1. Let All the Rookies Win!

New Leaf Distributing Co., 1997 – Once again I’ve been asked to vote in a popularity contest called “Rookie of the Year.” I guess if I were a devotee of the popular religious cult called Sports, choosing one new “player” hired each year to elevate and honor above the rest would make perfect sense. But I’m not, and it doesn’t.

I don’t know much about this odd cult, but it seems ruled by an obsession with who’s winning and who’s losing, who is better and who is worse. By the end of the season, nothing matters except who is the very best. When it’s over, one “winner” is ritually crowned supreme over all the rest – the “losers.”

No wonder Sports is this country’s leading religious movement. It’s the perfect religion for a society that worships upward mobility, status symbols, and winning at any cost.

Indoctrination in competitiveness is the primary emphasis in our schooling, not just in sports but in academics: “My Child is an Honor Student at . . .” But even more insidious is the initiation school called “popularity.” I think this division into “winners” and “losers” helps to explain the pandemic of low self-esteem that is in turn causing plagues of drug addiction, teen pregnancy, child abuse, hate crimes, etc.

Since in any competitive system only a few can win, far more people carry around the damaged self-image of “loser” than the exalted image of “winner.” And if winning is the only thing of value, it ceases to matter what we have to do to win. Childhood bullying is considered a social problem, but adults who behave the same way reap honors and rewards.

All of this is implied in a ballot that invites me to choose one from a list of names to elevate and honor, and fifteen to be “losers.” I know we are supposed to base our votes not on popularity, but on “real contributions to our mission and our work.” But because we have friends on other work teams, but know little about their work, we tend to fall back on our training in school. Popularity rules.

In real life, people have different strengths that balance each other’s weaknesses when they work together. Popularity can reflect real strengths that help get the job done – or become a substitute for solid work. In short, popularity by itself has nothing to do with shipping out the books in our warehouse, and the arrival of this ballot in my mailbox is just another example of someone mistaking their own strange cult for reality.

I am one of those fortunate enough in this win-or-lose capitalist economy to truly love my job. But at a company whose mission is to help the world evolve into a New Age, a ritual like this one just doesn’t fit. Our newest hires are not here to compete for popularity, but to work together and become the best of friends.

Given the choice to win or lose, everybody wants to win. But there are always more than two choices. Here’s my write-in ballot: cancel the contest. Let all the rookies win.

2. Us Against Them, Winner Take All

Sevananda Natural Foods Market, 2021 – As a boy I loved playing ball with my neighborhood gang of friends. But keeping score was optional, and winning was not the point. I never understood the attraction of organized sports, from Little League to Varsity – this bizarre obsession with proving which team is the very best. What difference does it make in the real world, where people are dealing with real challenges? Why throw an entirely made-up challenge into the mix?

The standard answer is that sports teach kids the value of teamwork. But teamwork is simply cooperation in pursuit of a worthy goal. Why is it necessary to compete against another team pursuing the same goal? Why can’t we all play on the same team, pursuing it together?

I’ve had many friends and co-workers over the years who loved to watch and discuss sports. I mean them no disrespect. It’s only another form of entertainment, after all – that popular drug that gives us an occasional break from our real-world challenges. Everyone needs some form of escape, though for some, “occasional” stretches into “habitual” or even “addictive.” Meanwhile, back in the real world, our families and communities face real dangers.

In the fantasy-world of Sports, like all those good-guy-vs.-bad-guy movies, much of the excitement comes from picking one team to root for against the other. It’s an imaginative exercise in dividing the world into “us and them.” It seems like harmless fun: but according to many of the authors in New Leaf’s warehouse, thoughts create reality. The powerful competitive thought-form called Sports helps to perpetuate the good-guy-vs.-bad-guy, us-against-them, winner-take-all mentality that makes Dr. King’s “Beloved Community” seem like such a distant dream.

