The present work analyses competition and its ideological spread in contemporaneity. First we have identified its matrix in private property, what enabled the use of this procedure as the stimulus of capitalism development. In this path, science has presented itself as a component of legitimation and intensification. Intending to increase human work exploitation, nowadays competition mixes itself with the cynic speech of cooperativeness. In the reproduction of the competition among individuals are present some subjective elements as authoritarian submission to the social, to projectivity, to sadomasochism and to the reified thought (ticket's mindedness). Concerning affection, competition is sustained by envy, which still adheres, via cultural industry, the individuals to consumerism. This article is a literature review research, whose theoretical bases are the Freudian Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Horkheimer.
competition; ideology; capitalism; cultural industry; envy