Competition and Cooperation

Lately, I have been thinking about the value of competition and cooperation. This is a theme that comes up a lot in my online class on cooperative learning. It’s become fashionable these days to think that cooperative learning supplants competition, but is this necessarily true? I begin to suspect that these two dynamics reflect deeper elements of being that are both somehow parts of each other.

During the group meditation tonight, a participant had talked about how she is used to being driven to achieve in school, as school almost encourages achievement and standing out in some way. Meditative practice cultivates another space, where one does not need to control all variables, but can come into it from an observing space, as well as finding the natural rhythm of the body and mind. As I was listening to these remarks, I did wonder whether this means that competition is no longer deemed as necessary? Or would it be seen in a different way, once a person looks at things through the lens of Samadhi, or wisdom?

Then, when I came home from meditation, I began to read a post regarding the value of teaching students resilience, and the ability to succeed in competition with others as having a psychological value of reducing anxiety. One key thing that came from this discussion was how competition was somehow framed as necessary to human survival and therefore as something to be faced, rather than avoided.  But sooner or later, I start to wonder: who is one meant to compete with anyway? Is it these ‘other people’ out there, or is it one’s own mind that one competes with? Again, I am haunted by the Buddhist way of looking at these issues.

If one really looks at experience, are there distinct selves and others? How does one set that boundary, and at what point? Does anyone really compete with other beings, or is it more like an artificial boundary between ‘me’ and ‘you’? Of course, in daily life, it seems that I need to produce statistics to show that I am working as much as others with whom I work. In that sense, even the most cooperative exchange sets up a standard of what is expected from me if I am to continue to be in the relationship. But from an ultimate point of view, can one say I am competing with a person, if what I see are just images and thoughts?

Perhaps a more fruitful way of looking at this might be to explore what is really entailed by these concepts. Competition entails a kind of measuring up against others. Cooperation, on the other hand, is about working with others to achieve a shared goal. But both approaches assume that success and failure depend on who I am in relation to others. They are both social psychologies. But what if my true being does not depend on these relations or the image of the self? How does one still continue to play/work and interact in those frameworks when one begins to see that they are socially constructed arrangements, rather than ‘authentic’ natural measures?

I think that as long as one recognizes that there is only mind (not beings interacting), then the terms ‘cooperation’ and ‘competition’ become a little redundant. They are useful because they create a tone for groups, but they don’t limit who one is or how the mind works. To know this is to work within the most accepted social frameworks without thinking those frameworks determine one’s true nature as mind. In that way, we compete for resources, but the mind doesn’t compete, because it encompasses everything. How, as the Venerable expressed it, could the left hand compete with the right, when they are both of the same body?