Competition's Last Stand
Social Liberalism is allergic to competition and aims to remove it from the American diet at all costs. Without it, we will all starve.
Ambition is the fuel that propels the engine of progress. Practically all successful people are highly ambitious, or else they would not have achieved so much. Without human ambition, civilization would not evolve. There would be less technology, but also less bloodshed. I will not venture to prove what’s better: a world of peaceful bystanders or a turbulent world of go-getters. To me, it’s fairly obvious that human ambition has been an outsized net-positive to humanity.
That being said, not everybody can be super-ambitious. Not everybody can be a Lebron or a Jordan. Role-players are the foundation of any good team and, just like the ‘96 Bulls, the human race needs a balance of superstars (who represent highly ambitious people) and role-players (who represent less ambitious people) to optimize performance. However, as technology advances, this scale changes, and the millions of people pejoratively referred to as ‘cogs in the wheel’ are being replaced. Such changes reduce the need for replaceable role-players and free up the roster for superstars, AKA ambitious people.
Ambition’s Secret Ingredient
Ambition, as is any emotion, is the sum of several different (often unknown) variables. Logically, a meritocratic system with many opportunities engenders ambition. Emotion plays a role as well, and feelings of agency, purpose, and confidence further inspire ambition in most people. Luckily, we live in a relatively free society, despite growing regulations, and understand the importance of self-confidence. We also encourage humanitarianism, a deontologically good driver of ambition, but it is not aligned with human nature and is thus thoroughly unpopular. What our countrymen fail to understand is that ambition requires much more than job openings, good self-esteem, and altruism. Hidden behind years of deprecatory propaganda, the secret ingredient to ambition is competition.
Competition between separate parties is incredibly effective. It’s proven that two horses racing will run faster than one would solo. Though this may be the only type of competition discussed in classrooms and at the dinner table, competition with oneself, or “self-competition,” is equally important and even more useful in modern America.
Truly ambitious people are not striving to be better than others, they are striving to be better than themselves. These things are not mutually exclusive, but the crux of most dogged motivation is that Jared tomorrow should be better than Jared yesterday. This type of competition is stressful, exhausting, and less common than normal competition. Unlike exogenous competition, however, self-competition is healthy for society and offers people purpose beyond finite accomplishments.
Unfortunately, few people have self-competition at the top of their minds. It should come as no surprise then that, despite more education and social mobility than ever, American ambition is in a state of inertia. The American dream lives on, but ambition is stuck in the rut without self-competition.
Money Corrupts
As this is being written from the Western perspective, a rough definition of a successful society is a society that supports freedom, opportunity, health, and security. By this criteria, a state will need a vast amount of wealth to ensure it can support these four pillars and be successful. This is indicated in the near-perfect correlation between prosperity and societal wealth when considering Western nations. But money can corrupt as much as it empowers. Recall the Prodigal Son. Conferred with great wealth and support from his father, he loses all ambition and eventually finds himself falling down the abyss of poverty and purposelessness. Rich countries, just like many rich parents, breed Prodigal Sons.
That being said, countries move much slower than individuals and the time it takes to unravel the values of a national identity takes decades, if not centuries. Generations do not become prodigal overnight, but step by step they lose the mindset and philosophy that once defined them. This cultural revolution leads societies to place equality and leisure at top of mind and freedom, competition, and work on the back burner. Love it or hate it, this double-edged sword is Progressivism AKA Social Liberalism or Leftism. The bond between wealth and Progressivism is so strong, that there are almost no examples in human history where a wealthy state did not become more Socially Liberal as it grew enriched.
Where does the United States land on this journey? Though we are born of and predicated on Classical Liberalism, Social Liberalism is slowly becoming the popular philosophy. Take into account the correlations we just discussed and this should be fairly obvious.
Social Liberalism offers many appealing and supportive policies, especially catering to the less fortunate. I won't endeavor to make a pros and cons list of Progressivism, but instead, I will relate it back to ambition’s Secret Ingredient: competition.
Progressivism’s War on Competition
Progressives hold equality paramount and regard maintaining equality as the government’s foremost duty. This can most clearly be seen in planned Progressive economics, where equity comes before competition. John Locke, the father of Classical Liberalism, called equal rights Natural Rights, so it should not be counterculture to consider equality paramount. Classical and Social Liberalism do not diverge in how much they value equality, but in how they define it. Whereas Locke sees equality as equality of rights, Progressives view it as somewhere near equality of outcome. We’ll call this last bit equity.
