How to Socialize a Competitive World November 23, 1913

Paul Moore Strayer, 1913
“This is an incurably competitive world. It is competition that gives zest to life and adds something of play to work. How are we going to socialize this competitive world? The desire to excel above one’s fellows still remains with us. A man’s greatness still rests on h9is achievement.
“The way to socialize this incurably competitive world is to set men to competing for something better than lordship and gold. You can’t get rid of the game; and you don’t want to. But you can change the rules of the game, and if you do that, then the game itself is changed. It is just as exciting to invent some new social machinery to enable people to get along better as it is to invent some new kind of locomotive or aeroplane – to invent something to put back money into the community as something to extract from it everything one can. That game is social – it is Christian.
“It isn’t true that ‘the world owes you a living.’ You owe the world a life. How have you spent and how are you going to spend it?”