"THE BITCH GODDESS SUCCESS'

...Of course, there is no other way to carry on business for the long swing...

...The authors might have added that competition can be keen in the schoolroom itself...

...He may be a useful citizen, a devoted father, a lover of mankind, but if he has not the tax bracket, the Cadillac, and the ranch style villa in Cedar Manor, he might as well be dead—or so it sometimes seems at four A.M...

...Dollard and Doob, in Frustration and Aggression, note that American school children throw aside their cooperative habits almost as soon as the bell rings for dismissal, and begin to practise direct competition in sports, or indirect identification with aggressive heroes...

...Taking the U.S...

...There is no society which does not know both the shirker, and the man who abstains from cooperating with his fellows, to go his way alone"—referring to economic activity...

...There is little doubt about the goals the American belief system calls for: get ahead, get more money, win what William James once called the bitch goddess, Success...

...The credo calls more for running people down than for building them up...

...Recently I received a letter from a group of 21 students at Tulane University in New Orleans...

...There is no terminus to his striving...

...Americans presumably get more tons of cold rolled steel, more cigarets, more television sets, because of the competitive pressure...

...that a spirit of mutual aid and of a kind not unlike that suggested by Kropot-kin does exist...

...When most Americans learn to find personal satisfaction in work well done, not only will the quality improve, but also the large number of Americans afflicted with mental breakdowns resulting from conflict, will gradually decline...

...He always tried to find a basis for mutual agreement and advantage—not verbal, but real...

...Many feminists do their best to make a woman's life identical with a man's...

...Aren't you ashamed to let Dick get ahead of you...

...But a good many careful observers are not so sure...

...I remember vividly the battles I fought at the Claflin Grammar School in Newton, Mass., to keep a girl from ousting me as ROADS TO AGREEMENT This article is based in part on Stuart Chase's new book, Roads to Agreement, to be published by Harpers in May...

...But Herskovits shows that altruism seldom goes to the lengths practiced by the Arapesh of New Guinea, who give away almost all the food they grow, hoping the neighbors will feed them in turn...

...The luxury of hauling off and hitting a brother, physically or verbally, whenever the mood is on us, is reaching a prohibitive cost in terms of plain survival...

...They prefer to minimize their biological role and carry the extra job of child-bearing as a handicap to be added to their professional careers—rather than accept special laws in favor of women...

...If you fleece the customers too often, pretty soon you have no more customers...

...A good deal of collective bargaining between labor and management is on a "killing" basis too—the less for you, the more for me...

...The favorite answer was: to prepare the boy for "a better job and greater earning power...

...Of course...

...In a Fortune poll (September 1949), Elmo Roper asked Americans: "Why send your son to college...

...What holds a group of combat soldiers together in the Army, he says, is a feeling that their buddies are responsible...

...Gordon Allport of Harvard gives us another view by posing a dilemma...

...Are conflict and aggression over-stimulated...

...But it is hard to gainsay their main point: we concentrate on the marks rather than on the work...

...Meanwhile, since the need for warm relationships is met so ife differently, we should not be surprised, says Allport, to find anxiety, insecurity, hostility, and aggression as the commonest by-products of our social relationships...

...We find it in competition between churches and clubs for membership, in struggles to reach the top in business, to outdo rivals in the professions, to make the best-seller list, to beat out the filling station across the street, to sell more soap than the other fellow, to show that women are just as smart as men, and maybe smarter...

...He was beaten from the start, and knew it...

...Later, workers emphasize their salaries, and forget the quality of their work...

...In real life, of course, the two situations are often mixed...

...Have the Indians some reason when they think us slightly cracked...

...Competition is not always operating inside the family, but it is omnipresent elsewhere...

...The irony of it is that the community, in fact, is there, and does help, and will help...

...I have never been there so I do not know...

...This conclusion comes out with great clarity in John P. Marquand's novel...

...Then one wakes in the small hours to face the terrible fact that he is a "failure"—a characterization almost on a par with "criminal" in America...

