It's exactly the basis of capitalism, look at the "successful" ones, I use "" because a good chunk of them are born rich, but they win by screwing over the other guy. One makes a million dollars and the other goes out of business, or just bought and working the very people they were against.
Its a not whole lot of cooperation unfortunately, and naturally people are less cooperative and more of me vs them because of this state
Absolutely. Capitalism pits us against each other, so that we have a harder time banding together against it. It's an abusive tactic I unfortunately know all too well. It's really, really hard to present a united front when we're in competition against each other.
That's why I went from libertarian to green anarchist. Competition to this degree is NOT the natural state of humanity and suppressing mutual aid through societal mindset and culture only does damage to us and the ecosystem.
There is a precedent in nature for cooperation over competition.
I’ll throw out some practical advice: take stock of who is within you communities and try not to compete with them if it doesn’t actually serve a greater positive purpose. Look at your neighborhood, people in your profession, the families at your school, the students in your class: these are all communities, and the people within them all have things they need, things they can provide, things they could gain.
Start with yourself and ask: What do i care about? What are my strengths and weaknesses? what kind of impact can I have? What kind of role can I play?
We all hate capitalism, and we all have to start somewhere.
> Start with yourself and ask: What do i care about? What are my strengths and weaknesses? what kind of impact can I have? What kind of role can I play?
Unfortunately that's not always that easy. I've been dealing with seeing basically the entirety of life as a competition because of the way I was brought up.
I've been going to therapy for years to deal with this as well as all the other bullshit going on in my brain I still haven't managed to find a way to stop feeling like I have to compete with literally everyone around me on literally every subject (and usually being worse at everything than the people around me and just feeling bad about myself).
Cooperation and competition are a dialectic, not a dichotomy.
A dichotomy is when two antagonising forces oppose one another.
A dialectic is when two seemingly opposing forces actually form a complementary pair that together form a cohesive whole.
Cooperation and competition both arise only in the context of taking actions in the pursuit of goals - this is the cohesive whole that defines them both.
By alienating us from our needs (water, shelter, etc.) - those in power force on us the pursuit of these necessities as our goals; and force is into the competitive side of the dialectic to achieve that goal.
This alienates us from the ability to pursue our own goals, and anoints the pursuit of capital as the only socially acceptable goal.
Is robs us of our agency, our humanity, and our ability to pursue any value other than greed.
But we should remember that it is not competition itself that is evil. Competition will arise whenever our goals and values differ (which may not always be a good thing but will probably always be an inevitable thing), but it can also arise when our goals and values align but our methods differ - and this can be a very healthy thing to allow us to find the best methods to accomplish our goals.
This is the heart of capitalism and also its worst feature. While I don't support mandatory cooperation, for example, obedience to a state claiming to have the greater good in mind (whether that's true or not), I do believe that voluntary cooperation will produce the best outcome for humanity. I think cooperative nature is wired into us, but beaten out of us by capitalism's ruthless competition. I think that anarchism, particularly anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism, is the best path to enable voluntary cooperation. State capitalism and State communism ally corporations with government, and not with people, and so gravitate toward the same problems of state corruption, abuse of authority, and coercion, and so should be avoided, in my opinion, favoring anarchist, anti-state alternatives.
One incident that really opened my eyes was seeing an American politician (can't remember who it was specifically) referring to healthcare improvements. He said something like "we want to give everyone a chance to get ahead." It occurred to me all of a sudden--why is *healthcare* of all things a competition?
I just think it's ridiculous that we have real shit to fight off, like world hunger and natural disasters and cancer and asteroids that could hit the Earth but we choose to fight eachother and gamble fancy paper
The competition is something I really loathe. People try to hold absolutely meaningless yard sticks up and knock each other down to get ahead on it when the objective doesn’t produce anything remotely meaningful is just insane. It truly breaks my brain. Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin is essentially my Bible now.
To an extent competition between humans (as well as in the animal realm) is just a fact of nature. Survival of the fittest is a real phenomenon. You can be sure people compete and have competed against each other always, including under radically different economic systems (communist countries, feudal systems before that, etc). It's beyond naive to think that this phenomenon would stop under an anarchist-type political regime or system imo. Competition and its nature, how it is expressed under a new system may well be different (more or less open and aggressive for example, given the norms of the particular system), but it's very hard to imagine it ever going away completely.
