<p>Prompt: While some people promote competition as the only way to achieve success, others emphasize the power of cooperation. Intense rivalry at work or play or engaging in competition involving ideas or skills may indeed drive people either to avoid failure or to achieve important victories. In a complex world, however, cooperation is much more likely to produce significant, lasting accomplishments. </p>
<p>Assignment: Do people achieve more success by cooperation than by competition? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.</p>
<p>The fast-paced nature of the modern world has made competitiveness the hallmark of success. While cooperation may achieve greater success in the long run, it is often abandoned by most of our society in the hustle and bustle of trying to "get ahead." This competitiveness can be observed in the current paradigm of our economic world (free-market capitalism), our recreation (professional sports), and our "culture", or what passes for it these days, television.</p>
<p>The not too distant memories of Worldcom, Global Crossing, and Enron give people a chance to reflect on the consequences of unbridled competition. These were companies that became supergiants by competing against, and then gobbling up, their rivals. And what was happening? They were given laudatory front-page headlines, their stock prices soared, and their CEOs regularly spoke on television. Competition made these companies what they were - and no matter how "shocked" everyone was when it all came crashing down - we were cheering them all the way.</p>
<p>The cheers are not any less loud for our professional athletes. Instead of simply encouraging excellent performance in the last year of high school and the college years to perhaps land a professional berth, today we observe the phenomenon of grammar-school children taking sports as seriously as high school students. And to what end? Well, they are told that the best, fastest, strongest, etc. will receive the most money and fame. And athletes routinely push their bodies to their limits - injuries that cripple for a lifetime seem ho-hum in an environment that consistently echoes Vince Lombardi: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."</p>
<p>And winning, that's what "reality shows," the dominant form of television entertainment, are really all about. The ruse is simple - put a group of demographically different people into an uncertain environment and then give them tasks to perform. As we've seen above, cooperation does not "pay." Ruthless, unbridled, take-no-prisoners cutthroat savagery is often essential to the "winners" of these shows. As always, the theme is the same - winning gets one money or "fame" - or both.</p>
<p>Ultimately that's what drives competition in today's world - the love of fame and money. These desires appeal to the basest and most primal urges of mankind, and those base and primal instincts bring out anything other than the "better angels of our nature", as Abraham Lincoln once said. Yes, competition achieves more "success" than cooperation, but at what cost?</p>