...The top of the pyramid can hold only a few of us...

...In this section of his inventory, Stuart Chase examines competition for success in America, and concludes that it is one of the roots of conflict...

...The data amply prove that man works neither by nor for himself...

...On the other hand, an aggressive, driving, competitive personality, which is the American ideal, is considered highly abnormal by many Indian tribes, where the aim of the individual is to merge himself as completely as possible into the group...

...It checks, too, with what I have seen and felt and sometimes trembled before...

...When those who come out on top make such enormous sacrifices and gain so little, we can but add the human wastage of the successful, to what we see in the mass of men, and reach a staggering total of human frustration and defeat—that is rendered more poignant by the very unawareness of the victims...

...Samuel A. Stouffer in his book, The A tneticsin Soldier, based on thousands of cases studied during World War II...

...But the girl and I fought for number two...

...When Perkins sold burlap bags out of Houston, Texas, he worked on a different theory...

...Suppose he was brought up to trust rather than to distrust...

...After the order comes the check—and that is the end of the story...

...In no society which anthropologists have studied is the individual entirely subordinated to the group...

...If the Marshall Plan does not do this, it helps nobody over the years...

...No," I said, "what...

...Milo Perkins contributes a significant point to business competition...

...A good many family quarrels could be avoided if women were less competitive, less on the alert to defend their "rights," more ready to accept the cultural distinction, arbitrary though it may be, that men's and women's tasks are functionally different...

...It was hopeless to try for number one, as a boy named Gordon, with what must have been a fantastic I.Q., had a permanent lien on it...

...without the community he is nothing...

...Members of a basketball team cooperate to win games, but compete for publicity as the star performer...

...Man is a group animal...

...Suppose he thought of his community as behind him, ready to help him over the difficult places, to look after him when he is wounded...

...In no group is complete individualism the rule—despite the heroic efforts of John T. Flynn and Herbert Spencer...

...Deutsch, running controlled experiments on college students, found greater ability in problem-solving if the groups were set up on a cooperative rather than a competitive basis...

...Point of No Return, which means just that to the hero...

...Lawrence Frank adds that there is a circular effect, too...

...Suppose each young American, starting out in life, could think of other Americans as his friends who would not let him down...

...But he does not know this —except in floods and fires and disasters—and it makes him harder, more fearful, and more aggressive than he needs to be...

...An educational system which can cause 21 students in Tulane, or anywhere else, to come to such mature conclusions, cannot be so bad as they think it is...

...Later on, the boys will be employing every method, some of them pretty dubious, to outwit their competitors and scramble to the top of the heap...

...First one up gets the chocolate bar...

...Henceforward, the hustling young American is locked in...

...This fierce group loyalty, far from making soldiers soft, accounted for prodigies of heroism in action...

...Competition is present in greater or lesser degree in every society...

...Melville Herskovits, in his Economic Life of Primitive People, finds on the whole more cooperative than competitive activities...

...Cooperation does not exclude individual effort, especially where the concept of wealth is well developed...

...Competition," he says, "means striving to defeat or outdo others in a narrowly restricted pattern of activity...

...Frank...

...Yet "neither our economic nor our political life is arranged to accommodate this dual need...

...He paused impressively to let the words sink in...

...Meanwhile a sad weedy lout, who would be in a class for handicapped children today, had as firm a grip on the last desk as Gordon had on the first...

...Do you know what...

...Society is not something to trust, it is something to lick...

...He says: One of the most striking aspects of primitive labor is the cooperation which characterizes it . . . the voluntary association of a group of men or women whose objective is the completion of a specific, definitely limited task...

...So artificial a motive cannot develop the full potentiality of an individual...

...By way of contrast: A cooperative situation is one which stimulates an individual to strive with other members of his group for a goal which is to be shared equally...

...We could have more fun, as well as fewer fights, Chase says, if we could take it a little easier...

