Today, I’m going to talk about something that lies at the root of much of the evils of the world : one-upmanship, otherwise known as social competition.

The most familiar form of this is “keeping up with the Joneses”. The Joneses get air conditioning, and suddenly everyone wants to hang out at their place. This burns you up, so you get a bigger, better air conditioner. They respond by getting a pool. And so forth and so on.

In that form, while it might lead to people living beyond their means and wracking up a lot of needless debt, it is still relatively benign. But change the variables a bit, and the sinister possibilities become clear.

Say you’re an imam in a Taliban-dominated area. Your biggest rival, the imam that really pisses you off with all his fancy talk and putting on airs, announces that the latest suicide bomber to take out a group of foreign infidels in their smug UN uniforms was one of his disciples. Clearly, this means everyone thinks it’s HIS disciples who are the most devout, and of course, that means that HE, the person you despise the most in the world, is the best imam.

Obviously, this cannot be allowed to stand, and you immediately go back to your mosque and deliver an impassioned speech about the vile and filthy infidels besmirching the lands of Allah and how the only path to true virtue is to wipe them off the face of the Earth, no matter what the cost.

You’ll show that smug prick who’s the better imam. You’ll recruit TWO suicide bombers.

Or take the Cold War. Say you’re high up in the military of the United States during the Cold War. You have just told the President that, due to your patriotic diligence and selfless self-sacrifices, the United States has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the entire world. And it makes you feel happy, proud, and erect to imagine all that destructive power at your… er, that is, the United States disposal. Finally, you will be able to show those dirty rotten Red bastards who is really the strongest nation, especially that smug Commie prick that is your opposite number. You can’t wait to see the look on his face when he find out just how royally screwed he is.

Then some peckerhead from Intelligence comes in and tells you that the Soviets now have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire world twice.

That socialist son of a bitch has one-upped you! Time to get on the phone to the President and explain to him how very, very inadequate the nation’s defenses still are, and how important it is to push for further expansion of the nation’s nuclear capacities, lest the Soviets gain a strategic advantage.

I could go on and on. Much evil has been done in the name of spite and jealousy and the desire to push a rival’s face into the dirt, and then sold as patriotism, being tough on crime, or truly dedicated to the highest ideals.

This social competition is an inevitable part of human society. It is bred into us. Social competition is how hierarchies are created. A wolf fights other wolves, starting low in the pecking order and moving their way up, until they lose. Then, that becomes their place in the hierarchy – one step below the wolf that beat him, but above all the ones he beat.

The one who beats everyone gets to be alpha.

But acknowledging something as inevitable and letting it run rampant are two entirely different things.

The most deadly expression of social competition is extremism. Extremism is more than a set of beliefs. It is a process by which people adopt more and more extreme positions in order to one-up one another in their fight for social dominance.

It always starts the same way : one person makes a play for social dominance by, in one way or another, claiming to be more “dedicated” (or devout, or committed, or whatever) because their positions are more ideologically pure than the current social leader’s. If the people of the social group, be it a student run animal rights organization or Congress, reject this ploy, then the cause of reason, restraint, and sanity lives another day.

But if they accept it and begin paying more attention to what the extremist has to say, the social group has contracted extremism and the prognosis is not good. Reason dies, and the sensible people might as well pack up and go home.

Because now it’s going to be about who can adopt an even more extreme position which is even more “pure”, and it won’t take long that, purely because two or more people are vying for social dominance, the positions adopted by the group are patently insane.

Because the thing is, extremism is easier to understand and more emotionally compelling than moderation. People believe X to be good and Y to be bad. The easiest thing in the world is to gravitate towards the person whose positions are the most X and the least Y. Whether or not any of it is a good idea takes self-restraint and second thought and all those other boring things that are no fun at all.

Nowhere is this more evident than the radical senescence of conservatism in the world’s democracies, especially the one south of the border. The “more conservative” candidate wins the primary (or what have you) and so all the competitors must try to out-do one another in unadulterated lunacy and any proponent of moderation, cooperation, or sanity is ruthlessly crushed as being “not conservative enough” or worse, “not a real conservative”.

The only solution, as I see it, is to educate people to recognize extremism as it forms, and give them the tools to defuse it. Teach people that there is no good thing that can’t be turned bad by taking it too far, and give them social permission to stand up and say “No, that’s not better, it’s just crazy”.

Or better yet, get them saying “No thanks, we’re sticking with sanity. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.