Meditation 48: Competition or Cooperation: Which is better for Society?

Human beings are paradoxical. We are social animals with a large antisocial streak. One unavoidable fact is that we are dependent on each other for the life of the whole society. The language of cooperation grows out of this. Our mothers teach us to share with our brothers and sisters, and we are, finally, meant to see the whole of humanity as a family.  

Our ideas of social justice and fairness come from the ethos of cooperation. We are taught to get along with others, to make compromises, to pull our own weight the world.  If only everyone would cooperate, as the saying goes, there would be no more war, no more abject poverty, and a common fight against crippling diseases and natural disasters.  The principle of cooperation entails that sometimes we ought to give up for the common good what we most desire for ourselves.  We are asked to make sacrifices in the belief that what is good for the whole society is also good for the individuals who compose it.

Prehistory shows that cooperation has always been an evolutionary plus for the human species.  It enabled individuals to band together in projects that no one person could realize. When civilization first began, cooperation was essential for farming, irrigation projects and the division of labor.  Cooperation, not always voluntary, has been the basis of both ancient and modern life.

At the same time, human beings are competitive.  As more and more goods are produced, inequalities arise in their distribution.  The hierarchal arrangement of all ancient societies meant that those at the top of the social order received more and better quality goods, while those at the bottom toiled unceasingly for mere subsistence.  The perception of less and more led to the stirring up of competitive desires to outdo one's neighbor.  Wealth lends prestige to its possessors and bolsters the ego of successful competitors. 

The desire for more and more good things for one's self and one's family is greed. Nothing is enough. There is no natural end to it. Greed, on the perception that there is not enough of the good things to go around, breeds competition.  The thinking of a competitive person, who wants more and better than his neighbor, is that since there is a scarcity of desirable goods, the individual must get out there and fight for a share.  There is an attitude about the world, and what the good life is, that lies behind seeing it as a competitive arena in which there are winners, and, regrettably, also losers.

Look at all the possibilities of competition in our world. We compete in sports for medals, in school for grades, in work for promotion, in war for national advantage, in art for fame, in business for money, and in politics for power.  For the winners of competitions there are fat wallets and big egos.  What is there for the losers?  What is the ratio of winners to losers? Obviously there are many more losers than winners.  It is even less than a zero sum game.

Competition does have a positive side. It encourages innovation and creative thinking. Effort is required to come out on top of a competitive process, new products and institutions are the results.  No doubt greed does provide many people with the motivation to compete.  It may even have been that competitiveness between humans helped the species to thrive as it has.   The question now is whether competition will be as valuable to the species in the future as in the past? 

Competition, by its nature, breeds a non-moral individualism. It makes people look to themselves first, and to look at others as potential rivals.  We become suspicious and fearful.  Competition separates us and breaks the bonds of society, creates factions, and makes cooperation more and more difficult. This could now be fatal to the human species. We do not have to look very far into the future to see challenges looming to our very life on this planet. Just ahead we are looking at global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, overpopulation, tidal waves, incipient pandemic, deforestation, over fishing, pollution, and nuclear waste.  Some of these are partly the result of the kind of competitive world we have created.  It will be all we can do to the survive on this planet, and it is sad and ludicrous to see human beings fighting each other when the only thing that will save us is cooperation on a universal scale.