262. WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER - On Not Wanting To Win
I often think about winning.
Not in the way that competitive people do. I don’t spend time plotting out how to win. I’m far from a competitive person. In fact that’s what I spend most of my time thinking about when I think about winning: why do people care so much?
For example, it was only last year, playing Cluedo with my younger niece and nephew, that I realised some players (most players?) actually enter the game with a strategy. I never have. Despite the obvious logic puzzle that a good whodunnit is (eliminating possibilities in a rational manner until only one possibility is left), I myself always just enjoyed making random guesses and crossing things off without any wider thinking about the most useful pieces of information to acquire or efficient strategy for getting it. I simply never cared enough about winning to strategise.
Board games, for me, are very much the journey and not the destination. An excuse to sit around with family or friends and have a chat and a laugh. It never comes into my mind that I would also like to beat those friends and family and win.
These days I’m also a football fan. And like any fan I do want my own team to win, and feel a sense of satisfaction when they do. But unlike many other fans, when we don’t win I am more than happy to acknowledge the strengths of the other team and the deserving nature of their victory. As long as the game was enjoyable to watch, I’m happy whoever wins.
When I watch football on TV and see the crowd shots they use when a goal is missed or a result goes the other way for someone, I usually feel alienated and a little disturbed by the level of despair apparent in every pained grimace. I never want to feel that strongly about a competition I’m not even involved in. After all, we’re only spectators. It wasn’t even us who lost!
Strangely though, being a spectator of a competition — like with the football — tends to be the only time I really care about who wins. Not because I want to win, but because I invest in the hopes and dreams of the people I am watching. It is a sense of compassion and empathy that drives me to hope for victory. I know how much it means to to them that they win, so I hope — for their sake — that they do too. But it is a sensation that is accompanied by a very real sense of bewilderment about why they care so much about it.
I’m not naive or blind: winning is important to people only because capitalism has made it so. Winning is a means, in our rigged and unfair system, for some of our intentionally limited resources or opportunities to be granted to the victor(s). Winning means access to prizes previously forbidden or inaccessible. But it’s important to acknowledge that prizes are a social construct made meaningful only because of their manufactured scarceness or the inequalities we’ve chosen to allow in the distribution of the resources from which the prize comes. People want to win the FA Cup, for example, because of its history and prestige, but its history of prestige is largely because winning the FA Cup translates into more money, either for the players or their clubs. Money that is important in the dog-eat-dog capitalism of professional sports. Not because it makes for better football, but because it makes for better business.
I only want to win the lottery because we live in a world where money is scarce. Give me everything I need, and the lottery loses its allure. The prize of millions of pounds becomes meaningless in a world without the need for excesses of money.
Watching the BBC reality competition, Race Across The World, recently, I have marvelled at people missing out on experiences of a lifetime in countries they have never visited before so they can race across borders at the fastest speed to win not even the competition, but that one leg of the competition. Getting their name in a book first instead of stopping off along the way and seeing something or somewhere extraordinary. The show is compelling precisely because different competitors make different decisions as they race about what they hold valuable and how they want to balance winning against not missing out on precious moments. But the show only works in this way because we live in a world where travel is expensive and few can afford to take time away from their every day lives (and families) to see the world. It takes a television show’s budget and social status to fund it and justify the time off work and away from home, and the conditions under which competitions agree to get that opportunity are conditions under which they have to want to win. Very easily, a whole cast of racers could simply agree to take five days off together to just see the sights and enjoy the world on the BBC’s budget. Ignore the competition, forget about winning for a few days, and have a holiday. But the fear that someone else might break the agreement — race to the finish line and win ahead of them — is what stops it. Solidarity which ensures that everyone wins is always eroded by the individualism of zero-sum games. Not because people are naturally selfish, but because people are fairly rational and understand that in a world where the deck is stacked in so many ways and no-one has responsibility for if you live or die but you (entirely by design) then you would be foolish not to strive for the advantage that comes with victory.
The sheer number of reality competitions which exist on TV is a sad testament to the fact that we can’t just enjoy arts, talents and skills, it seems, without the corruption of competition being placed on top of it. Rather than watching a travel show, or a baking show, or an art show or a drag show, such things are only worth viewing if someone can lose each week and be eliminated. If, in the end, a winner can be declared. After all, the manufactured prestige of victory is what gets contestants applying each season, and every new season is more money in the bank for the production companies. Capitalism, once again, making the artificial logic of competition seem inevitable and natural when it is, in fact, a choice.
It’s not just reality TV. In all film and TV, for example, a decision has been made that industry recognition, instead of simply celebrating the many accomplishments of everyone, must come in the form of individual awards. Movies and shows which win, and movies and shows which lose. Jobs too. Instead of paying everyone a decent wage, workers are pitted against each other in competition for limited promotions which come with extra money or benefits. There is no objective reason this ought to be the way that financial compensation is awarded — to the few and not the many — but we accept it because it is the unquestioned norm.
I think the insidious ease with which we accept the narrative of competition and assume the value of winning is one of the main reasons our unequal and deeply unjust world continues to tick along without significant objection. The seemingly natural idea that there must be winners and losers and that everything is a competition is an artificial result of intentional choices made by those with an advantage. But they have convinced us that this is simply an organic state of affairs or result of an inherently selfish human nature. A self-serving ideology that benefits only those already deemed “winners” The more we pretend that it is simply the way things have to be, the less we question and challenge it.
I suppose my suspicion around the desire to win comes from a lifetime of watching professional wrestling on TV and being involved with improvisational comedy. In each endeavour the illusion of competition is offered to an audience which works only because the performers are actually in secret collusion with each other, working collaboratively to put on an entertaining show. To “lose” in wrestling might well be to “win” in terms of audience drama and long-term storytelling. To “lose” in improv might be to fail for laughs in a short-form game or sit back in a supportive role so that someone else can shine in a hilarious scene. When we go into business for ourselves and try to legitimately “defeat” the people we are performing with, the whole thing falls apart and audiences go home unhappy.
It works in wrestling and improv because when we all work together everybody wins. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled (or, rather, the greatest trick those who currently benefit from the unequal and unjust distribution of wealth and resources across the world ever pulled) was getting us to forget that the same is true in everything. If we all work together, everybody wins. When we strive against each other to be the only winner, the spoils go only to the victor, and the rest of society suffers.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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