Supercompetition is never "Nature's way"

Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998

(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

The beagle is a dog we are all familiar with. He is a rabbit hound who, let loose in the woods, will run until he has caught a rabbit. He will do this even when there is no rabbit.

The Beagle was also the name of the ship biology-watcher Charles Darwin sailed on in his famous 1831 voyage to the Galapagos Islands. In 1851 he published On the Origin of Species. Recap: Darwin saw evolution as a natural mechanism by which species became more competitive or survival-worthy over the course of many generations. Survival-negative characteristics get weeded out of the gene pool, while survival-positive characteristics move the species to new heights.

Darwin's views were vigorously opposed by the legitimate academics of the Victorian world, then befell an even worse fate -- they were adopted by post-Victorian pseudo-academics. "Survival of the fittest" became the slogan under which all sorts of uncivil excesses were excused -- the imperial violence of the British Empire, the capitalist excesses of the robber baron era, the permanent primacy of the rich over the poor.

Tons of bad sociological commentary can be traced to this distortion of Darwin's teachings. In the right hands, it can turn everything that is bad and immoral, from slavery to fraud, into something "natural" and thus defensible. In the Dark Ages, according to the Great Chain of Being, the status quo was excused because it was God's will that the king rule over the people. In Social Darwinism, God's will is replaced by science, or nature.

But Social Darwinism was a crock, as anyone with multiple brain cells and not occupying a seat of privilege understood. Why was it that society only mirrored the competitive realties of nature (dog-eat-dog brutality) and ignored the equally powerful collaborative realities nature displayed (community action, familial love, teamwork, symbiotic relationships that worked for everyone's mutual benefit)? As Lewis Thomas said, "The survival of the fittest does not mean those fit to kill; it means those fitting in best with the rest of life." Not competition, but transcompetition.

Most dysfunctional competition excuses itself using the logic of Social Darwinism. We see it in sports, in education, in careers, in politics, and in the way organizations are run:

• "We're doing these people a favor even hiring them. We don't want to spoil them."
• "It's fine to target low-income groups with our advertising, but you wouldn't want to hire them."
• "The fact that I sold more policies than you has nothing to do with the fact that I get the good leads and prime territories. I'm just a better salesperson."
• "This company is out of gas. Sell off the assets and make a fresh start. The people here will be better off."
• "If customers can't figure out our products are unhealthy, that's their problem."
• This company is a for winners only. if you haven't made a mark after two years here, you belong somewhere else."

A wonderful moment in the discrediting of Social Darwinism occurred in Ethiopia during the war Mussolini initiated in order to impress Hitler. Mussolini wanted to show his fellow fascists on the Axis side that Italians, like Germans, constituted a super-race, and that they could easily sweep over the primitive non-Aryan nation of Haille Selassie. The African war was to be the feather in Mussolini's competitive cap.

One morning in 1935, a busload of trained, well-armed Italian soldiers ran out of gas in the territory of a fierce tribe of geladas -- baboon-like monkeys. For over an hour the animals pelted the bus with sticks and stones, shattering glass and banging on metal, terrifying the soldiers with their hostile screeching. Finally, the soldiers made a mad dash for the bus doors and ran across the plain to escape the enraged primates, abandoning their food supplies and shedding their carbines and gunbelts as they ran.

Monkeys are not supposed to overpower their betters, or put them to rout. But working together against a group less cohesive than their own, they handily prevailed.

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