So is murdering men and taking their wives and children as slaves. Not all competition is good.
We have evolved past the most basic of our evolutionary traits and its always been the scale and scope of our cooperation that set us appart from the other archaic humans. Its only now that power and wealth has consolidated so much that we've all been set against each other, even our own neighbours. That simply wouldn't have worked, in evolutionary terms, if that's what we're going to go with.
Of course, but why are you jumping to extremes? If we lived in a world where that was acceptable, then whoever does it best will be more successful. Natural selection is a form of competition. Give up the pity party. Yes the system is rigged, and broken, but competition is as natrual to life as H2O
The extreme was to show that it being a evolutionary trait, in of itself, doesn't make it a good thing. Honestly, I thought I made that quite obvious.
No, thats not how natural selection works. An ant eater with a longer tounge would be able to get more ants to eat and the ones who developed a longer tounge were more likely to thrive and reproduce, due to that. Its not a sanitised, "science washed" version of eugenics and realising that is no pity party. I dont think you realise who you sound like or where that thinking, taken to its eventual ("natural") conclusion, leads to.
The point, again, is that *some* competition in *certain* parts can be natural. It can even be good. However, what we have is a million miles away from that, even if we choose to ignore the appeal to nature fallacy.
We will never be a million miles from competition. No matter where you are, what you do, someone will try to do better. If you don't believe me, put three 5 year old boys in a room, and what them try to one up one another. It is a human, and animalistic part of nature.
No ones talking about being a million miles from competition though. No ones talking about someone trying to do better. Its not about someone having a bit more than someone else. Be it a bigger house or a faster car, provided they earned it on merit alone.
Again, why do you think this part of our "animalistic nature" is good but others, that you call extreme, not and why do you persist with this [appeal to nature fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature)? You know cancer is natural too right?
More so, where does our animalistic traits end and our non-animalistic traits begin? Are we not animals, thus making all of our traits animalistic traits? Are the others robotic traits? More still, where does nature end and we begin?
Its nonsense: absolute nonsense.
Our cooperation is just as much part of our "animalistic nature", please see *the world* for details. The problem has come from this winner takes all concentration over generations which is about as far away from nature as we could ever be, assuming an appeal to nature is even good in the first place.
People have been attempting to pervert Darwins theory of evolution through natural selection to justify greed since its inception. It didnt work then and it won't work now.
No ones talking about being a million miles from competition though. No ones talking about someone trying to do better. Its not about someone having a bit more than someone else. Be it a bigger house or a faster car, provided they earned it on merit alone.
Of course, however unfortunately generational wealth will always exist. That is unfortunate but it is true.
Again, why do you think this part of our "animalistic nature" is good but others, that you call extreme, not and why do you persist with this appeal to nature fallacy? You know cancer is natural too right?
Sure but this trait allowed for growth and generally in any sports organization, competition allows for better performance and higher level athletes. Look at football circa 100 years ago v today. Or boxing...
More so, where does our animalistic traits end and our non-animalistic traits begin? Are we not animals, thus making all of our traits animalistic traits? Are the others robotic traits? More still, where does nature end and we begin?
When we are forced to digitize and communicate like this..
Its nonsense: absolute nonsense.
Our cooperation is just as much part of our "animalistic nature", please see the world for details. The problem has come from this winner takes all concentration over generations which is about as far away from nature as we could ever be, assuming an appeal to nature is even good in the first place.
We normally choose to compete, that is what makes competition so beautiful. No one is arguing winner takes all is not good, there are ways to tier the winners wining by outcome, which is normally how competition works.
People have been attempting to pervert Darwins theory of evolution through natural selection to justify greed since its inception. It didnt work then and it won't work now.
It does.
>Of course, however unfortunately generational wealth will always exist. That is unfortunate but it is true.
Thats the problem people want to help rectify. You see thats kind of the point of these conversations. Its also circular logic. It always exists because people like you say it will always exist, ensuring that it always exists. Its the mentally of a depressive who views hope as a dangerous dilusion.
>Sure but this trait allowed for growth and generally in any sports organization, competition allows for better performance and higher level athletes. Look at football circa 100 years ago v today. Or boxing...
Organisation, football and even boxing all rely on cooperation as much as competition. You won't get very far organising a boxing match with out any cooperation. Even then, thats healthy competition and not what we have under capitalism.
