A core, fundamental tenet to conservative thought is that of competition. In order to drive people to their best, we must compete over finite resources, which can be many things. It is in this inherent struggle against one another that meaning is prescribed. And this competition is natural, inherent, perhaps even fundamental to who we are.

Competition can mean many things as broad of an idea as it is. We can look at where the notion of competition comes from, hinting at notions of naturalism. Competition comes from nature, right? Animals compete against each other for resources and the ability to survive and reproduce. It is a contest, defined by one's ability to thrive in a brutal environment where all play for themselves.

Or we can look at where competition takes us, seeing the views of hierarchy. Humans may be seen as innately unequal, and competition the decider of that hierarchy. Or such hierarchy itself could be justified, as it is The Exceptional Few (not yet written) who decide it. Competition is what selects those few, and leads to a better world by empowering those who can shape this world, granting them the power to do so.

But in this piece, we're not going to look at the players. We're going to look at the culture of competition, the enduring contest that puts us against each other. It is this culture that seems to inherently deserve to be played, irrespective of winners and losers. This culture takes many forms, but no matter its presentation, it functions the same. The unwritten rules and hidden contract that divide us, and beyond that, bind us, in many systems. Whether it be in the unwritten rules of job promotion, the careful politics of authoritarian governance, or the free capitalist market, this culture pervades throughout. This culture is the game, the competitive sport that governs our entire lives. And it is this gamification of our society that subtly grasps at our lives itself on every scale.

Thomas Hobbes is not traditionally considered a conservative; scholars typically view him as before conservatism. Yet in his most famous work, Leviathan, he repeatedly champions the absolute monarchy as a force of good. He believed that monarchs deserved their power, believing an all-powerful sovereign was the most righteous way to govern a nation. To him, the interests of the monarch were aligned with the people, and in that monarch's absolute power could they best serve the people. Hobbes, in his Behemoth, declares the English Civil War to be a "revolutionary challenge", and repeatedly condemns "the democraticals."

Hobbes is perhaps best known for his social contract theory, which argues those in a society were approximately rational actors who would rationally try to achieve their best interests. In such a case, for the mutual prosperity of all, the people can agree to a social contract to form their society, even at the expense of some of their own freedoms. But why was such a social contract necessary? To avoid what Hobbes called the "state of nature", the contractless state where individuals would act chaotically.

In this chaotic realm, competition was unbounded. "If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their own end endeavour to destroy or subdue one another." Hobbes outlines three core causes of conflict: competition, mistrust, and glory. But mistrust seems deeply connected to competition (why would you mistrust one another if you weren't competing?) And glory itself seems like an object of competition. In this state of nature, humans were all selfish, bounded only by power. This notion of competition was inevitable, as it was only natural and expected for humans to be pit against each other. So instead, this competition could be managed through the social contract, even facilitated by it. When the sovereign owns everything, it is only through the sovereign that one can own anything.

Now, Hobbes certainly does make his preference for the sovereign quite clear... but he carefully notes the sovereign isn't the only solution. Some mechanism to redirect competition towards a less chaotic state is needed, but it does not have to be through an absolute monarch. In this sense, the game can have different rules, as long as it still funnels that inevitable competition. The sovereign itself represents such a rational actor, focusing on their own interests, but those interests happen to align with those of the people, for example. And now, this competition would be done by the sovereign, as it was the duty of the sovereign "to give titles of honour, and to appoint what order and place and dignity each man shall hold." And thus in such a rational framework, it is trivial to see how rational actors must compete for this places from the sovereign.

Hobbes, through his ideas of the social contract theory, paved the road towards the philosophy of realism. Realism expanded on this notion that individuals are rational actors, and believed a set of incentives could make sure rational actors behave in a mutually beneficial way just because it wouldn't be worth it for them to do otherwise. It, of course, expanded this idea onto nations as well, seeing them as extensions of those individuals. Realists saw the French Revolution as the anarchic chaos that Hobbes described, and saw the balance of powers as a sort of social contract. Metternich, perhaps the defining figure in balance of power theory, plays the most Hobbsian chords. "The point of departure is defined by the world 'order.' Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order." And to achieve that system of incentives, he must rely on "the true interests of all States," with diplomacy as a new facilitator of competition.

