The Cooperation Game

Thinking about the balance between competition and cooperation in society.

Imagine a world with no competition. No pay differences, no status differences, no sporting competitions, no voting, no choosing. Mates would randomly assigned, public offices would be randomly filled, as would all other jobs. Products would be offered in one type only. All people and all things we use and need would be the same. 

When people ask for social justice, is that what they mean? Probably not. But relief from competition is at the crux of the issue, and to think about it, we have to figure out the role that competition plays and should play in our lives. It is obviously pervasive, and our political divide is fundamentally about just how pervasive it should be. Human nature is no guide. We are intrinsically both cooperative and competitive, and can be led to extremes of either, from the bayonette charge of battle to the self-abnegation and communalism of the monastary. Temperaments vary tremendously as well, making accomodation of them all in one society truly a conundrum.

Consider the other limit case, of no cooperation. There would be no corporations, no states, not even families, which are, after all, the original communistic enterprise. It would be the ultimate war of all against all, one against the world. This scenario is even more devastating then the opposite, immediately extinguishing the human race. That should provide a clue about the relative importance of cooperation and competition.

Indeed, as a rule, competition is largely destructive, and cooperation is constructive. Competition is what destroys civilizations and its control requires all the means we have to "civilize" ourselves, from manners, to sporting etiquette, legal systems, business regulations, diplomacy, etc. It is competition that needs to be rigorously controlled and channelled into a few virtuous avenues, while most of the training we lavish on children begs, pleads with them to cooperate, to get along with others, and to participate in the cooperative institutions of life.

Competition finds its way into the strangest places.

Competition is, in comparison and at best, the spice of these systems. The thrill of victory, the satisfaction of greed, and the earning of love- all are visceral, but only constructive under rigorously controlled conditions such as the institution of marriage, the legal structures of business, and the rules of sport. For example, the common convention of monogamy among non-Arabic cultures is a control over mate competition, which is immensely helpful in keeping social peace and promoting happiness. Even if it lowers the competitive temperature of a society, and may reduce its future fitness, if one takes a eugenic view. For while competition is destructive in the short term, it can be creatively destructive, sweeping away badly run businesses, insufficiently warlike nations, and per natural selection, less fit organisms. Competition is important for long-term discipline and success, for all its short-term costs and dangers.

The political right wing generally wants more competition. It is, as a rule, composed of those who have done well under the current system, and wish to preserve it and allow successful people like themselves more success in their competitive pursuits. If money wins elections, then so be it, and let's equate money with free speech. If whites win over blacks, so be it. If the US wins over communism, no succor should be extended to the vaqnuished. Business should be red in tooth and claw, regulations be damned. Parents should be able to pay for better schools, better colleges, better mates. And should be able to bequeath all their money onwards to create dynasties of wealth and power. What better success than intergenerational success?

On the other hand, the US has traditionally been thought of, and thought of itself, as a land of opportunity, where there is some base of equality- in the law, in voting, and in the opportunity to work hard to achieve a successful life, without the dead weight of nobility and inherited privilege. Some of these ideals were put into concrete form over the last two hundred years by fostering universal, free education through high school, and land-grant and other state colleges and universities. And here is where we get to the crux of social justice- the prospect of equal opportunity and "fair" competition. Is there such a thing as fair competition?

We should take sports as a guide here. While fundamentally competitive, modern sports are all governed by cooperative bodies that set rules, and keep setting new rules whenever some change in technology, social mores, or innovative technique threatens the "fairness" of the competition. So yes, there is such a thing as fair competition, but only where we have the fortitude to put cooperative bodies (i.e. the government) decisively in control of the rules of the game. 

Such cooperative regulation has, for instance, saved the banking industry from its own competitive miasma, transforming the incredibly destructive boom and bust cycles (and bank runs, and bank collapses) of the 1800's into the well-oiled and well-insured system we have today. Contrast that with people like Donald Trump, who in the depths of psychopathic narcissism have no use for rules or committments to an overarching constitutional, legal order. What they think of as "winning" is more like a trampling of our carefully considered and constructed system of cooperative institutions, in favor of short-term and short-sighted corruption.

Fine, so there is a dynamic balance between competition and the cooperative structures that fence in and run "fair" competitions, and also provide a wide variety of public goods that competition can't provide. The point, obviously, is to capitalize on the human diversity that we have in such abundance, and on natural competitive instincts and imperatives, to organize productive systems in government, business, and society at large. 

Where does that leave social justice? It should be obvious that ideologues of the right wing have gone off some kind of deep end of late in their yearing for culture war, white supremacy, and destruction of the state structures that regulate our way to a more civilized and peaceful existence. On the other hand, the Left is also extreme in its fantasies of unfettered immigration, welfare and housing for all, restitution for historical injustices, and enforced diversity in all possible spectra of underprivilege, disability, and oppression. For example, the iconic competitive high school of San Francisco, Lowell High, recently went through a tumultuous elimination of, and then reversion back to, competitive entrance examinations. Clearly the competitive exams were discriminatory in effect against black and latino students. But were they unfair? What is the point of having elite schools, versus having uniform average schools that serve all equally? 

Another example is Native Americans. If we were to be truly just, European descendents would all pack up and leave, providing thorough reparations to the oppressed, in the form of a pristine, vacated continent. Yet, there was a competition, conducted in the ways of its time, which is to say by warfare, disease, organization, numbers, and technology, by which Native Americans lost the competition for the continent. Should all such competitions be ruled unfair, in retrospect? Can we reel back history to such an extent, and do we want to? Are our standards of fairness getting too refined? Are we growing overly allergic to competition? And is equality of opportunity really enough? The history behind us has bequethed blacks with systematic poverty, so we have tried affirmative action to make some small reparation. But even that small amount has fallen afoul of the ideal of equal opportunity, as seem from the white and conservative side, even as they promote obscene intergenerational transfers of wealth and power that will make of our country another feudal and "old" country.

I think that is what the current right-left divide is really about, and involves incredibly complicated questions of history, human nature, and practicality. And of the future- what we as a nation and culture want to be. Neither the far left nor far right paint an attractive picture of that future, and our political system increasingly whipsaws between the more extreme visions. This is due firstly to its own structural failures that were baked in from the start. But it is also due to changed conditions as we come up against growth constraints. When the pie is growing, it is relatively easy to share its pieces. But when the climate apocalypse is looming, when we are clearly overpopulated with respect to planetary carrying capacity, and are unwilling to build physical and social structures of cooperation, then competition naturally heats up.

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