...Yet all the time the need for affiliation remains somehow basic...

...It is an endless spiral, with ulcers and heart attacks waiting around the curves...

...Full and equal cooperation, not rivalry, would seem to be a better goal...

...II As children are early trained to be competitive, one of the patterns is girls against boys...

...Republicans cooperate to beat the Democrats, but compete bitterly for the Presidential nomination...

...her name was Marjory...

...said the mayor of a Texas town, as he drove me back to the hotel in his Cadillac after a talk at the Country Club...

...Their chairman, John E. Lanne, who wrote me from Desire Street (just like the street car), said: Our group have concluded that something should be done about our unhappy striving for what are often meaningless rewards...

...Lawrence K. Frank is an expert in the behavior of young children and has worked with the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation, and others, for many years...

...I'm in the 86% tax bracket...

...Competition as a habit is taught to every American child in school, and often in the home as well...

...After the vice-presidency, he must try for the presidency...

...Stouffer's—this sense of responsibility is often lacking...

...Most societies do make such a distinction, withr-out competition between men and women...

...Our last testimony will come from Dr...

...Work organizations of this kind, free or compulsory, temporary or permanent, organized or informal, are found everywhere in the primitive world...

...A more vicious pedagogical arrangement it would be difficult to imagine...

...We Americans, taken as a whole society, emphasize not the quality of endeavor, but the reward which follows the endeavor...

...All normal people want warm, close relationships with their fellows...

...The pie is supposed to be only so big, and the number of cuts limited...

...The idea is for the seller to put it over somehow, anyhow, and get the order...

...Competition keeps us forever jockeying for status—at cocktail parties, meetings, dinners, country clubs, reunions—trying to get ahead of a rival by showing him up...

...Remembering that no man is an island unto himself, do we carry the competitive struggle too far in America...

...Friendliness, harmony, free communication of ideas, abruptly ceased when the boys left the class where they worked jointly for the solution of a problem, and entered the class where they had to scramble singly for mutually exclusive goals...

...He is outspoken about the harm done by this cultural standard...

...and he dug his elbow gently into my ribs...

...There is no question that competition makes a man feel he is surrounded by rivals if not by enemies, rather than by friends...

...Conflict, you see, enters with competition...

...culture as a whole—my generalization, not Dr...

...Apparently, too...

...I can hear him now, stumbling pitifully over the algebra lesson...

...Do Ameri-cans get too much of a move on...

...The grading system of grammar schools, high schools, and colleges, has much to do with shaping the individual's sense of values, as it is the first set of sociological incentives which he encounters...

...In our modern culture such goings on, at least in public, call for psychiatric observation...

...us to get a move on...

...the ideal of competition at some points in American life, especially when it terrifies a person with the spectre of becoming a "failure," leads to an excessive amount of ill will and struggle...

...In another question on the Fortune poll, the parents rated a "chance to get ahead" above a "broad knowledge of the world and its problems," above "learning to get along with people," above "becoming a more useful citizen," and far above acquiring "moral character" in college...

...the number two student in the eighth grade...

...His books include "The Economy of Abundance," "The Tyranny of Words," and "The Proper Study of Mankind...

...And less was accomplished...

...III There is plenty of case material to support Dr...

...Note how parents seem to be thinking of their boy as a lone individual struggling in a kind of hostile sea...

...The price paid for competitive success may be the abandonment of individuality, and the acceptance of fashion and social norms for living...

...There is nothing in "human nature" which demands competition at the level of horsepower we normally give to it...

...While the youngster is taught the formal principles of membership in the greatest democracy ever heard of, with its flags, songs, symbols, ancestral heroes, all complete, actually he often imagines every man's hand against him, or at best indifferent to him...

...Fundamentally, this is cooperation for a bigger output, a bigger pie to divide...

...He has served as a special consultant to the TVA, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and Standard Oil of New Jersey...

...Every man for himself...

...She usually won, and I hated her...

...After that, with 15%, comes Knowledge...

...After the presidency, a bigger presidency in a bigger company...

...A lot of business in America is conducted on what he calls a "killing" basis...

...A real service for you on this lot of bags—delivery, terms, what not—and a nice profit for me...

...Deutsch found evidence, too, of greater personal insecurity, together with fear and hostility, under the competitive patterns...

...It may be nice for a little while, ulcers and all, when you hit the top...

...This reply accounts for 66% of all...

...they will not let you down...

...He finds competition within cooperative work groups for the prestige of being the best performer...

...If Joe is wounded, he knows his buddies will take care of him...

...But it need not exclude some lively competition between firms for business—thus getting us back to the individual pattern found by Herskovits in most societies—competition laid on a groundwork o\ social cooperation...

...If he really wants to get to the top of the Stuyvesant Bank, he must conform to a rigid set of unwritten standards in deportment, dress, home furnishings, clubs, his wife's appearance, recreation, travel, proper reading, children's schools, well nigh everything...

...Does it make for survival...

...We will make the pie larger, and share the increase...

...Indignity to one's self-esteem quickly generates hatred, if not violence...

...If we cannot compete for high net earnings any longer, income taxes being what they are, we can at least compete for the honor of financing the government...

...We find it in school grading, in sports and recreations, tournaments, debates, the star system in Hollywood, Chamber of Commerce drives to make Jones-ville the best little shoe city in the state...

...We were reseated every month according to our marks, the number one desk being the first on the teacher's right...

...He cites the husking feasts of Hidatsa Indians, the communal buffalo-hunts of our Plains Indians, cooperative farming in New Mexico pueblos, and many others...

...GI's were afraid of being transferred to other units because nobody would then be responsible for their safety and well being...

...Our young man on the make achieves no real security of status...

...First, a definition taken from Morton Deutsch of Howard: A competitive situation is one which stimulates an individual to strive against other individuals for a goal of which he hopes to be the sole or principal possessor...

...for everywhere man has apparently recognized the efficacy of group over individual effort...

...The standard credo says no, competition is the energizer of life and there should be more of it...

...The book is an inventory of techniques for getting along better with other people...

...Is it worth it...

...while common sense tells us that in certain situations, it causes STUART CHASE, widely regarded as one of our most articulate analysts of social and economic behavior, has done special research in recent years on the application of scientific method to human conduct...

...Not scholarship and learning, but the grades—the rewards—which result from scholarship...

...We may not be our brothers' keepers, he says, but technology is pushing us ever closer together...

...There comes a point in his upward career from which there is no return...

...Two professional tennis players will cooperate to put on a good show for the customers, but may compete strenuously to see who can win the most matches on the circuit...

...First and last, it creates a good deal of misery and hard feeling...

...At least that seems to be the conclusion of those who have studied the matter most carefully...

...Mutual advantage, says Perkins, is the only enduring basis on which to conduct a firm's business, the nation's business, or for that matter, the world's business...

...One study of prejudice (Allport and Kramer) indicates that 80% of all adult Americans have marked prejudice against various groups of their fellow citizens...

...Straight business competition, along Main Street and elsewhere, makes for a good deal of duplication and economic waste, along with the large total production...

...Next, with 19%, is that a son should go to college to find out how to lead a fuller life...

...See who can run the fastest...

...At the same time, they are touchy about slights to the ego...

...A boy so trained, far from developing that robust individuality which the code calls for, actually becomes regimented...

...A big man in this man's town...

...It is not nice to try to get there and not make the grade...

...Group may compete with group in a spirit of rivalry which is by no means always friendly...

...The idea that the sea might buoy him up, refresh him, hardly enters their heads, as they stand on the doorstep replying to Roper's skilled interviewers...

...The only time to relax comes in the mortuary chapel...

...Suppose we try to judge the competition credo in a broader frame...

...Sometimes we get it inside the family, but the guaranteeing of self-respect is not a particular concern of business, industry, or government...