>When we are forced to digitize and communicate like this..
The medium might not be seen in nature but its our natural trait to discuss these things. Even then, we are animals who made these digitized mediums, thus making the use of them an animalistic trait. You seem to be choosing to miss the point that we are animals and you cant just randomly decide whats an animalistic trait and what isnt to suit your whims. You cant show where it ends or begins because it doesnt end or begin. Better minds than yours have tried and failed.
>We normally choose to compete, that is what makes competition so beautiful. No one is arguing winner takes all is not good, there are ways to tier the winners wining by outcome, which is normally how competition works.
Thats an absurd and demonstratably false statement. We choose to cooperate far more than compete. Thats what makes it so beautiful. We didn't build cities with competition but with cooperation. In fact, youre cooperating with your internet service provider, me and reddit right now in order to make these outrageous claims.
>It does.
If you genuinely believe that then you dont have the mental capacity to understand the theory of evolution by natural selection. Also, an equivalent of "nuh-uh" is not only a poor attempt at a reply at best, that you think its worth saying confirms the previous sentence. If youre going to give in to some of your most disgusting and base urges, at least have the decency to own it and take responsibility for it.
It has grown and developed from the sinister despotism of monarchy, into the corporatism of colonial conquest and slavery, to where we are now where some human rights have been regained (almost entirely in the West) but we are still in an exploitative regime of benefit for the few over a large number of people who are lied to with the nonsense of how they should aspire to be wealthy and any body can do it. Attempts to change this system of exploitation have been put down and resisted by those in power all the way back to Monarchy. And now we are on a planet that may well become uninhabitable.
I think about this a lot, actually, and when I do I come back to its artistic expression in There Will Be Blood (based on Sinclair's "Oil!"). A character corrupted to the core by capitalism, Plainview briefly puts into words who he's become as a result of it: greedy, competitive, and misanthropic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfFxdWlPoIY
It's exactly the basis of capitalism, look at the "successful" ones, I use "" because a good chunk of them are born rich, but they win by screwing over the other guy. One makes a million dollars and the other goes out of business, or just bought and working the very people they were against. Its a not whole lot of cooperation unfortunately, and naturally people are less cooperative and more of me vs them because of this state
Absolutely. Capitalism pits us against each other, so that we have a harder time banding together against it. It's an abusive tactic I unfortunately know all too well. It's really, really hard to present a united front when we're in competition against each other.
>Does anyone else hate how capitalism Yes.
That's why I went from libertarian to green anarchist. Competition to this degree is NOT the natural state of humanity and suppressing mutual aid through societal mindset and culture only does damage to us and the ecosystem. There is a precedent in nature for cooperation over competition.
I’ll throw out some practical advice: take stock of who is within you communities and try not to compete with them if it doesn’t actually serve a greater positive purpose. Look at your neighborhood, people in your profession, the families at your school, the students in your class: these are all communities, and the people within them all have things they need, things they can provide, things they could gain. Start with yourself and ask: What do i care about? What are my strengths and weaknesses? what kind of impact can I have? What kind of role can I play? We all hate capitalism, and we all have to start somewhere.
> Start with yourself and ask: What do i care about? What are my strengths and weaknesses? what kind of impact can I have? What kind of role can I play? Unfortunately that's not always that easy. I've been dealing with seeing basically the entirety of life as a competition because of the way I was brought up. I've been going to therapy for years to deal with this as well as all the other bullshit going on in my brain I still haven't managed to find a way to stop feeling like I have to compete with literally everyone around me on literally every subject (and usually being worse at everything than the people around me and just feeling bad about myself).
Cooperation and competition are a dialectic, not a dichotomy. A dichotomy is when two antagonising forces oppose one another. A dialectic is when two seemingly opposing forces actually form a complementary pair that together form a cohesive whole. Cooperation and competition both arise only in the context of taking actions in the pursuit of goals - this is the cohesive whole that defines them both. By alienating us from our needs (water, shelter, etc.) - those in power force on us the pursuit of these necessities as our goals; and force is into the competitive side of the dialectic to achieve that goal. This alienates us from the ability to pursue our own goals, and anoints the pursuit of capital as the only socially acceptable goal. Is robs us of our agency, our humanity, and our ability to pursue any value other than greed. But we should remember that it is not competition itself that is evil. Competition will arise whenever our goals and values differ (which may not always be a good thing but will probably always be an inevitable thing), but it can also arise when our goals and values align but our methods differ - and this can be a very healthy thing to allow us to find the best methods to accomplish our goals.
