[Leibniz13]

Love that you have such a different way of seeing it (and yours might well be the more common view)-more ideas/views means seeing it all in a bigger context.

It seems to me that the awards process already asks us to hold ourselves up in comparison to each other as a way to use friendly competition to better ourselves. It's not as if it were a zero-sum game. Consider how different groups in the community (or classrooms within a school) will race to raise the most funds for charity x or y. There we have good examples where the friendly spirit of pushing each other by competing has a non-zero-sum effect. It's also an example where seeing how we're doing in comparison to each other works better than just turning in your private results and finding out at the end which team won (with no 2nd-nth place winners revealed).