Equity does not allow for competition. The free market is obviously unwelcome in Progressive economies, but because inequality exists outside of the realm of finance, Progressive policy must pervade society at a cultural level as well. As America becomes more and more Progressive, we are slowly replacing equal rights with equal outcomes. Beginning in youth, children are incentivized to conform and equalize rather than to compete. If you haven’t been to an American elementary school lately, you may be surprised to notice that, aside from grades, merit-based rewarding is practically abolished. Advanced math classes are becoming a thing of the past. Even in sports, the purest form of competition, every kid gets a trophy. These are all manifestations of an equality-above-all philosophy that favors equality of outcome over performance, by means of abolishing competition.
Part and parcel of equity is the victimization of groups considered to be disenfranchised. Common examples of victimized groups include racial minorities, B-teams in athletics, lower reading levels, or lower income brackets. Whether you believe someone to be deserving of an artificial boost or not, equity eats away at meritocracy like a parasite. It is a lose-lose game for the Victim and the Victimizer. The Victimizer is stripped of opportunities and often self-respect, while the Victim loses feelings of agency. Let’s break down the potential side effects one side at a time:
The Victim Dichotomy
The Victimizer; symptoms include:
Feelings of self-hatred and unworthiness due to unwarranted guilt-mongering
Material loss of opportunities as a result of affirmative action
The Victim; symptoms include:
Feelings of impotence as victims are merely products of their surroundings
Entitlement due to not getting what one thinks they inherently deserve
Indolence stemming from equity handouts
The equity-powered Victim Dichotomy has one enemy overall: competition. The Victimizer is stunted and their competitive ability is artificially reduced. Harrison Bergeron in living color. Simultaneously, the Victim then uses their victimization as a pretext to preclude them from competition, especially self-competition. Because self-competition is more valuable to ambition than external competition, per the reasons delineated above, the Victim Dichotomy is even more harmful to the Victim’s ambitions than the alleged Victimizer. Ironic.
Politically, Social LIberalism has snuffed the proverbial fire under the ass of most Americans. The birth of the American Welfare State and the Great Society reforms have given a sizable safety net to most Americans. These safety nets have ballooned so sizable that the average American can enjoy a life of mediocre wealth (compared to global standards) without ever having to compete to add value to the economy. Safety nets are a great advantage of societal wealth, but this gift can become a curse in the hands of the undeserving recipient. Remember the Prodigal Son. Unfortunately, due to the easy access and high monetary value of these benefits, many Americans are disincentivized to compete with others or themselves for a fair living. I am not talking about perpetual welfare abusers, I am talking about the regular fellas who would normally strive for more than the bare minimum but don’t because the minimum isn't so bad. Leeches will be leeches in any society, but an over-indulgent welfare state can turn strivers into layabouts. No normal person wants to live off welfare, but why engage in arduous competition when you can get by fine with handouts? So the cycle continues.
Successful Society → Wealthy Society → Progressive Trends → Equity → Anti-Competition → Lack of Ambition → You Get the Gist
A less ambitious society inexorably leads to hardship and negative growth. This in turn leads to a loss of wealth and the socio-political pendulum swinging away from Social Liberalism. As competition is welcomed back into the mainstream, ambition will return to the masses. So long as evil does not pervert the inventions of the ambitious, which it unfortunately often does, a new generation of success should follow suit.
Prognosis Negative
In the last decade, the United States has experienced unprecedented wealth gain and the rapid popularization of Progressivism. The common man is beginning to realize that equity is not the same as equality and that the cultural fabric of America is tearing. Whether they realize it or not, equity is in direct contravention to competition, and without competition, the fuel for American prosperity will dry. These anti-competitive ideologies first infect the youth and proceed to grow in national influence as generations age. Gen Z is the first generation of truly widespread Progressivism and studies show that over half of Gen Z’ers disavow traditional American values, a direct result of the Victim Dichotomy. The worst is yet to come, for when these young people reach the primes of their lives, the lack of generational ambition will be calamitous.
If you look at our adversaries, they understand that competition is a prerequisite to ambition and success. China, a Communist country, makes a glaring exception to its controlled regime: competition and ambition are not just allowed but encouraged. Unlike failed Communist nations, the CCP fosters academic and technological competition and Chinese adolescents are running laps around Gen Z because of it. If we do not welcome competition with open arms, beg and plead for its forgiveness, we will be overtaken by those who have.
Unfortunately, this would be an unprecedented feat. The Wealth-Progressive Spiral has proven almost impossible to beat without an exogenous force, like a war, precipitating such a change. I would love to offer simple solutions but our situation seems dire. I would start by reforming public education to reintroduce competition, especially self-competition. Beyond this, families must lead the charge in staving off the victim mentality in their children. This is perhaps the most corrosive anti-competitive mind-rot and it shows no signs of stopping. More than any of this, the epiphany that there is no ambition without competition could be impetus enough to shock the system into recovery – at least that’s what I’m trying to do here.