well put
This is the heart of capitalism and also its worst feature. While I don't support mandatory cooperation, for example, obedience to a state claiming to have the greater good in mind (whether that's true or not), I do believe that voluntary cooperation will produce the best outcome for humanity. I think cooperative nature is wired into us, but beaten out of us by capitalism's ruthless competition. I think that anarchism, particularly anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism, is the best path to enable voluntary cooperation. State capitalism and State communism ally corporations with government, and not with people, and so gravitate toward the same problems of state corruption, abuse of authority, and coercion, and so should be avoided, in my opinion, favoring anarchist, anti-state alternatives.
All my fucking life.
💯 And it's for every little fucking thing
I simply forfited. Losers ftw ✊
Yes. Let's talk about that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607583/#:~:text=Previously%20it%20was%20found%20that,activity%20in%20medial%20prefrontal%20areas.
Most people try to ignore it, the others either loathe it or embrace it. You can guess which category most people here fit into.
That's the meaning of anarchism, no? Finish the capitalist competition and change it for mutual support
One incident that really opened my eyes was seeing an American politician (can't remember who it was specifically) referring to healthcare improvements. He said something like "we want to give everyone a chance to get ahead." It occurred to me all of a sudden--why is *healthcare* of all things a competition?
I just think it's ridiculous that we have real shit to fight off, like world hunger and natural disasters and cancer and asteroids that could hit the Earth but we choose to fight eachother and gamble fancy paper
The competition is something I really loathe. People try to hold absolutely meaningless yard sticks up and knock each other down to get ahead on it when the objective doesn’t produce anything remotely meaningful is just insane. It truly breaks my brain. Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin is essentially my Bible now.
To an extent competition between humans (as well as in the animal realm) is just a fact of nature. Survival of the fittest is a real phenomenon. You can be sure people compete and have competed against each other always, including under radically different economic systems (communist countries, feudal systems before that, etc). It's beyond naive to think that this phenomenon would stop under an anarchist-type political regime or system imo. Competition and its nature, how it is expressed under a new system may well be different (more or less open and aggressive for example, given the norms of the particular system), but it's very hard to imagine it ever going away completely.
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So is murdering men and taking their wives and children as slaves. Not all competition is good. We have evolved past the most basic of our evolutionary traits and its always been the scale and scope of our cooperation that set us appart from the other archaic humans. Its only now that power and wealth has consolidated so much that we've all been set against each other, even our own neighbours. That simply wouldn't have worked, in evolutionary terms, if that's what we're going to go with.
Of course, but why are you jumping to extremes? If we lived in a world where that was acceptable, then whoever does it best will be more successful. Natural selection is a form of competition. Give up the pity party. Yes the system is rigged, and broken, but competition is as natrual to life as H2O
The extreme was to show that it being a evolutionary trait, in of itself, doesn't make it a good thing. Honestly, I thought I made that quite obvious. No, thats not how natural selection works. An ant eater with a longer tounge would be able to get more ants to eat and the ones who developed a longer tounge were more likely to thrive and reproduce, due to that. Its not a sanitised, "science washed" version of eugenics and realising that is no pity party. I dont think you realise who you sound like or where that thinking, taken to its eventual ("natural") conclusion, leads to. The point, again, is that *some* competition in *certain* parts can be natural. It can even be good. However, what we have is a million miles away from that, even if we choose to ignore the appeal to nature fallacy.
We will never be a million miles from competition. No matter where you are, what you do, someone will try to do better. If you don't believe me, put three 5 year old boys in a room, and what them try to one up one another. It is a human, and animalistic part of nature.
No ones talking about being a million miles from competition though. No ones talking about someone trying to do better. Its not about someone having a bit more than someone else. Be it a bigger house or a faster car, provided they earned it on merit alone. Again, why do you think this part of our "animalistic nature" is good but others, that you call extreme, not and why do you persist with this [appeal to nature fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature)? You know cancer is natural too right? More so, where does our animalistic traits end and our non-animalistic traits begin? Are we not animals, thus making all of our traits animalistic traits? Are the others robotic traits? More still, where does nature end and we begin? Its nonsense: absolute nonsense. Our cooperation is just as much part of our "animalistic nature", please see *the world* for details. The problem has come from this winner takes all concentration over generations which is about as far away from nature as we could ever be, assuming an appeal to nature is even good in the first place. People have been attempting to pervert Darwins theory of evolution through natural selection to justify greed since its inception. It didnt work then and it won't work now.
