Compete! Your country needs you...

Countries compete in the global market.  Regions compete within countries.  Companies compete with each other.  People compete with each other within companies, within communities, in life, generally.  Why?

Why is life, and work, and living, a competition?

An obvious reason: Here we are, all living on this planet Earth.  The basic instinct for reproduction is strong, even though in many "western" societies individuals have passed the peak level of procreation, others have not, and the global population is still increasing.  It stands to reason that there is a maximum number of people that the world and its environment can support.  Any logic based upon the natural resources of Earth would say that we passed that peak long ago.  That's why we need ever-increasing doses of technology in order to continue to support our bloated population.  And that's why we need to compete, because there's not enough of everything.

Another reason, rather more personal than that.  It's that everybody wants more.  After all, animals compete, plants compete; nature is all about competition.

So is it just down to "human nature" that we have to compete?  A natural sense of wanting to make measurable progress towards our own individual goals, or is it something that we have been taught by generally accepted thinking?

We have developed a model where everything, but everything, is geared towards making money.  Usually for somebody else, although we are comforted along the way by thinking that we are making money for ourselves.  And we have been persuaded by an infinity of accepted thinking that it is the only way ahead.    Money is the basis of absolutely everything in this world.  Every seed, every tree, every animal, every grain of sand, every drop of water, everything has been attributed a monetary value.  And we accept it, because we have decided, somehow, that the right way to measure ourselves is by money.  We have even invented a science along the way, called Economics.

I find myself pondering on this sometimes.  I understand that chemistry is a science, because it is concerned with the atoms that make up the world around us.  It is plainly based in fact.  Likewise physics - this is clearly a science because it is concerned with the relationships of energy, space and time, the laws that govern the physical world in which we live.  Biology is also an obvious science because it is also concerned with the physical world around us, the anatomy and physiology of living things, animals and plants.

But economics?

This is a question which, I know, has been asked many times, and by people far more learned than me, to the point that recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics have found it necessary to defend the scientific credentials of economics against a stream of academic arguments.  

I'm not arguing that economics is subjective, and that it can't be a science for that reason.  I'm more concerned with the base of the whole thing.  Economics is concerned with money, and money is an invention, not a given universal truth.  If Man and human thought did not exist, neither would money, and neither would economics.  One could not say the same of chemistry, physics or biology, they would exist all the same, even in the absence of men to study and control them.

Money is an invention of man.  As for example is the game of Monopoly, which was invented by a man in order to create amusement, and presumably also to make money.  It is a reality with which we all have to live, but my question is... why?

Money has been brought to represent all things physical in this world, it also represents the labour (or rather the time) of men and women.  For the present, it represents pretty much everything except the air around us, a proportion of the oceans, and the members of the human race.  And although the business of slavery was made illegal many generations ago, even with humans, the tide is once again approaching.  For example, a football club can sell a player to another club.  Of course, what the club is selling is the outstanding contract term that the player has committed to, but that to me comes perilously close to putting a monetary value on that person.  And in modern thinking, that idea, of putting a value on a person, is getting stronger.  Companies now have financial resources, technological or intellectual resources, and human resources.  When I started working, some 35 years ago, the department of a company which was concerned with the employees was called Personnel.  Somewhere along the way that changed to HR, which somehow sounds less insiduous than Human Resources, doesn't it?  In some companies these days, the rather frightening term "human capital" has come to prominence.  And the idea that people have a value has also developed in the media.

When you read stories in the press, or on the internet, you will find that people are generally described by a number of key measures - their sex, their age, where they live, their job and how much money they make.  Sometimes it goes a little further, and the short description of that living, breathing human being includes the value of their house.

So is competing nothing more than looking at somebody else who has more than we do and saying "I want to have more than them"?  Is it just all about me, me, me?

Governments talk of competition as a matter of life and death.  The only way that a government can increase the standard of living of its people is for the country to compete, and win, in the global market.  Growth is needed because there are never enough resources to pay for everything, and people always want more, so politicians promise them more in order to stay in power and then have to borrow in order to meet those promises, and then they need more growth to repay the debt.  You could say that this is a cynical view, and that governments (particularly "left of centre" ones) have an altruistic objective of making life better for their people, but the problem is that they always fall out of favour with the people when the economy hits a bump in the road, and we change tack with a new government who gives us a few years of tightened belts to make it better for us in the long run, and we're more or less back to where we started.

How could we do all of this differently?  This society in which we live - where most of us have to compete with each other for the right to work all the hours under the sun just in order to stand still, where inexplicably, economists tend to earn more than chemists and physicists and biologists - is this really the most efficient way to get the human race from A to B?  

I can't believe that it is.

Where do I fit into all of this...?

Somewhere inside me is the feeling - the knowledge, even - that we are all one, that we are all a part of the same whole.  And if that is really the case, then how can we be in competition with each other, and not in competition only to help each other?  And if money is an invention of man and, as the throw-away line goes "it's all a game", then why do we keep on playing? Why don't we just change the rules of the game so as to make a decent life possible for everyone, even those who can't, or simply don't want to, compete?

If I trawl the depths of my own beliefs, then I come up with some basic principles.

-  the earth is here for us all to share
-  no-one should take more than he or she needs
-  the real currency of life, the key to happiness, is understanding
-  in the end, we will all be equal

But, paradoxically perhaps:

- we own our own house - in fact two houses, but that's not for want of trying to sell one of them
- I work in  the City of London, the global centre of money, and I'm paid a lot of it
- understanding what makes people tick generally makes me more sad than happy

The only one of those basic principles with which I don't have some sort of internal/external conflict is that in the end, we will all be equal, but even on that one, I'd like to leave my mark on the world, and not just as the enigma that I seem to be at the moment.

So taking those into account, I guess I'm just an armchair revolutionist, a pseudo-communist, a hypocrite who votes Tory because they seem to be more like me.

And I hate to be beaten at anything...