Zero Sum Game

I love sports. From my earliest days, I participated in every sport available in our community. And I believe that over the years I learned some great lessons about teamwork and exerting yourself toward a goal.

But there was another lesson that, in retrospect, has not proven to be so helpful. That is the idea that there are only two options. You either win or you lose. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. I understand that to be the way things are set up in many of life’s situations, but at least to me there seems to be a problem when that same mindset gets transferred into other parts of every day life.

For example, it can get translated into a sense that life is a zero sum game, the idea that there is only so much of whatever it is we want to go around. Money, power, status-you name it. Thus, with that mindset, anything that someone else gets or achieves, especially if they are different than me, somehow diminishes me and my prospects. Life then reverts to a ball game mentality. You either win or lose. There is no other option. Again, if they win, I lose. The possibility that we all might gain or “win”, if you will, through some one else’s success seems to escape us.

I have mentioned this before, but I learned something from raising my children. The idea of fair only comes up in the conversation when I think I am being “taken.” If things are going my way, the concept of fairness does not seem important. In fact, I accept things as the way they are supposed to be. But if my place in the pecking order is somehow threatened by whatever or whomever, then suddenly the issue of fairness comes to the fore. So, if you try to mitigate the unfairness, it might feel unfair to me because, up to now, I have benefitted from that unfairness.

Isabel Wilkerson, in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, writes about what political scientists call “dominant group status threat.”

“‘This phenomenon ‘is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups who are perceived to be inferior,’ writes Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status.’”

“Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash.”

“In the zero-sum stakes of a caste system upheld by perceived scarcity, if a lower-caste person goes up a rung, an upper-caste person comes down. The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.”

“The researchers consider this kind of group hypervigilance to be what they call ‘racialized economics’: the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead “while your group is left behind.”

“‘Those susceptible to ‘dominant group status threat,’ Mutz wrote, ‘will do whatever they can to protect the hierarchy that has benefited them, to ‘regain a sense of dominance and wellbeing.’”

Again the old song from Paul Simon comes to mind: “Slip sliding away.”? Too often that song’s sense is a dominant theme on our personal playlists.

In many situations that seems to me to be a limited perception. In his book The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory, Tim Alberta recalls a conversation with Vincent Bacote of Wheaton College in which Bacote said “Just because other people are getting something, doesn’t mean you’re losing something.”

Think about it using this example. You and I did not discover the polio vaccine, but we certainly profited from Dr. Salk’s and others’ success (their “win” so to speak) as did the whole world. You have to have lived through those fearful times to really appreciate the magnitude of that discovery’s impact. By the way, Dr. Salk did not patent the vaccine formula, wanting it to be quickly and inexpensively available. So in that case we all “won.”

I would suggest that Salk’s benevolent act serves as a model for the rest of us. It also indicates that life is not always a zero sum game. Someone else’s win does not necessarily constitute a loss for me.