Something’s been on my mind lately about competition and how we evolve due to it.  I think about YouTube and 3 million TV channels and the massive increase of awareness of other people’s “best” and how it would make people better.

In my opinion, competition brings out the best.  You get five kids in the schoolyard doing some sport, and they’re each trying to be the best out of the five.  When the scope only includes that schoolyard, or a small city, or a tribe, people who would be considered “legends” by those around them might not even compare to the “legend” from a different city or tribe who had inherently better athletes.

But now the scope is huge.  And growing.  Let’s say I a kid was top trumpet in 9th grade, but the band only had 17 members.  Then I the kid moves to a band with 200+ members.  The top trumpet there was Louis Armstong compared to me the kid.  There’s no doubt that the top trumpet in a 200+ member band is amazing.  But what if was a 2000+ member band?  Or a hundred 200+ member bands?

How far can we go with excellence? 

As we incrementally increase how big “the band” is in all areas of life – music, sports, leadership, ideas, patents, crafts, honesty, integrity, programming skills — it seems only natural to me that the “best” will also incrementally improve.  I look forward to how good our best can be and it fills me with a sense of pride.

And yet we still have the Idiocracy problem.  The best breeders aren’t breeding as often as the worst.   The people having the most kids are low-skilled and entitlement-hungry.  Where you would have normally surmised that the weak branches break off the tree in the winter, making the tree stronger, we have a system that favors the weak branches and stops Mother Nature from doing her job.

It reminds me of Forrest Carter’s “Education of Little Tree” where it says

Don’t feel sad, Little Tree. It is The Way. Tal-con [the hawk] caught the slow [quail] and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow. Tal-con eats a thousand ground rats who eat the eggs of the quail — both the quick and the slow eggs — and so Tal-con lives by the Way. He helps the quail. … Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. Take the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat. … Only Ti-bi, the bee, stores more than he can use… and so he is robbed by the bear, and the ‘coon… and the Cherokee. It is so with people who store and fat themselves with more than their share. They will say a flag stands for their right to do this… and men will die because of the words and the flag… but they will not change the rules of The Way.

So while he goes on about flags and men, it still makes me feel that we are trying to change the rules of The Way.

So I think my real question is - how do we balance compassion and competition?