I was furious.
On my parents’ TV screen, I was watching the Ohio State Buckeyes celebrate wildly. Meanwhile, the Miami Hurricanes looked on, stunned.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
In fact, moments earlier, the Miami players were mobbing the field in jubilation. Fireworks were going off above the stadium. The game appeared to be over, with the Hurricanes victorious.
But then, in the midst of the celebration, a referee threw one of his yellow flags onto the field. He then proceeded to call a dubious penalty on a Miami player.
The game would continue. And Ohio State would come from behind to win the game and a national college football championship.
The result was bad enough. But the way it all went down left me in a rage.
I was 15 years old when this game took place. About 3 and a half years after the final whistle, I would attend the University of Miami and become a Hurricane for life. But as I watched Ohio State players celebrating on TV, I had no affiliation to the school they’d just vanquished. I was simply a fan of the Miami football team.
I shouldn’t have gotten so worked up. But I couldn’t help myself.
For years, I held a vendetta against The Ohio State University. I rooted against their football team in every game. When their basketball team played a road game in Miami, I jawed with Buckeye fans in the arena concourse. And, when my family drove through Columbus, Ohio — home to the Ohio State campus — I urged them not to stop the car.
Eventually, the anger subsided. But it was quickly replaced by shame.
For it turns out that Ohioans are kind-hearted, salt-of-the-earth people. I’ve worked with several over the years, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about any of them.
I was wrong to paint them as villains for so long, just because of the results of a football game. It was foolish, shortsighted — and strangely predictable.
Competition. It’s an American hallmark.
A nation built on the promise of an elected government and a capitalist economy relies on competition. On straining for scarce resources. On gaining an edge.
We compete for employment, for housing, for influence. We even compete for acclaim as the best spouse or parent.
Ostensibly, this makes us better. It keeps us motivated to give our best at all times. It inspires us to produce more. And it allows society to reap the benefits.
But hyper-competition is not foolproof. The edge we require can cut both ways.
Going head-to-head with others is a zero-sum game. There are winners and losers. Rising up means another gets pushed down.
When we’re in the fray, it’s hard to ignore this dynamic. And it’s tempting to denigrate the competition in order to swing the odds in our favor.
Some of these efforts can be mostly harmless. For example, athletes often trash talk each other to gain a psychological advantage. While this can be obnoxious, the hostilities normally don’t extend any further than that.
But other times, denigrating the competition does cross the line. It can lead to us othering our competition. It can cause us to act in racist or misogynistic ways.
Scenarios like these can cause lasting destruction. They can tear our society further and further apart. They can leave countless victims in their wake.
Scenarios like these beg the question: Is competition more destructive than good?
There’s an image that I’ve long struggled to reckon with.
It’s a portrait of Adolf Hitler as an infant.
I despise Hitler. I have always viewed him as the epitome of pure evil. Even writing his name here makes me feel squeamish.
And yet, he doesn’t look like the devil incarnate in this photo. With curiosity written on his face, he simply looks like a child.
This image is important to consider. For it reminds us that society’s greatest ills are not innate. They’re cultivated through the structures we encounter.
Hatred is a learned behavior. One forged by our experiences and our misconceptions.
And the kiln that turns us from respectable to rotten? It’s fueled by competition.
The very idea of duking it out for a limited resource — be it property, influence or accolades — is fraught with danger. For while the rules of chivalry help keep things respectable, it’s on each of us to abide by them.
Generally, such guidance is sufficient. But if desperation takes hold, or our emotions get the best of us, we toss aside good judgment. We revert to jungle law — to winning at all costs.
The dark side of competition gave rise to so many dark chapters in our planet’s recent history — the rise of the Nazis in Europe, the spread of terrorism in the Middle East, the advent of brutal drug cartels in Latin America.
But those are just the grim headlines. The real story lies under the surface.
The images of an angry mob of insurrectionists rushing the United States Capitol will always be chilling. But one image is doubly haunting.
It’s of a rioter darting through the capitol rotunda with a Confederate flag in tow.
Such a flag once flew in parts of America, after the southern states seceded and plunged the nation into a bloody Civil War. But even during those trying times, it never flew in the seat of the United States government.
Much has been made of that flag over the last 150 years or so. There are varying opinions on what it stands for, and even what to name it.
(While many have dubbed it the Confederate flag, southerners have often called it the Rebel flag.)
In my opinion, the Confederate flag symbolizes competition gone wrong. Of an error compounded by calcification of time.
You see, the southern states didn’t try and leave the union on a whim. They did so because they felt left behind.
The earliest decades of our nation were defined by two economic models — a northern one, teeming with cities and industry, and a southern one, dotted with rural plantations.
The southern economy was built on slave labor — on the bondage of Black people. The northern one was not.
Slavery and the plantation model were not invented in the south. But they became ingrained there. So even as the world evolved, white southerners found themselves irrationally attached to a system where hierarchy was determined by skin tone.
As the United States expanded westward, adding new states to the union, the South saw its influence shrink. Threatened, it responded with a stinging act of defiance — secession.
But the Confederacy was not long-lived. Barely four years later, the Civil War ended in a southern surrender.
Even so, the scars of the conflict would linger.
For in the wake of the bloodshed, white southerners were forced to compete with freed slaves for land and prosperity. The stakes were high and the resources were strained.
In the wake of such challenges, the disgraced southerners demonized their new competitors. They formed posses to kill young Black men. They set up a system of sharecropping to keep black families in poverty. And they codified segregationist policies in every state they inhabited.
Such abhorrence — forged by competition — helped spawn an ugly legacy of racism that persists to this day.
And yet, the post-war South was not alone in this endeavor.
Indeed, as immigrants flooded to our shores and filled our cities, they were met with similar resentment. The newcomers — be they Irish, Italian, Chinese, Arab, or Mexican — faced resistance from the established, who abhorred the competition.
Xenophobia has a long shadow even in the most enlightened bastions of America. Add in the growth of the business sector and globalization in recent decades, and the issue has only intensified.
That is how we’ve gotten to where we are today. To a polarized America where millions of people support blatantly racist positions.
Building walls isn’t about making our nation more secure. Dissolving global trade isn’t about making our nation more prosperous. And typecasting people based on skin tone isn’t making our nation more equitable.
No, such actions are self-serving. They rig the competition so that those with a track record of prosperity remain victorious at all costs.
And in doing so, they threaten to eat America alive.
It’s time that we take a fresh look at competition.
It’s time that we more closely consider its limitations and moral dangers.
For while competition will continue to exist — Adam Smith’s invisible hand can’t exist without it — it doesn’t need to exist unfettered. It can’t exist unfettered.
Such introspection will not be easy. Rehashing our core principles never is.
But it’s a process that cannot wait.
For the next calamity lurks in the distance, and its underlying cause is already known.
It’s on us to do what needs to be done. It’s on us to put a sheath on the double edge of competition.
Let’s get to it.