In a culture that secretly subscribes to the piratical ethic of “every man for himself”-the social Darwinism ­of “survival of the fittest” being far from dead, manifesting itself in our retrace political system of competing parties, in our dog-eat-dog economic system of profit and loss, and in our adversary system of justice wherein truth is secondary to the skill and connections of the advocate –the logical culmination of this ethic, on a person-to-person level, is that the weak are seen as the natural and just prey of the strong.

But since this dark principle violates our democratic ideals and professions, we force it underground, out of a perverse national modesty that reveals us as a nation of peep freaks who prefer the bikini to the naked body, the white lie to the black truth, Hollywood smiles and canned laughter to a soulful Bronx cheer. The heretical mailed fist of American reality rises to the surface in the velvet glove of our every institutionalized endeavor, so that each year we, as a nation, grind through various cycles of attrition, symbolically quenching the insatiable appetite of the de facto jungle law underlying our culture, loudly and unabashedly proclaiming to the world that “competition” is the law of life, getting confused, embarrassed, and angry if someone retorts: “competition is the Law of the Jungle and Cooperation is the Law of Civilization.”