A Trophy For Thee AND For Me

What’s the do-gooder’s end-game in making winners of losers?

Until the equity police write a tell-all book explaining their intentions in rewriting the rules of academics and sports for today’s youth, we’re left to speculate, so speculate we must:

Who benefits when everyone wins a trophy? What lesson does it teach the winners versus the losers? What is the value of sparing losers the pain of loss and robbing winners the glory of victory?

Let’s assume the unwritten rules of this sort of “community” approach to modern child-rearing were drafted with good intentions. Sports organizations stopped keeping score and everyone was a winner when the game was done. But why? What was the goal?

Do people who win learn a lesson when they receive the same rewards for winning as the losers?

If you’ve ever won anything at any point in your life, you can see how the “trophy for thee and for me” approach has the appearance of knocking winners down a peg. But if humility is the goal, the question is: Does it actually work?

The act of speculation is to apply the anecdotal to the aggregate. In this case, would you personally be a better person, a better competitor, a better employee, hunter, father, husband, or friend if every time you achieved something you were forced to share the glory?

I personally can say definitively: no.

If I work harder, think smarter, and achieve more than my colleagues and I earn the same reward, the natural response would be to not work as hard next time, because what would be the point? We are efficient machines: we seek the most reward for the least amount of effort. We work as hard as is necessary to achieve the goal, and if the effort didn’t matter because the reward was shared anyway, high performers don’t just lower their personal standards, but they do it with a sizable chip on their shoulder — toward the system administrators for the unfairness they created, and toward colleagues for reaping rewards they didn’t earn.

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