What the human sciences are beginning to demonstrate is that humans are wired for both competition and cooperation, egoism and altruism, and which of these are more fully developed depends on how we are raised, on our education and training, on our social environment, on our institutional structures and incentive systems, and on the choices we makeĪs we navigate these systems. The first myth is that human nature is invariably selfish, aggressive, and competitive. But how do we move beyond the culture of contest? First, we need to dispel several influential myths that help perpetuate the culture of contest. So the culture of contest, for both of these reasons, is inherently unjust and unsustainable. In the process, it confounds our ability to solve complex problems together. The culture of contest sets such people against one another.
Solving these problems requires the highest degrees of cooperation among people with diverse insights, experiences, talents, and capacities. The second problem is that the culture of contest undermines our efforts to solve the increasingly complex problems we're facing on this planet. And the result is a perpetual state of social conflict, instability, and crisis in human affairs.
So, by design, the culture of contest increases social disparities. There are two major problems with the culture of contest: First, when you organize every social institution as a contest, you promote only the short-term material interests of narrow segments of society, who enter those contests with an inherent advantage, due to inherited forms of power and privilege. We even organize most forms of recreation and leisure as mental or physical contests. We organize education as a contest for grades and recognition. We organize the market as a contest of capital accumulation. We organize justice as contest of legal advocacy. We organize governance as a contest for power. The culture of contest organizes almost every social institution as a contest with winners and losers. In order to adapt one thing we need to do is move beyond what I call the culture of contest. And we urgently need to adapt, because the scale of human suffering and ecological degradation are going to increase until we do. But we haven't yet adapted to this new reality. We've literally transformed the conditions of our own existence. There are now 7 billion of us on this planet with technologies that increase our impact and our interdependence a thousand-fold. Michael Karlberg's TEDTalk, what is the culture of contest, what are the three myths about human nature, what method of change only perpetuates the problem and why, and what are the three fronts that we can all work on to change the world for the better?īeyond the Culture of Contest: A Critical Juncture in Human History Michael Karlberg Transcript from TEDx talk, Innsbruck, Austria, 9 June 2012 We stand at a critical juncture in human history.
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