Participation and Excellence

[Remember the Paralympics and Special Olympics during the Olympics...]

The theory is that competition draws each individual along, bringing out of him or her the best he or she has to offer. Competition and the resulting fame are thought to be among the great achievements of our rational meritocracy. They promise both self-improvement and participation.

The reality is almost the opposite. In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren't even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed with competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition.

and

What we have been witnessing is the growth of perfectly innocent, even banal, physical pastines into something which makes governments, national and international communications systems vibrate with excitement. Clearly what excites them is not sportmanship, widely based participation or a profound or sustained interest in how many millimetres higher the high-jump bar has moved...Rather they are attracted by the event's ability to produce bevies of immediate stars who are tied to facile national emotions. These stars become not role models for the young- few would pretend they could ever jump so high -but dream models. They become the modern knights of the Round Table.

(John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, p. 507)