Win or Not to Win?

I was talking to an acquaintance recently who expressed an intense competition with other companies in his industry. He knew their weak points and spent a good deal of time assessing their strategies and motives. If company X does this, will company Y undercut it and so on.

My immediate reaction (must be my liberal upbringing; the closest I’ve even come to a sport is yoga and it’s non-competitive) was why would I care about what another company was doing? Why wouldn’t I just try to do my best where I was and be glad that there were other companies out there in my industry giving people jobs? (Plus I sort of feel guilty about engaging in open competition, like it’s tacky, given that when you do, someone has to lose. Is it really a pleasure to win at another’s expense?)

I’m not sure I won this acquaintance over. But it reminded me of a favorite story of mine about my son Vincent when he was about eight years old. He was in a YMCA swimming class and his coach pitted him against another little boy in a race. Both children were the top in the class. When they dove into the water and began their splashy mad dash toward the other end of the pool, the other little boy kept straining to see where Vincent was and in the process got behind and lost the race. When Vincent got out of the pool, I told him what I saw and asked what he was looking at. “I was just focusing on the wall,” he said innocently.

What does this have to do with good and evil, you may well be asking at this point? Stay with me. Separately, I was reading this book called “The Sociopath Next Door,” written by this psychiatrist who says one in 25 people are actually biologically and psychologically without a conscience. Apparently they aren’t all serial killers, many look like normal people, only they have a secret, they don’t have any guilt or remorse over what they do to others, nothing to stop them from doing just about anything. (Scary stuff. I couldn’t find anything else to read that weekend.)

Anyway, in psychiatric terms a person without a conscience is the equivalent to evil and the person with a conscience is closer to God, or good. Which brings me to this question: How do we fool our conscience to do bad things to other people (like war, it’s for a just cause) and how do we do it in smaller ways, for instance, wishing another company ill because you share the same customers and business. That kind of competition is deemed to be okay, because we’re a high achieving society, it’s almost like a moral lesson. Win at all costs.

Final question: What does it really mean to win?