IMHO, a lot of the ideas about competition in society come from a deep (and sometimes purposeful) misunderstanding of natural selection. [1] is an decent taste

IMHO, a lot of the ideas about competition in society come from a deep (and sometimes purposeful) misunderstanding of natural selection. [1] is an decent taste of this line of inquiry, and America's early 20th century obsession with eugenics is fascinating in a really, really, really unsettling sort of way. That said: I disagree that individual competition brings out the worst in people. It can certainly do that - but applied properly, it can also improve attention, creativity, and other indicators of task-based performance. Also, life/society as we currently understand it does contain aspects of competition, often in subtle ways. A person might decide between multiple potential mates; a prospective employee might negotiate their starting offer; a student might organize a club to help distinguish themselves from thousands of other graduates. Whenever I buy food or clothes or whatever, I need to buy it from someone (not being a diehard homesteader), so there are multiple vendors competing for my attention and custom. We might be able to do without some of this, but a lot of it is driven by limits on resources (material, population, etc.) (You might also be interested in the New Games Movement, one of the many weird outcroppings of hippie-era counterculture: they sought to build a corpus of games that highlighted cooperation over competition. The movement died a somewhat predictable death, but its games live on - if you've ever played any of the circle games popular with camps, youth groups, and teachers, you've probably played something that has its roots in the New Games Movement.) (Last diversion: game-theoretic dilemmas are also really interesting, since most of them revolve around cases in which individual optimal strategies lead to worse overall strategies. See also: bystander effect / volunteer dilemma, tragedy of the commons.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest