Anything you can do I can do better

There is a lively song from the musical "Oklahoma" that goes "Anything you can do, I can do better!" In the musical it is just an opening for a young man and woman to show each others' stuff, as they grow from puberty into adulthood's interests.

Yet now in my quest to discover "what people really do do," it seems that the phrase "anything you can do, I can do better" is a major thing among people's interactions, explaining lots of behavior.

I noticed that a long time ago, watching many of my friends.

Yet it did not seem to be anything I could find in my own self. I occasionally hypothesized about the phenomenon, to myself. It might explain lots about what I observed in the world of people.

I tentatively concluded that, to the "normal" person, lacking an inner measuring stick, that it was a way of evaluating their own performance, by measuring against what their neighbor was doing.

It thus explained the urge to run foot races, race cars, even the generally bloodless mock battles of team sports.

That means of evaluating performance thus was not tied to actual achievement capability. It only required one be better-than the other person, to show OK-ness. It was not tied to the successful doing of what it took for the group, the species, to survive and thrive. It therefore could easily miss the boat and never know it.

I now am beginning to suspect that this is what is responsible for America to be unraveling in recent times.

The self-correcting feedback loop is tied to the wrong parameter.

And it also explains the strange response I got back starting 23 years ago when I publicly proposed my KESTS to GEO concept to save civilization. The aerospace studs merely saw me as attempting to show them up.

And thus they responded, instead of welcoming me and my concepts to the endeavor of extending civilization into space in the near future, to instead of looking big and impressive and totally concerned with the future of mankind - the distant future, that is - letting the present times coast along continuing to give them the cushy prestigious life, obscuring what I had proposed.

So it was an "anything that Jim Cline could do, we important aerospace folks can appear to do better" kind of response attitude. Merely a rivalry game, that was their duck soup; something they could win with one hand tied behind their back and blindfolded, how great they were. That seems to explain a lot. It also means I really misjudged them. No helpers, they.

But it is not that they are bad people. It is merely their knee-jerk way of relating.