Rivalries

How lonely France would be if there were no islands across the straight in the world! There wouldn't be a country with terrible food and monotonous life styles to laugh at. And so is for Britain: their comedies would be much less fun without jokes about snobbish French people. Rivals can be a mirror, reflecting your values and mistakes. With a mirror in front of you, you gain better understanding of yourself, which helps you grow. Laughing together for hundreds of years, Britain and France probably know each other better than anyone else in the world.

Same principles apply to Harvard and Yale, Berkeley and Stanford. During the annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley, all sorts of "insulting" cartoons will be posted around the campus to attack each other. There is also rumor that a Stanford professor once gave a lecture in Berkeley wearing a "Beat-Cal" T-shirt. Correspondingly Berkeley made a statue for a football coach who led his team to defeat Stanford for successive five years. These two schools have been beating each other for decades, each having a point.

Rivals are different from enemies. Beating enemies stimulates national or regional sentiment, while losing to enemies brings strong frustration and arouses revenge. Victory over rivals also creates fabulous pride for one's alma mater, but failures do not hurt that much. This is the beauty of competition between rivals. Rivals, though reluctant to admit friendship between each other, view them more as friends rather than enemies. Losing to friends can be regretful, but not resentful. That's why failures to rivals can generate positive motivations out of negative results.

But there is no clear cut-off between rivals and enemies. If you only want to defeat someone, you're probably rivals; but if you want to smash someone, you're more likely to be enemies. When people's attitudes towards each other change, their view on the counterpart's role will change as well. Britain and Germany used to be enemies, but became more rival-like after WW2.

Thus in the same competition, people do feel different when they lose to different people. It's very interesting to think of Olympics in this way. Athletes all over the world compete against each other, and audiences cheer for their domestic players. If you have to lose, who you'd rather lose to? Losing to a rival is not fun, but you can attribute it to the marvelous progress that your rival has made since its last failure. Losing to an enemy is much worse, it may suggest a transfer of power from  "us" to "them".