Head to Head

Can we move from rewarding competition to celebrating connection? Can we survive if we don’t?

I watched Rain Man for the first time the other day. Spoiler alert: I am going to describe one of the killer, climatic scenes.

I am going to describe this scene because it is about as far away from killing and fighting as you can get. It is a climax where the intensity has everything to do with its tenderness.

I’m talking about the moment where Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond leans into his brother, played by Tom Cruise.

And their heads touch.

It is a moment of the sweetest connection. It is the culmination of a relationship that begins in greed and callousness and hurt. After all, Tom Cruise’s character, Charlie, had essentially kidnapped his brother in a bid to grab a larger portion of their late father’s estate. But in the course of a cross-country adventure, Charlie grows attached to Raymond, who is autistic. And Raymond feels that affection. Hence his silent display of brotherly love — a meeting of minds, yes, but also hearts.

That scene resurfaced as I read a profile of entertainment industry mogul Ari Emanuel not long after.

That New Yorker piece reflected a masculinity, a way of being a man, that is about as far from the Rain Man scene as you can get. The Emanuel story portrayed the career of someone who has thrilled to and thrived in head-to-head competition.

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Famous for inspiring the character of cutthroat talent agent Ari Fleischer in the show Entourage, Emanuel has accumulated vast riches by outmaneuvering rivals. Fittingly, the centerpiece of his current empire is the UFC — a league of brutal, few-holds barred, mixed martial arts fighting.

According to the article, Emanuel is verbally coarse, has threated to throw a chair across a room and has engaged in ethically questionable business moves. These include partnerships with some of the most repressive, undemocratic nations in the world, Russia among them.

The article raises these issues, and offers a partial explanation for Emanuel’s combative spirit and enormous ambition. Journalist Connie Bruck portrays Emanuel as a picked-on kid who coped by retaliating. He was diagnosed with dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and was unable to read in the third grade. He was teased and “never failed to respond,” Bruck writes.

Emanuels’ two older brothers also went on to become major public figures: physician and author Zeke Emanuel and former Mayor of Chicago and Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. As a kid, Ari Emanuel adopted the role of family protector, “ready to attack anyone who bullied him, or insulted his brothers, or even picked on a stranger who attracted his sympathy.”

There’s something noble about this impulse. And Emanuel demonstrates playfulness, curiosity and tenacity in the profile. But by becoming a fighter at an early age, Emanuel seems to have developed a vicious streak. In remembering one boy he battled as a kid, Emanuel said: “I wanted to kill that kid — I really almost did, slamming his head in that wooden grate.”

Bruck’s article suggests Emanuel’s mindset of constant melee and drive to dominate have come at a cost. Not only has he cozied up to dictators (and would-be dictators, in the form of Donald Trump), but Emanuel appears to have lost friendships over the years.

Yet he seems unfazed by frayed relationships or, for that matter, business setbacks. The conclusion of The New Yorker profile puts a fine point on his particular skill — possessing the thickest of skins.

“There’s a boxing or UFC analogy,” Emanuel tells Bruck. “You gotta bite down on your mouth-piece and start fighting! You have to be willing to take the emotional damage. People get exhausted from that beating. I don’t know why I don’t.”

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There is something perverse about Emanuel’s success. In effect, we’ve built a world tailor-made for men impervious to pain. A world that has rewarded coldness and Machiavellian scheming.

It’s a world that has rewarded men in particular, and led to brutal behavior by those who have risen to the top.

Dustin Hoffman, for example, has allegedly abused his celebrity status to assault or harass women.

But that era is ending. Hoffman is now experiencing the shunning that has come to other men — and a few women — who have preyed on the less powerful or claimed an exalted status.

A leveling of power is under way. Those on the margins are speaking up and being heard, especially by younger generations. My 16-year-old daughter watched Rain Man with me. And at the end of the movie, she asked why Hoffman, who does not have autism, played Raymond rather than someone on the autism spectrum. Indeed, TV shows featuring autistic actors are now being released.

This shift away from traditional centers of power is accompanied by a deep questioning of competition itself. And scrutiny of the conventional, “confined” masculinity that tends to view others as rivals or subjects to be dominated.

That version of masculinity has gone hand in hand with the capitalism system, a competition-based economic system also now in doubt. Among millennials, 66 percent had a positive view of capitalism in 2010. But this fell to 51 percent by 2019 — roughly equal to the share of millennials with a positive view of socialism.

No wonder. Capitalism and its associated rat race have long stressed out and disappointed human beings. Work has deadened the souls of countless people in organizations with hierarchical systems of control, where a few at the top direct the many “below” them. The pandemic and ever-more tangible environmental crises have reminded us that we’re in the same boat. That cooperation is critical to survival. And that a winner-take-all economic system has put obscene amounts of wealth in the hands of a few — typically white people.

In fact, wealth disparities accelerated during the pandemic, raising questions of equity and the wisdom our economic system more forcefully than ever.

This is not to say there’s no room for some competition. But we’ve lost sight of a healthy balance between competition and cooperation, between battling rivals and building relationships. One sign of our mania with winning is that so many people can’t handle losing. Witness Trump’s inability to concede defeat in the 2020 election.

With democracy, social justice and a livable planet at stake, do we really want a system that rewards hyper-aggressive, combative men and women? Can we afford it?

Can we do better? Can we move from lionizing the Emanuels of the world to celebrating the Raymonds and Charlies?

Can we evolve from head-to-head competition to head-to-head connection?