Competition is bad! Ooooh thats going to get some goats. Competition is only legitimate when there are true shortages of necessary things, in other words when times are in crisis. This does occur in nature obviously and we as humans have observed it. A dog will indeed eat a dog but only in extreme conditions. The problem is that we then optimized and structured civilization in favor of that behavior.
Humans do not need that kind of motivation in order to do all of the wonderful things we are capable of. Competition elicits all of humanities worst behavior such as greed, envy, avarice, cheating, killing….
We know that humans are capable of such behavior but we are also Homo sapiens sapiens, we put the term “wise” in there twice which means we should try and act that way.
Situations where people make conflicting plans tend to result in net harm for all as the plans collide and fail, and stupid things happen, instead of any of the plans.
This doesn’t require scarcity, it’s orthogonal to it, you could have war without scarcity (WW2, the contest over Taiwan), or peace despite it (Witness a community in crisis, look around for cannibalism, you mostly wont see any of it), war just requires coordination failure, which often correlates with scarcity, as a society with no trust or rule of law will have difficulty gathering investment for large projects and growing wealth, and a society with great wealth will tend to have stronger information workers, journalists, accountants and legal systems. But the direct causal factor is not the wealth.
I want to agree that conflict in that sense, the waste, is just always bad. But, we don’t have to be idealistic about it. Sometimes we really do lack coordination infrastructure, in which case we have to accept that there’s going to be conflict.
Competition is bad! Ooooh thats going to get some goats. Competition is only legitimate when there are true shortages of necessary things, in other words when times are in crisis. This does occur in nature obviously and we as humans have observed it. A dog will indeed eat a dog but only in extreme conditions. The problem is that we then optimized and structured civilization in favor of that behavior.
Humans do not need that kind of motivation in order to do all of the wonderful things we are capable of. Competition elicits all of humanities worst behavior such as greed, envy, avarice, cheating, killing….
We know that humans are capable of such behavior but we are also Homo sapiens sapiens, we put the term “wise” in there twice which means we should try and act that way.
Situations where people make conflicting plans tend to result in net harm for all as the plans collide and fail, and stupid things happen, instead of any of the plans.
This doesn’t require scarcity, it’s orthogonal to it, you could have war without scarcity (WW2, the contest over Taiwan), or peace despite it (Witness a community in crisis, look around for cannibalism, you mostly wont see any of it), war just requires coordination failure, which often correlates with scarcity, as a society with no trust or rule of law will have difficulty gathering investment for large projects and growing wealth, and a society with great wealth will tend to have stronger information workers, journalists, accountants and legal systems. But the direct causal factor is not the wealth.
I want to agree that conflict in that sense, the waste, is just always bad. But, we don’t have to be idealistic about it. Sometimes we really do lack coordination infrastructure, in which case we have to accept that there’s going to be conflict.