In The Dictator's Handbook, authors Smith and Mesquita, two political scientists, generalize these notions to authoritarian states in general. Dictators must play a careful and delicate game with their keys to power, minimizing which supporters they must rely on and which interests to take priority. These keys to power are the new players, competing with the dictator above for control, and their own keys below. Authoritarianism necessitates strategy, and to be able to better compete against threats to power, you must act rationally, to play the game, if you will.

But the game facilitated by the totalitarian state that necessitates competition only in alignment to itself is not the only set of rules. Returning to our notion of competition and the "state of nature", yet another game could be played to facilitate the notions of competition without reaching complete anarchy. A decentralized set of rules that restores "freedom" to individuals, without placing it in the hands of the establishment. This mechanism is of course, the free market.

This new set of rules seems to have certain advantages. For one, the sovereign has absolute authority and coercive power to make you do exactly what they want, without the possibility of correction or stoppage. But the free market was, of course, free. It was not in the power of the collective group, embodied through the state in the sovereign, but in the individual consumer who made personal decisions. The market was in theory, fair, not biased in towards of an existing sovereign, instead rewarding individuals based on their own choices. And it was efficient, allocating resources not based on the needs of a sovereign order from the top down, but from the demands of consumers bottom up.

It was with Edmund Burke's careful deliberation that the notion of the market first truly appeared in substantial form. Throughout his life, Burke had been a proponent of aristocracy and a fervent defender of the monarchy, finding the events of the French Revolution most repulsive. Indeed, he is seen today as the founder of conservatism, and he built off the work of the realists before him. Like other realist, his ideas called back to Hobbes and the sovereign, the just deserving aristocracy that could be owed support for protection. Only through this sovereign, of course, could such competition be realized. But worried about the waning support of such a sovereign, and the rise in the new revolutionaries who believed in such absurd notions like "popular sovereignty," Burke looked for other options.

This game would have new rules. If the revolution wanted to break together the "natural and civil" categories that would "regulate and hold together the community," to take away the state control, then perhaps that could be wrestled with. Burke wanted to make the old regime feel new, to make it feel revolutionary; and what was more revolutionary than freedom? In his Thoughts on Scarcity, Burke discusses how the "balance between consumption and production makes price." Through the choices and wills of the consumer and producer, the compromise done in private could dictate market prices, and the mechanisms of this market were a moral way for the parties to "mutually discover each other's wants."

Unlike the public system directed by the sovereign, the private one had no directors, dictated by the consumer. But the incentives of the game retained nonetheless, as now the many players in a system defined by wealth would compete for wealth. Players in the game "have a right to look to advantage", and to take risks when they "advance their money." The game was fair, and it was all-encompassing; even if the "impossibility of the subsistence of [a laborer]" was at stake. If you weren't paid enough to live, you just didn't play well enough.

Friedrich Hayek himself, the founder of neoliberalism, took this line of thinking even further. "Competition, is, above all, a process of discovery... a procedure for the discovery of such facts" that would be otherwise unknowable. He even directly compared societal rules to a game, describing that the "practices that led to the formation of the spontaneous order have much in common with rules observed in playing a game." Learning more of "the origin of competition in play" would be a difficult topic, but one with "masterly and revealing" analysis.

Hayek saw the game embodied by the market as a way to sort interests, a more efficient system that prioritized the most important needs of individuals. Economic loss merely deprived individuals of "the least important of the desires" they had. The economic sector was "the control of the means for all our ends." It was the freedom empowered by this game that loosened the rigid nature of the sovereign, and embodied individuals to play for themselves.

In both of these two competing philosophies is competition at the center. Competition may be dictated by the sovereign, with players competing for placements granted by the sovereign. Alternatively, it may be dictated by markets, with players competing for control of those markets and realization of those interests. Inherently so though do these systems put players against one another. This game is zero-sum; there has to be winners and losers. Not everyone can gain important positions from the sovereign, and not everyone can profit in a transaction; someone has to lose.

