In a capitalist society like ours, competition is woven into nearly every aspect of life. From a very early age, in fact, we learn that life is a competition where there are winners and losers.
The standard narrative that we’re taught—getting good grades leads to getting into a good college which leads to getting a good job which leads to success—is grounded in an ethos of competition. It is not an exaggeration to say that we continually battle each other in some way or another, encouraging us to think and behave in an aggressive and even combative manner in order to get an edge on our perceived competition.
We may think that this mindset is “natural” and that things have always been this way—but that is not the case. In his 1963 The American Idea of Success, Richard M. Huber described the dominant early American “gospel” of success as the “character ethic,” in which ambitious individuals were instructed to repress their personal desires and subscribe to the will of God. The making of money was a morally sanctioned act, according to popular works by Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, with honest, hard-working Christians thus most likely to find........