The rest of us are handicapped by a need to comply with an altruistic Code of Competition.

The Thesis of the Book

The competitors who I have observed and about whom I am writing are chiefly amateur sailboat racers. But my contacts with competitors in other sports as well as newspaper reports and books written by and about golfers and tennis players and runners and other sportsmen-demonstrate that all amateur competitors behave similarly and are similarly committed to an altruistic code. Nor are professional players immune; they have inherited the same genes and they differ merely in their greater talent and their greater ability to resist the universal inclination to give their opponent a break.

The thesis of this book is twofold:

First: Competitors behave deliberately. They do what they want to do and achieve what they want to achieve. Although other competitors and other influences occasionally prevent them from succeeding, their actions - rational or irrational, beneficial or detrimental - are deliberate.
Second: Much of what competitors do deliberately is consequent to their inheritance of unconscious dogmas, particularly an altruistic Code of Competition, that require them to behave in accordance with principles that were essential to the survival of their primitive, pack-living ancestors.

That the behavior of competitors is deliberate has been widely recognized, although competitors have paid it little attention. That the behavior of competitors is largely the consequence of information inherited from their primitive ancestors has not been widely recognized. Competitors are typically unaware that their egoistic intentions are regularly overwhelmed by an inherited altruism and that they usually choose to comply with an altruistic Code that benefits their opponents, rather than themselves!

Compliance with the Code creates the camaraderie, the pleasant ambience, the good fellowship that causes sport to be so attractive to so many. It accounts for the willingness of one competitor to assist another in his acquisition of competence, for the distress a competitor feels when his opponent is adversely affected, for the universal support of the underdog and for everyone’s admiration - and resentment - of the winner.

But it also causes competitors to accept being controlled, to acquiesce in being beaten, to restrain their aggressiveness, to be embarrassed by winning and to be tantalized by fear. It promotes the belief that deservedness should determine results, that pre-existing rankings should be accepted, that the more aggressive should dominate and that losing is a satisfactory outcome.

I have been interested in behavior throughout my career. I was preoccupied with behavior during my medical training, practice and teaching (as a Professor of Pediatrics for 23 years) and I have maintained a keen interest in understanding my fellow competitors (as well as an enthusiasm for recording my observations) during my more than seventy- seven years of racing sailboats throughout the world.

Sailboat racing, which is largely an amateur sport (although some events include professionals), provides a unique platform from which to observe competitive behavior. Its highly unpredictable course and outcome facilitate the exposure of inherited, unconscious drives and the portion of the sport in which I have participated, international Olympic sailing, provides frequent insights into the behavior of great, as well as ordinary, competitors.

I have concluded from my observations that competitors regularly forego their egoistic intentions so as to act altruistically in compliance with an altruistic code. The Code appears to have been inherited (along with a vast array of other capacities, limitations and motivations that have only recently been recognized). It seems to derive from the behaviors necessary to the sustenance, support and survival of the packs in which our primitive ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years. These conclusions have been substantiated by a number of recent scientific investigations.

Studies in animals conducted by Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare (What’s Next? - Out of Our Minds) have indicated that sociability, i.e., cooperation between individuals, rather than intelligence, may have determined man’s transition from mere primate to master of the world. Woods and Hare believe that insight into the minds of others - possession of a theory of mind (an attribute restricted to humans and those animals, such as dogs, that have lived in close association with humans) - is the primary determinant of human success. The implication is that an awareness of and a concern for others was necessary to the survival and progress of our pack living ancerstors and that we inherited that altruism, are committed to it and cannot escape it.

Terrence Deacon’s (The Symbolic Species - The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain) study of the human brain has caused him to propose a Deacon Doctrine: Persistent and powerfully influential ideas, like language and mathematics and codes of behavior, fit into and are determined by the pre-existing structure and function of the human brain. The implication is that the codes of altruism that have persisted, that continue to govern our instinctive behavior, are hard-wired into our brain. It is not surprising that competitors cannot (or can only with difficulty) resist the code of the primitive pack that they have inherited.

Joshua Greene (Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind), who studies human responses to altruistic challenges, has demonstrated that egoistic, emotional responses are regularly overriden by altruistic, cognitive responses. "When an apparent moral duty [egoism] conflicts with the greater good [altruism], judgments in favor of duty are driven by emotion, while judgments in favor of the greater good are driven by more controlled [and more powerful] cognitive processes." These insights into brain physiology explain why my competitors and I so often forsake our egoistic intent and act for the greater good of our opponents and the sport.

Although Aristotle claimed that observation is the basis for all natural philosophy, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my observations have been corroborated by these (and other) recent neurological and behavioral investigations. It’s so nice to be proven right!

I do not - as I used to tell my medical students - expect my readers to believe that all of my presumptions about the relationships between modern and primitive behavior are necessarily true, i.e., that there can be no other explanation for them. Indeed, if they only wish to know how competitors behave and have little interest in why, I do not think it essential that they read Part II which discusses these relationships until after they have read Parts I and III (or at all!).

However, I believe that after reading Part III they will recognize that competitors are regularly complying with an altruistic Code and they will wonder how the precepts of that Code came to dominate their behavior.