Winning Isn't Everything...

...Or Is It?

My current read is How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer. In Chapter 7, discussing Italian soccer, he makes a tertiary comment (yes, again, Timm) wherein he quotes Inter Milan fans who praise the superiority of their team's "anti-Bush, anti-Berlusconi, anti-American" worldview, where "there are some things more important than winning."

Is this the case? Are there more important things than winning? I don't know that there are. Of course, that is a qualified statement, namely that winning can be stated differently in a lot of different situations: winning in business may not be making the most money, etc. Nevertheless, I find it very difficult to buy into the belief that a loss with honor is better than a victory with dishonor. Winning and losing here does not refer to the short-term, as, in many ways and fields a dishonorable win can hurt you long-term. It is my opinion that the honorable, ethical way leads to long-term victory, but that's another digression.

Why would I believe in such a cutthroat belief, even backed by what you might call a "soft" undertone? It's because I am an unabashed capitalist. Quite frankly, the capitalist system rewards people who work smart and work hard. It is very brutal in its assignment of winners and losers, but it is ultimately the best system to adequately define the relative merit of each individual's contribution to the whole. And the only way for capitalism to work is to reward the winners and punish the losers.

So there's the macroscopic ethos. On the personal level then, it is thus the responsibility of us as individuals to pursue winning. It is the responsibility of the government to keep the losers in the capitalist race from suffering too badly, but this must be done without deterring the winners from making society better. Those are the two things that social anarchists have never been able to appropriately answer (usually they slide around the question). Society does not advance, morally, ethically, technologically, economically, or in any other legitimate form of human measure by actively punishing the winners for winning and rewarding the losers for losing. It's the old point that communism equalizes society by bringing the top down, not the bottom up. I believe that capitalism is the best system for bringing the bottom up, but I don't have the time tonight to explore that in the depth it requires. You have to reward those who improve/provide a useful good to society, even stupid, mundane things that we consider bland, like insurance ;-) The second point is that people aren't altruistic, by and large. This ties into the above point. If all people wanted was for the society to get better, then we wouldn't need to reward achievers. But this is obviously not the case. Again, capitalism is the best way to do this. The market is brutally effective, both at rewarding risk-takers and innovators, and at valuing the relative contributrion of each task to society.

If you've ever won anything, you know the feeling of elation that it gives you. That, most of all is why we must strive for victory, because it makes us feel good about ourselves. So, as Vince Lombardi says, Winning Really Is the Only Thing.

Peace