One-Upmanship essays

One-Upmanship essays In a society of one-upmanship it falls on us to create an environment which is conducive to harmonious and peaceful coexistence....a Herculean task, not a mean feat to be accomplished effortlessly. In a society where one needs to get noticed amongst a sea of people to be given some credibility for ones merits, one-upmanship is a constant phenomenon governing ones life. Be it the daily mundane cores, to achieve ones own personal end or any lifetime achievement in a larger perspective that of the country, the world or humanity. That then instills in every human being a sense of competition and where there is competition there follows at heels the spirit of ruthlessness, and needless to add in a ruthless atmosphere, there is no place for mutual sympathy or any compassion for the other and the atmosphere is far from harmonious one. Competition is the spirit of one-upmanship and it certainly is not a healthy trend, as many tend to put it, of stretching oneself to reach ones own maximum po tential. On the contrary it simply inculcates the negative feelings of always wanting to outdo the other and in that process end up humiliating the other person, which again, is a total negation of harmony. I guess we can debate for hours whether competition is a natural principle, or whether it is something that is a result of our surroundings and our conditioning. The world is in a bad shape. There are too many obsolete and incomplete paradigms and competition is one of them. We are told that competition is good for us. It is a powerful, deeply entrenched and old-fashioned principle. It is not a paradigm of mutual benefit, but rather of winning and losing. It is incomplete. Take a soccer match, for example. Can both teams win? Dig deep into your imaginations. If the principle were to be "stretch" rather than "competition", both teams could win. The game could always be a draw and each team would try to do better next time. They w...