In both of these systems can individuals not be trusted not to sabotage one another, only may that distrust be channeled into "safer means." A player may abuse their connections to the sovereign or powers granted by it to dishevel enemies who may threaten their position. Likewise, a player in the market may use their wealth to secure themselves better transactions or to attack opponents. Players cannot cooperate, they must be put against each other.

This game is natural, inevitable, perhaps even beautiful. To Mises (the mentor of Hayek), "the provision of material goods" served ends beyond just economic ones, and could branch into life in general. These ends "alone gave it meaning", and thus can it be inferred that the competition of those ends was inherently meaningful, what Mises calls "judgments of value." Hayek called the realization of these ends "what men should believe and strive for", and believed it was "the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created." As for Hobbes and the realists like him, it was the protection of the sovereign that protected individuals. "The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place" when there is no "common power" to Hobbes; thus, only with common power can morality and justice even exist. The social contract, and with it the sovereign, was required for meaning.

In either case, the game is not just played at the highest levels of corporate dominance or relation to the sovereign. The culture of competition is self-similar on many levels, trickling down from those at the top to those at the bottom. Take police officers competing for a promotion in a "highly competitive culture." When job security is at risk and needs to hit "aggressive or unachievable targets", the pressure of the game can force them to make hard choices. In law firms, partnership is a lucrative but scarce reward that associates are forced to compete over, forcing similar optimizations. As it is in finance with bonuses and classes, in academia with the promise of tenure, in sales with public leader-boards, and in so many more industries. In a way, the private structure of businesses mirror that of the sovereign, as those at the head of the corporation (the shareholders) force those below to compete for their own interests.

Of course, in the case of the sovereign itself does power more trivially trickle down. The sovereign has keys to power, individuals that help them maintain that power and enact that power as granted to them. These individuals of course have their own keys, and the hierarchy of subordination goes on and own. Smaller versions of the same games are played at many scales, all the way down until those at the bottom.

Burke believed strongly in the concept of the sublime, "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." This feeling of sublimity came from the contrast between beauty and danger. When pain or fear was enjoyed at a certain tolerable distance, it was memorable, beautiful, and meaningful; such emotion could inspire one to act for themselves. Too close and it was just pain, and too far and the effects would dim like a dying candle. This notion of sublimity seems all too perfectly realized by the game: either through market competition that wasn't existential but was significant (enjoyed at a distance with the danger of losing), or through competition for attention of the sovereign with such overbearing subjugation putting one in a similar kind of danger.

And it is this that fundamentally defines the culture of competition, a pervasive philosophy not just about winning or losing. It is about order and stability as Hobbes described, but not to eliminate competition, but to facilitate it. No matter the specific form it takes, the game makes life meaningful to both Hobbes and Hayek. It distances the dangers from the existential "state of nature", and provides new mechanisms to truly realize them to what seems to their fullest. The threat of returning to that anarchic state itself invokes the Burkian sublime so plainly, an imminent danger that removing the sublime would impose. No, it isn't just about winning or losing, it's about playing. Because in the gamification of life, meaning comes from that game, the invocation of the adrenaline of the sublime and the minimization of suffering.

This competition, perhaps to some, was supposed to be for the realization of the interests of everyone. Market competition would reward those based on merit, and address the genuine needs of consumers. Absolute rule by the sovereign would protect the people from the anarchic state, and provide them with the security they needed to thrive. Yet the corruption of corporations that sacrifice prosperity and even lives for market share is not just prevalent, but fundamental to the systems of capitalism where competition rewards the best players. Such corruption also remains in the state of the sovereign, where the cruelty of absolute dictators and their supporters in order to protect their own sources of power or take more power for themselves leads to immense human suffering.

And the best players are the ones who aren't held back by morals. Making unethical choices can be what lifts you above the competition, so why not? When the game is all-consuming, it can come at the expense of everything else. And the immorality that comes from the sovereign will trickle down, as will the immorality of markets rise up. The culture of competition comes to define society, and turns individuals, as it always intended to, against each other.

But it's all in the game, right?