User:Roxane

The extreme competition, mean to say the war, is it justifiable?

Since the appearance of life on earth till our modern society, competition has been an undeniable fact.

 It has always existed  but the forms have evolved.  Because the living beings have become more complex, the different forms of competition have become more complicated also, evolving from the primitive fight for life until the different kinds we know now (political, ideological, economical,...).
 Competition is constantly present in our every day life under its more common aspects (at school, at work,...) but also under universal aspects as ideological, political, ... wars.  
 But is competition justifiable?  Sometimes, competition pushed to extreme can lead to horrors.  Is it excusable?   To answer this question we will distinguish the different sorts of competition and try to understand what is causing it. 
 But first we would like to tell you how we define the word competition : it is all kind of opposition that can be conducted by different parts and this in all possible domains.

Let's start with the ideological competition.

Since the man has begun to be Man, differences of opinions have appeared.  This is normal because the human being is made to think and to constitute his own opinion on a precise problem.  And everyone does not react the same way.  
However, all type of ideological competition is not necessarily good.  Let's take the example of the Jews' genocide.  The extreme German nationalism led Hitler to invade his neighbours and to exterminate the Jews.  
We see that when the ideas can not be confronted anymore, we tend to a form of ideological dictature leading to horrors that we know so well (Pinochet's dictature, the killings in Rwanda,...). 
To resume, the ideological competition is natural and justifiable as long as everyone respects his neighbour's opinion.  But conducting wars because others think differently or are simply different is not excusable.  We don't have to forget that everyone has the liberty of opinions.  So being different should not be a cause of punishment.

Another sort of very important competition is the biological competition. Indeed, it is thanks to this that the human beings are evolving since the Creation. The creatures have always had to fight for life and this for different reasons. For example, the resources or the living space can begin to be scarce. This fight favours the best ones, the most adapted to their environment. According to Darwin's theory, this is the natural selection. This natural selection due to concurrency between the different beings makes possible the biological evolution.

 So according to Darwin, the biological competition is really important and can not be evicted.  
  There is another theory(Malthus' theory) about the men's evolution.   But this one is about social competition that exists between people.  

According to Malthus, the population follows a geometrical growth while goods of consumption follow an arithmetical growth. We can differentiate two different cases. The first one is when there is a lot more goods of consumption than needed. The prices are quite low and there are no particular problems. But at the other hand, when the goods of consumption are missing, prices increase very fast and the unemployment begins to appear. This difficulty concerns mostly the low social classes. The growth of population goes slowly down until a normal situation is recovered. And at that moment the cycle begins again. To avoid an extreme social competition, a social political concern is born in the modern societies. This one tends to minimise the fluctuation of the population and by the same way, the poverty.

 But this kind of competition has also a few advantages.  For example, necessity is an important factor of invention.  Spirits are a lot more stimulated when there are obstacles to surmount and this is because men are compelled to do some efforts to survive.  

This explains why it is important to have different social classes in a Society : the poorer are stimulated because they want to become rich ; and the richer are scared to become poor.

 So this competition can be interesting but must be kept under control.  Indeed, as it has been explained before, a too important social competition can be dangerous.    

The economical compeition can also be dangerous if it is not kept under control. This competition is the principle of our modern economy. It can be good to have open markets, free circulation of goods and services, ... Indeed, competition makes it possible to get the best product for the lowest possible price. In a monopolistic situation where only a few societies detain the power, the price can be set arbitrarily and become too high. The creation of profits is based on different concepts such as the rarity of the product, its utility, the work it requires, ... At the opposite competition enables this to happen; the price is settled according to the structure of the market. If the demand is high even higher that what the market can offer, the price will be high; but if the demand is low, the price will be low also.

 Competition is also a factor of progress : it stimulated  people to innovate.

But perfect competition does not exist. To make it possible, there are a lot of factors (such as having a market accessible to everyone, without any restriction, ...) that we can not combine. It is an utopia to think that we can have a perfect interconnection between all the players of a same market! As we have learned from some bad experiences, extreme competition can lead to horrors such as the illegal employment of workers, their excessive exploitation, ... The environment is also put in danger sometimes by the illegal circulation of dangerous products between countries. Everyone can find his profit in the others' unfortune.

 To resume, competition is important for its contribution to progress and to the economical development.  But anyway, it must be kept under control to evict inhuman attitudes.  

To conclude let's take the concurrency leads to its extreme : the war.

To illustrate as good as possible the application of extreme concurrency, let's take some concrete examples as the two World Wars.
 As mister Mottart said, the economical competition is an important cause of conflict between nations.  Indeed, it is one of the causes that led to the Second World War. The German felt economically betrayed and this led to a real hate against the Westerners.  Some politicians jumped on the occasion and started a second World War.
 Competition is also present during the war.  All did use  competitiveness  to diminish the power of their opponents.  For example, the scientists try to  attribute intellectual problems or physical differences to their opponents.  Most of the time they even develop a type of racism.  Each collaborator will follow this idea of racism so that all their horrible acts  could be excusable.  This reasoning is very natural : people feel alone and lost during a period of war.  They will accept  all kind of instructions that will help them  finding an orientation.

Such an attitude can lead in certain conditions to a real hate against a whole population. The Second World War can always be a good example here. Racism against the Jews was instigated by the government and a few leaders mostly for economical reasons and has been the cause of their genocide. The extreme competition has shown during that period of the twentieth century all its horror and its cruelty. Surprisingly , a lot of people accepted such a situation. Such behaviours are of such an immorality that we could never have expected it from a civilised nation. The man in war does not care about any limits. He allows himself a lot of things he would not even have imagined in a period of peace. For example, he does not respect the injured or the civil population. So, it appears that the populations normally considered as civilised understand and know each other so bad that they fight against each other under a pressure of extreme competition never seen before. However, the man has never been totally good or totally bad. Even in a civilised society the bad sides never disappear completely. The rules imposed by the societies try to canalise the evil. But during the war nobody takes care about the rules anymore and so men appear as non-morally evolved.

All this shows us that the war is the prolongation of nearly all kind of competition led to its extreme. So governments use competition (consciously or not) to start wars. It is logical to say that wars will always exist as long as the population will live in different conditions and as long as the hate that persists between them will be fed by very intensive intellectual forces. The best solution to try to evict wars is to use competition at constructive ends. It is moreover the lesson that Europe has withdrawn from years of war and hate. It is what has permitted the construction of the European community.