Every competition damages the credit: our rivals seize occasion to obscure us so as to outshine us... Rivalry discloses faults which courtesy would hide... The heat of conflict gives life, or even new life, to dead scandals... Men of good-will are always at peace; men of good repute and dignity are men of good-will.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The title overstates, and the text itself supplies the honest version: what damages is the declared duel, the visible head-on contest in which each side's cheapest weapon is the other's history. Competition of that kind rewrites both reputations downward, resurrecting dead stories, disclosing what courtesy had left covered, and recruiting audiences whose only interest is the mud. The alternative is not surrender but relocation: compete by differentiation, becoming incomparable rather than superior (maxim 63's own category), letting work contest what mouths should not, and staying, in the quote's phrase, a man of goodwill, which is both the ethics and the better strategy.
Practice
- When a rivalry heats, move the contest onto work: ship, publish, deliver; every public exchange of words is a joint withdrawal from both accounts.
- Differentiate out of the duel where possible: the segment, the method, the audience that makes comparison beside the point.
- Guard your mouth about the rival with special care; in a declared contest, your every criticism is filed as tactics, even the fair ones.
Use this when
- Use this when provoked toward a public duel; the provocation is often the rival's best move, since the pit costs the cleaner party more (maxim 172 priced this).
- Use it in promotion seasons, when contests turn archaeological and every camp starts digging.
Ignore this when
- Don't read it as refusing all contests; tenders, matches, and markets are competitions with rules and referees, and those you enter to win (maxim 66 lands them).
- Don't let peace become concession of the record; when the rival's campaign misstates facts, correct them once, flatly, on paper, and return to work (maxim 205 handles the rest).
A picture of it
Two coaching institutes shared a town and, for one ugly year, a war: comparative hoardings, poached faculty announced like conquests, old rumours about each founder refreshed and redistributed. Enrolments dipped at both, because parents read mud as a property of the pond, not of either fish. The smaller institute exited the war unilaterally: dropped the comparisons, published its results plainly, and rebuilt around the batch-size promise the big one could not match. Within three years the town spoke of them as different things rather than ranked ones, which is the only exit rivalry ever offers, and the war, lacking a second army, expired.
In the mud, the winner is whoever the audience remembers least dirty, which is nobody. Build a different pond.