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Comment by linguae

20 days ago

Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in a family where my dad at one point was a musician and my siblings and I all pursued competitive careers at one point in our lives (academia, acting, business, music, sports), but I don’t know if Americans in general are averse to competition. In fact, I’d say Americans love competition. Americans generally love sports, for example.

I do agree, though, that we Americans could do a better job at handling losing, and we also have a problem with people and institutions that want to win at any cost, violating mores and laws when they are impediments to “winning.”

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linguae

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originalvichy  20 days ago

>Americans generally love sports

That’s funny, since I think your sports leagues are the best example of fake competitiveness. Every major sports operates a closed league.

The greatest basketball talent ever from my country is playing for a team that’s tanking (see? it even has a word), which for those who don’t know is the act of purposefully losing games to be able to get better draft picks. Because of a closed league, the players and staff are not really punished for bad performance.

The reason for this (besides the obvious financial reasons) is the idea of losing completely. In football leagues around thw world, historical giants have faded away to irrelevancy due to bad performances year after year or mismanagement (for which there are rules for to have fewer incidents).

Fundamentally though the sports system is more enertainment than pure competition.