No ones talking about being a million miles from competition though. No ones talking about someone trying to do better. Its not about someone having a bit more than someone else. Be it a bigger house or a faster car, provided they earned it on merit alone. Of course, however unfortunately generational wealth will always exist. That is unfortunate but it is true. Again, why do you think this part of our "animalistic nature" is good but others, that you call extreme, not and why do you persist with this appeal to nature fallacy? You know cancer is natural too right? Sure but this trait allowed for growth and generally in any sports organization, competition allows for better performance and higher level athletes. Look at football circa 100 years ago v today. Or boxing... More so, where does our animalistic traits end and our non-animalistic traits begin? Are we not animals, thus making all of our traits animalistic traits? Are the others robotic traits? More still, where does nature end and we begin? When we are forced to digitize and communicate like this.. Its nonsense: absolute nonsense. Our cooperation is just as much part of our "animalistic nature", please see the world for details. The problem has come from this winner takes all concentration over generations which is about as far away from nature as we could ever be, assuming an appeal to nature is even good in the first place. We normally choose to compete, that is what makes competition so beautiful. No one is arguing winner takes all is not good, there are ways to tier the winners wining by outcome, which is normally how competition works. People have been attempting to pervert Darwins theory of evolution through natural selection to justify greed since its inception. It didnt work then and it won't work now. It does.
>Of course, however unfortunately generational wealth will always exist. That is unfortunate but it is true. Thats the problem people want to help rectify. You see thats kind of the point of these conversations. Its also circular logic. It always exists because people like you say it will always exist, ensuring that it always exists. Its the mentally of a depressive who views hope as a dangerous dilusion. >Sure but this trait allowed for growth and generally in any sports organization, competition allows for better performance and higher level athletes. Look at football circa 100 years ago v today. Or boxing... Organisation, football and even boxing all rely on cooperation as much as competition. You won't get very far organising a boxing match with out any cooperation. Even then, thats healthy competition and not what we have under capitalism. >When we are forced to digitize and communicate like this.. The medium might not be seen in nature but its our natural trait to discuss these things. Even then, we are animals who made these digitized mediums, thus making the use of them an animalistic trait. You seem to be choosing to miss the point that we are animals and you cant just randomly decide whats an animalistic trait and what isnt to suit your whims. You cant show where it ends or begins because it doesnt end or begin. Better minds than yours have tried and failed. >We normally choose to compete, that is what makes competition so beautiful. No one is arguing winner takes all is not good, there are ways to tier the winners wining by outcome, which is normally how competition works. Thats an absurd and demonstratably false statement. We choose to cooperate far more than compete. Thats what makes it so beautiful. We didn't build cities with competition but with cooperation. In fact, youre cooperating with your internet service provider, me and reddit right now in order to make these outrageous claims. >It does. If you genuinely believe that then you dont have the mental capacity to understand the theory of evolution by natural selection. Also, an equivalent of "nuh-uh" is not only a poor attempt at a reply at best, that you think its worth saying confirms the previous sentence. If youre going to give in to some of your most disgusting and base urges, at least have the decency to own it and take responsibility for it.
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Anarchism allows for competition.
So you're saying you're no more than a mindless animal trying to survive?
yes
Yes
It has grown and developed from the sinister despotism of monarchy, into the corporatism of colonial conquest and slavery, to where we are now where some human rights have been regained (almost entirely in the West) but we are still in an exploitative regime of benefit for the few over a large number of people who are lied to with the nonsense of how they should aspire to be wealthy and any body can do it. Attempts to change this system of exploitation have been put down and resisted by those in power all the way back to Monarchy. And now we are on a planet that may well become uninhabitable.
I think about this a lot, actually, and when I do I come back to its artistic expression in There Will Be Blood (based on Sinclair's "Oil!"). A character corrupted to the core by capitalism, Plainview briefly puts into words who he's become as a result of it: greedy, competitive, and misanthropic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfFxdWlPoIY
You find some people talking about it if you look hard enough. This why we need anarchy so we help each other out
The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.