The cult of competition was always popular among the winners, ever since the game was played with clubs and spears. But it received a boost in the 19th century from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Even religious people twisted it to proclaim that winning the bloody competition for survival is a sign of God’s favor.

But Darwin himself understood that species don’t just compete: they also cooperate. A century later, another controversial theory called the “Gaia Hypothesis” postulated that all the species on the planet cooperate to keep it friendly to life. This new scientific paradigm is slowly displacing Darwin’s paradigm of dominance, which displaced the Biblical one of dominion.

Competition and cooperation have always been complementary aspects of human life, but centuries of competition among empires, nations, and corporations have tipped the necessary balance. Behind a facade of competitive free enterprise, modern corporations cheat, lie, bully and bribe to win. Winning has become more important than health, honesty, sanity, finally life itself. Our deteriorating climate and the thousands of nuclear weapons targeting our cities are the logical consequences of an unquestioned assumption that life is competition, with only two alternatives: win or lose.

The Olympic Games are praised as a peaceful alternative to war. Sports are obviously preferable to war, but I see in them a ritual enactment of the win-or-lose mentality on a global scale. When will the world come together to care for its children rather than to play games to decide which nation is the very best at this, the very best at that? Why not pursue a goal that actually matters?

3. A Win-Win-Win for People, Community, and Planet

“Community” evokes the deep sense of belonging people yearn for in our transient, technocentric age. It harks back to our oldest roots as humans – the tribe, the village, the extended family, where people took responsibility for each other, the land they depended on, even generations unborn. The genetic memory of these traditional cooperative societies lives on in Dr. King’s vision.

Eating together, celebrating together, sharing culture and conversation all contribute to a sense of community. But working together is its heart and soul. For millennia it was the only way humans could survive in a hardscrabble world. It’s still the best way to learn and build community, re-discovering that together we are greater than the sum of our individual selves. Taking on a common project has accomplished many a milestone in human history, and still gives us a satisfying sense of shared purpose.

I was lucky enough to know that feeling during the 20 years I worked at New Leaf Distributing Co., an employee-owned wholesaler supplying metaphysical and holistic books to independent bookstores, and again while working at my local food co-op, Sevananda Natural Foods. Both were alternative companies where I found a team worth “playing” for. But rather than competing against an opposing team, we competed with ourselves to improve our individual performance – like runners who strive to beat their previous record – and to tighten our teamwork. We worked together not for some glorious title or trophy, but to contribute something valuable to the world.

“Sevananda” is Sanskrit for “the bliss of service,” and I experienced it daily. At the co-op I could see the real-world difference our team effort made for people we served face to face. More than once during my nine years there, our hard work helped save the co-op from going under. Teamwork made the difference, and everyone’s contribution counted.

A corporation is a system of organized greed, designed to maximize profit by minimizing responsibility to others. A co-op, on the other hand, thrives on taking responsibility for its community. Though Sevananda competes with other stores, the money its customers spend there benefits the community rather than wealthy stockholders on Wall Street.

Across the economic landscape, co-ops are proving they can flourish through an ethic of service. REI, Organic Valley, Ocean Spray, Land-O-Lakes, and Ace Hardware are all co-ops. Community-owned credit unions sailed through Bush Jr.’s financial bubble-bath virtually unscathed. Housing co-ops, health care co-ops, electricity co-ops, even laundry service co-ops are spreading in places devastated by “business-as-usual.”

All these co-ops formed when a few enterprising individuals saw a need and, instead of forming a corporation to exploit it, decided to share the costs and benefits together. Why depend on corporations that profit from filling our needs when we can do it ourselves? Why not ditch the us-against-them, winner-take-all economy and shift our spending from predatory corporations to co-ops? Why don’t we all join the same team and work together to create a “Beloved Community” for the generations of children unborn?

Note: These are my personal opinions and do not represent any organization I’m involved in. If my words resonate for you, please share widely. You can subscribe (or unsubscribe) at StephenWing.com. Read previous installments of “Wingtips” here.