill that time. The powers that be didn't trust us to figure that out for ourselves, and they were worried that we would get up to mischief if they didn't show us the way. They introduced electives in schools. Woodworking, music, debate, various clubs and school sports. 

Of course the sports got subverted into a way to teach kids to be competitive young. This was especially important for the ones who were good at sports but were never going to be able to get by on the brains they were given. Schools in the US have mascots and fight songs. They have "homecoming", which is the first home game of the season, the first game they play on their own field. They dream of winning enough games to go to the state level competition. They form fierce rivalries with neighboring schools. Sometimes there are even college scouts at games looking for talent to add to their team. 

Schools go to great lengths to support the talented high school athletes, to the point of giving them passing grades to allow them to focus on their athletic performance and bring honor to their school. If the athlete gets in trouble, it can disappear or the school and the authorities might look the other way. Apparently the alumni association act a bit like shareholders and complain if the team doesn't win enough. It's a big accomplishment and point of pride among parents and the school when the team goes to state. They hang banners in the gymnasium to commemorate it. Parents go to games and scream bloody murder at each other while their child is on the field. It gets out of hand sometimes with one of them verbally or physically attacking the coach or the referee. 

What Americans don't realize about the rest of the world is that school isn't like this in other places. In most other countries they focus on lessons and passing exams. They don't have a sports program and they don't have any kind of competition. They don't make everything about being a winner or a loser. If you took someone from another country to an American high school football game, they would find it all a bit bizarre. They wouldn't be used to everybody standing for the national anthem with their hand over their heart. They'd wonder what the cheerleaders were about. I think the parents screaming with their faces set in masks of fury would probably frighten them. 

In many ways, Americans don't understand how different things are there to everywhere else. Social culture is completely different. Part of that is definitely connected to this culture of competition. What I always struggled with was that I wasn't particularly competitive or ambitious. I was content with enough, and I didn't need the attention. Besides, I was clumsy, but only when people were watching me. It turns out that I was actually nervous instead of clumsy, but it meant that I was never any good at sports. And before anybody starts about participation trophies, it was the parents who started it. They couldn't stand for their kid to lose, so they gave them a participation trophy and then gave their kid shit for having been given a participation trophy. It's the worst kind of hypocrisy. It comes of parents who try to succeed and compete vicariously through their kid, and it can't be nice for the kid to be taught that they can't win for losing. 

Lastly, I would like to make the observation that when Americans argue, most of the time they're more concerned about winning the argument than they are with having a civilized discussion and arriving at a mutual understanding. I think this tendency to look at it as a matter of winning or losing at all costs, they overlook the possibility of creating a win-win situation. Everything becomes a zero-sum game, and it alienates anyone who sees it differently. It's off-putting, more than anything. It gets in the way of constructive dialogue and prevents us from getting anywhere.