Dr. Larry Katz on why we are too competitive

I’ve recently begun to suspect that we, as a society, favour competition over cooperation to our detriment.  As children we are trained to compete. We play competitive board games like Sorry, and Monopoly where you win by sabotaging the other players. We fetishize competitive sports, spending 100’s of billions of dollars watching athletes violently punish each other. It would seem that these attitudes carry over into the political arena.  States and religions and corporations all compete for power, leaving a trail of bloody conflict in their wake. And yet it can be argued that competition brings out the best in people. The dominant capitalist economic system is based on the concept of a group of self-interested players who collectively and competitively comprise the market where the success of the top players advances by exploiting those less successful. Some of our most significant scientific and engineering advances came as a result of intense development work motivated by man’s most deadly competitive endeavour, war.  Radar, jet planes, Nuclear technology, and the Apollo program to go to the moon were essentially the result of this competition between nations.  But cooperation also has its value. The Space Station was a cold war cooperation between the US and Soviet Union. The Megatonnes to Megawatts program that used soviet nuclear warheads to power US nuclear reactors was a successful cooperation. The EU is a huge cooperative governance model. Universal Healthcare is a cooperative program to share the burdens of treating the sick. I want to ask the question: can we envision a world where negative competition becomes socially unacceptable? One in which we compete without sabotaging others, or perhaps even one where nations cooperate? Should we work to bring this about?

An award-winning developer and producer of interactive multimedia applications, Dr. Larry Katz is Professor Emeritus, Adjunct Professor, Head of the innovative pedagogy and Sport Performance program, and Director of the Sports Technology Research Laboratory, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary. An Educational Psychologist, he is interested in how people learn and how they can improve their performance using innovation and technology. His research interests include, performance analysis, educational technology, data analytics, virtual environments, multimedia design, collaborative online learning, pedagogy, and health and wellness education. A former competitive athlete, coach, coaching instructor, referee, and volunteer leader, Dr. Katz has first-hand experience with intense competition and the impact of competing when cooperation is mutually beneficial.

For over 20 years, he worked on and recently patented his trademarked Move Improve ® mobile platform for peer-to-peer, self-directed, and consensus learning.

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