Wise Words? Competition and Cooperation

Its a common idea, especially in the martyrous and conservative American Midwest, that suffering is the pathway to success. The more you suffer, the better at suffering you become, and the more rewards will come your way which will justify your suffering and give you the sense of peace and achievement which you sacrificed so much for. Sadly this is an idea which has in some ways found new popularity in my generation, especially those of us who have found the most digital fame. Even without a faith in a martyr to justify their efforts, the modern focus on "the grind" be it for fitness money or just plain exposure falls into much of the same mindset. Intentional sadness now, rewards later. Its been suggested that the focus on material goods is one of the underlying causes of the depression so prevalent in Western culture, but its my hypothesis that the issue runs much deeper than that. The issue is not that we are competing for material goods, but that we are competing at all.

When I talk to certain older people about why they feel competition is important for the development of a sane and productive society, a lot of the answers I get center around a perceived inherent human laziness and a need to push people outside of their comfort zones in order to avoid societal sloth. The main issue I have with this, bigger even than the assumption that all humans are lazy, is that at its core it is a response to fear. Fear was important for human society to develop beyond isolated societies of hunter gatherers since larger strength and capabilities were more easily found when resources were shared, but I believe it persists in our society today more out of habit and tradition than necessity. 

Its no secret that we live in a society of surplus goods. I worked at an Amazon warehouse in Ohio for a short time (even the managers there only stood on the merit of lasting a little over six months) and even in a small distribution center around a small suburb of Ohio we processed almost 45,000 packages a day. I was told that in peak seasons, namely Christmas and the proprietary Prime day, this number could easily double to 90,000 and balloon even further. Clearly we have systems in place which are capable of spreading out resources to an alarming degree. However, competition has necessitated that most of whats distributed through this system is cheap plastic crap. Plastic is an oil by product, it costs next to nothing to produce and can be molded into any shape imaginable. I think there will be a generation of kids, maybe around the time I could be looking after grandchildren, who will have as much fun with 3D printers working in the medium of plastic as myself and my brothers did making ridiculous things on KidsPix back in the early 2000s. But for right now plastic is a cornerstone of our society, and its polluting the whole planet beyond measure. Plastic pollution has seeped into our oceans and now its even being found in the blood of fish and even humans. 

Its clear even when looking at the most surface level facts how we got here. Plastic as I mentioned is an oil byproduct, so even when people started to get concerned about how much junk there was in the 1970s, concerns were swept under the rug by pandering smoke screen policies such as recycling implemented and paid for by both plastic and oil lobbies. Its insane to me that this country which claims to be a great example of democracy (at least in a representative form) can be so clearly undercut by whoever has the biggest wallet but Ill save that rant for another time. For the time being lets get back to why our market has evolved in this way.

Plastic is popular because its cheap, and valuable because its malleable. This has provided anyone with a dream in America (at least those rich and white enough to peruse their dreams) with the tools to build produce and manufacture anything they desire. The fact that everyone in our society works for food dictates that these desires are centered around how to acquire mass amounts of money and status. These things, besides providing comfort to themselves, will allow others who they care for to exist without the burdens of work which they have likely escaped by founding a successful company. Its a common critique of socialist thinkers that we want to strip away people's rights to do this because we want everyone to be working for the whole and not themselves. And while I'm sure some people do think that way, I think that it would be much better for everyone if we just removed the necessity for work that makes people's decisions about what to produce and how so cut throat. 

That's the truth behind what competition does. It does not push people beyond their comfort zones and into new kinds of productivity and ingenuity, it forces them to think based on fear. This fear motivates them to forgo ethical production as a means to bring their dreams into realities and focus instead on how to cut the throat of the competition in order to stand above and beyond people who are slaves to the system. We don't need to beat them, we just need to break them. We see this even in the animal kingdom. If two species become competitive, over many generations they make life so hard for each other that eventually one of them dies off and the other is left with the challenge of turning their weapons back into tools for survival. In the long run, the competition leaves both parties weakened and unequipped to deal with life. Compare this with examples of coopetation which are present in the animal kingdom. In those scenarios, the natural environment is seen as the true competitor working against both species, and so they learn to work together in order to make survival easier. Tools are developed for survival out of necessity, and over time both species prosper more than if they had never come into contact with each other. If you take the competitive thinker's argument and apply it to this example, they would suggest that having another species to rely on would make these species more passive and less energetic about mating and propagating their species. But this has never happened once in the history of all observed natural life on this planet: cooperation is more effective than competition every time.

Its a common belief, especially in some of the most prominent philosophy of the last century, that human kind is forever divorced from the animal kingdom because of our consciousness. However, I think in our attempt to use this consciousness to its full ability, we've allowed ourselves to be fear mongered by socially conservative thinkers into believing that the best way to do this was competition and learning how to slit each others' throats. However, consciousness does not change the fundamental ways in which we interact with other life. Just like all of our animal friends we need other humans to survive, for humans we actually need each other more because our consciousness introduces a demand for other people to talk to. I think for myself and a lot of other people who historically identity as introverts this need for communication was made painfully obvious during the coronavirus pandemic, in which contact with another human being was not something which was guaranteed daily anymore. Based on the fact that we need each other more, I would argue that competition is even more toxic to us than it is to other animals. What changes with the presence of consciousness is the power we have over the world around us. The weapons and productive methods we use are far more dangerous and as such do more harm to the planet than we originally thought was even possible. Therefore, its even more imperative that we seek to become more cooperative than we are competitive.

The counterargument which I can see forming itself through my father's voice in my head would love to point to the achievements of capitalist western civilization and say that this is proof that competition works. However when you look at the history of the world through less rose tinted glasses, that argument doesn't really hold up. Its a common belief that the west rules the world because we came to the invention of guns first but I think that's largely a misconception. Guns were possible in eurpope first moreso because its contiguous climate and small continent size allowed for more communication and sharing of goods early on which sped up early social development. That social development and cooperation made it easier for people to share ideas, although unfortunately the gun was one of the more promonent results of this time. If you need any further proof that compeittiion does not enforce progress, the Roman empire despite having already conceived of steam based technology which would not actually exist for hundreds of years did not peruse such technology because they felt that their competitive domination over the slave class of their society removed a necessity for such machines.  

So in short, a universal based income would not make the world lazy. If anything, the ability for us all to eat without having to compete would make it so that the only inventions which would take off in our society would be ones which holistically benefit the whole society. After all, cooperation is the natural pursuit of the liberated mind. That idea itself is actually as old as Budhusism, for after the Buddha achieved enlightenment, his inclination was not to dwell and revel in this euphoria forever but to go out into the world and help other people alleviate their own suffering. Compassion and cooperation are truly the only way to save our world from competition and capitalism.