I think that very competitive people are more likely to get to the top. Their competitive success makes them think that competition is a good thing, so they are inclined to foist an unnatural degree of competition on the rest of us. I don't think it should play a very great part in people's lives unless they are part of the elite. I don't think that at other times and in other cultures, competitiveness has had so great a role in society. "kids shouldn't be shielded from competition" !!! My God, never in all your life will you be subjected to such a culture of competition as when you are at school! Loathsome headmagisterial preaching that always seemed to include the word "challenge". Compulsion to learn stuff that was of no interest and unlikely ever to be of use in future life, pushed with the pressure of competition and reward. It never worked on me; I never could cudgel facts into my memory unless they interested me. In after-school life, that inability never held me back. As for making robots. Surely the interest lies in the doing of creative work. For creative people the reward lies in making; in the finished product. They have a different and higher motivation from the merely competitive person. As for school sports and representing the school. Ugh! At the peak of sporting prowess lies the Olympics, and the lives of competitors who must these days endure a monomaniac compulsive competitiveness which entirely robs them of a balanced existence. We make heroes of these half-people! I am in my sixties now, and look back on my schooldays with black hatred. Down with school! Down with competitiveness!
"I don't think that at other times and in other cultures, competitiveness has had so great a role in society." Yeah, they only had to compete for SURVIVAL.
What you say sounds as if it might be true -- but if you actually examined societies where survival was more of a problem, I don't think you would find that they generally had especially competitive cultures, so far as day-to-day life was concerned. Maintaining good health in a strenuous environment might have more to do with survival. So might the ability to learn necessary skills. Inter-tribal rivalry ("exogenous competition") might be important, but battles might be once-in-a-generation events. In most healthy societies, I would expect to find competitiveness among the elite, but a strong collaborative common identity among the remainder of the populace.
The essence of civilization itself is cooperation, not competition. A pack of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers competed with other packs because its limited territory could not support a larger population. But the whole point of gathering in villages and later in cities was to exploit division of labor and economy of scale. This mandates cooperation. You have to do what you do best for the good of the whole clan, tribe, city, nation, or species, depending upon the era you live in. If you decide you need to compete with a specialist in some other type of labor, you are wasting your own labor doing something you're not so good at. Obviously a certain level of formalized competition is necessary to find out who is best at what job. This is where school comes in. It is a qualitatively different environment than adult life and children are not treated as adults on purpose. Not only do we need to see them try their hardest at different types of work, we have to challenge them to learn as much as possible about the types of work which they seem to have the best aptitude for. Sure, interest is important and must be factored in. Educational tyrants who insist that every child study exactly the same curriculum have no place beyond, say, the sixth grade. It's time to start separating the mathematicians from the journalists and carpenters and give them the training to excel in their fields. It's time to separate the assembly line drones and civil service clerks from the rest of the pack and not waste resources frustrating them with advanced biology classes. It's time to have a talk with the novelists and musicians about the reality of the marketplace and the need to also have a "day job." Competition is an instinct that most of us have in varying degrees, and it needs to be accommodated. Chess, football, flower shows and the Friday night poker game do that. I think it's important to allow people these outlets, since I agree that the competitive instinct is not quite in harmony with civilization. But children are not adults and in many of them their primitive competitive instinct can be harnessed by "challenges" that help them grow into adults.
