Winning

American society has fallen into a culture of winning. High-profile sports for profit, bipolar politics and rabid capitalism have created a perfect storm of competition over cooperation. Every political discourse in the media is couched in terms of winning. The winners are the wealthy, the corrupt and the greedy. The losers are the American people.

As a humanist living in a capitalist system, I have always felt challenged. In my early working years as a teacher and a nurse, I became quite accustomed to living with less. My work situations were relatively immune from the kind of avarice and back-stabbing prevalent in corporate-cubicle culture. My professions were gender-integrated. Nursing is predominantly a female occupation. However, later in my career, I began to encounter more aggression and capitalist greed within the health care industry. 

I do conduct business within the capitalist system. I have to pay to have shelter. I have to pay for food, clothing and basic needs. This has been an area of practice that has been very demanding, since I have had to deal with medical and financial challenges within this system for the past fifteen years. 

The concept of win-win has been helpful to my practice. In a recent transaction, I was able to work out a win-win with a buyer who was amazed at the whole process. "They threw away the mold when they made you," he said. I laughed. All I had done is act on my principles as a humanist seller. I had treated him fairly and had not striven to push him to my price on principle in order to win. We both got what we needed out of the transaction at a mutually satisfactory price. 

This behavior used to be a normal part of everyday transactions. The Fair Market has been replaced by the so-called Free Market. The new-Right American concept of Free Market is a repackaging of American Imperialism. It is actually Free Market by American Corporate Rules. Those rules are based on the idea that he who has the most and biggest guns wins.This is the Wild-West Libertarian view of social justice.

Winning does not promote learning. Failure does. Science and education depend on trial and failure, not winning. Yet, the recent obsession with Nobel Prizes in Science shows that capitalist avarice is working its way into professional Science. Winning the Nobel has become more important in the public eye than examining the actual advancements made by the winner. Perhaps this explains in part why a war-promoting President of the U.S. and a former Liberian dictator's minion have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Abandoning the win for the win-win is not very hard for a humanist who is clear on his/her ethics. I am not a rocket scientist, and I have been able to figure it out readily in most situations. It helps to start in simple human transactions. Abandoning contention for conversation is a good beginning. A shrug of puzzlement rather than a boisterous defensiveness comes easily when you abandon the idea of controlling other person's mind in order to win your point. Gradually, the win-win becomes second nature. And, sometimes it entails maintaining a very separate peace by walking away.