Reading time: 5 minutes
punditman says...
One summer my friend decided to do extra school work by creating little booklets on construction paper, covering various topics, such as The Steam Engine.
Of course I had to do the same.
We’d cut and paste pictures from magazines and write descriptive prose in our best cursive writing.
The whole thing was kind of nerdy weird. What primary school-aged boys did extra homework in the summer? In any case, such scholastic over exuberance and discipline would soon be tempered.
Since the dawn of civilization, many a big brain has grappled with the question of whether humans are inherently competitive, cooperative or born as blank slates. Contemporary research suggests that both nature and nurture play significant roles in shaping human development and behaviour.
Now that we've resolved that seemingly endless debate within evolutionary biology and psychology—often deemed fruitless—I think I'll return to the narrative.
Trophies and Tendencies
This same friend scored 40 goals one season in the elite hockey league in which we both played. To mark this impressive achievement, he was awarded a trophy with a mounted puck.
Of course I had to have one too.
And so, after scoring a hat trick, I asked the referee for the puck and badgered my dad into having it mounted on a trophy that said "70th goal of career and first MTHL hat trick." I too would get a trophy like my buddy had, and mine would have a higher goal count.
Days and weeks passed until finally Dad arrived home after work with the new hardware.
But something didn't sit right. Not only had I included more than one season, a goodly portion of these self-counted goals occurred in exhibition games, scrimmages, practices, or whatever my vivid imagination and creative accounting conjured up. Other than the "first hat trick" part, the rest was…umm…embellished.
Was this the product of envy and had I thus broken the tenth commandment?:
"You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey…nor his hockey trophy.”
The liberal Baptist church I attended as a youngster was big on “love thy neighbour” but I don’t recall much about sin (here's hoping for an exemption for those under age ten).
Or was this episode simply the product of a misguided competitive tendency?
The ill-begotten award sits in a bin amongst other trophies—the ones born of true merit.
Clap for the Wolf Kids
In middle school, another pal started his own "radio station."
Of course I had to do the same.
Hands up everyone who spots the trend here. Clinical psychologists say it’s normal for kids to emulate their peers instead of their parents as they form their own identities, solidifying friendships and social cohesion—a behaviour that normally recedes as individual paths are forged.
Anyway, having our own radio stations involved each of us taping songs directly off Chum radio, interjecting our deejay voices into the mix and then typing out our own unique song charts.
The two of us even collaborated for a couple of "variety shows" and "interviewed" “guests” like Richard Nixon, Pierre Trudeau and Raquel Welch—by inserting snippets of lyrics from pop songs as their answers.
For added drama, we used a sound effects record and that’s when things went off the rails.
We ended up sentencing Tricky Dick Nixon to a firing squad, sending his body on a ship to Africa and feeding his corpse to a pit of lions. Luckily there was no Internet then.
To this day, my younger sister thinks I should've gone into radio, like our Uncle Wes did. Sorry, sis—maybe I'll do a podcast one day.
But I'm more curious as to why I had to have what my buddies had, at least in some cases.
Some say it’s all part of our competitive nature. They point to capitalism—a system built on self-interest, accumulation, ownership and profit—as the only system that aligns with our “nature.” And now a word from the friendly oligarch who has decided to channel himself into this essay in order to excuse 500 years of exploitation, imperialism and colonialism:
"Never mind all the unbridled greed, class warfare and genocide, guys. It's just human nature, we can't help it ya know."
Others claim capitalism is the problem. As any parent knows, insidious marketing ensures kids adopt consumerist and materialist values, so it’s not hard to see how this diminishes any natural instincts for collaboration.
At any given moment we can find as many examples of altruism, solidarity and compassion as there are acts of selfishness, rivalry and indifference.
Human nature is a big-think topic with many facets, but one common notion is that our nature is constantly evolving, shaped by genetics, circumstances, social structures and our own uniqueness.
And if we favour one of these aforementioned human tendencies—competition or cooperation, at the expense of the other—be it “survival of the fittest” hyper-capitalism, coercive collectivism, or any form of groupthink—we do so at our peril. Authoritarianism, after all, can appear in many guises.
It’s something to keep in mind when we go about choosing how to govern ourselves and society.
That’s enough extra homework for now.
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this article and want to encourage Punditman to keep going, you can buy me a coffee below. Every little bit helps!
I believe that what we think of as human nature varies depending on the articulation of modes of production making up our social formation whether communal, slave, feudal, capitalist or socialist. As Marx observed in 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' "“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." So Punditman, when I started reading your Substack articles I thought, why don't I write one as well. Call it envy if you like, or quote Marx (see my piece, Ukrainian Denouement at https://substack.com/home/post/p-142695686?r=pm71k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web). Also, yes, produce a podcast by all means as we at ECV Ontario have done with two seasons of Behind the Aroma, the last one of which was just published:: Spices, narrated by Olaitan Ogunnote, produced by Bamidele Adekunle including a cameo appearance by my wife Luisa, talking about Italian spices. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4O2cpZMbeK2hZGEw3BQ9Nz?si=20b9b4da7f514694 Glen Filson