I disagree. I think much of human suffering due to competition stems from lack of security, or the lack of reassurance that basic needs will be met.
Imagine a technological utopia. All of your needs as a human being are met. All of the needs of your friends and family are met. Can you not imagine how much easier it would be to advance toward a "social utopia"?
Before the Renaissance, the cut-throat psychotic human beings tended to do the best in terms of gathering resources, security, etc. Since the Renaissance, this has become less and less true and merit has started to take precedence.
Eventually, once the conditions for a technological utopia are met and for the majority of the population, it will be a like a light has suddenly been turned on. Those that have all of their basic needs met, tend to be nicer to others on the whole.
Besides, even if I'm wrong, it's not hard to imagine some sort of machine or system that short-circuits "our biologically driven urge to dominate the gene pool" for the good of humanity.
Good comment - there are two places I disagree with you:
1) See the hedonic treadmill theory[0]. You could point to someone, relatively speaking, who is on top of the world. But they are still unhappy. Why is this? It's sometimes theorized that we are at a "set point" in happiness, and while we can run faster on the treadmill, or slow down on the treadmill from time to time, we are stuck at this set level of happiness.
2) Surely the vast majority of the developed western world is not at a lack for "basic needs", but why is there so much anger and despair? Because I believe you might be missing more of the "basic needs" than just Food and Water. See Maslow's hierarchy of needs[1]. While it is also theory which has arguments against it, it utilizes a more comprehensive definition of "needs."
Surely there are many people in the western world who lack psychological stability or lack companionship.
> All of the needs of your friends and family are met.
You will need to define "needs" because IMHO, that is not true. I have relatives who are veterans of war, friends who have had psychotic breaks, friends who have everything they need but something just doesn't "click" with them.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
"The author is flat out wrong. The Hedonic Treadmill has been disproven. Moreover, the author seems to be conflating the concept of the treadmill, with adaptation. The former denotes the subject returns to the original state. The latter recognizes that while we become accustomed to new things, we still improve in happiness.
The author is also misquoting, or misunderstanding, Kahneman. Kahneman isn't talking at all about the treadmill. He's talking about what he called the "Focusing Illusion"-- a fancy way of saying "the grass is always greener on the other side..."
Relevant links:
"Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being"
http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S9_Diener.pd...
Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056
Kahneman's paper where that OP misquotes Kahneman from:
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Schkade_Kahneman_...
As for the hedonic treadmill, I'm sure this is something that philosophers have considered for ages, but I can only give my personal thoughts on it which are this:
I believe that "happiness" is attainable. Perhaps not pure bliss like popular culture likes to portray it as, but when I think of "happiness" I usually think of "contentedness." In this frame, I think it becomes more obviously attainable.
And if it is attainable in the far-from-perfect world we live in now, then surely it will be attainable in some-distant-future-full-of-convenience. I also think that this concept of hedonism is self-perpetuating. If you believe in nihilism, it becomes your reality. If you reject nihilism, it doesn't.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Relevent HAPPYish scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AWcB_xuBSM
This is the case for basically everyone I know, and I'd imagine this being the case for a lot of the people here. But we're not advancing to a social utopia.
Until that floor is a lot closer to what we call "middle class" you're not going to realize many social benefits.
"in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
I'm mildly optimistic that we can at least encourage the better bits of society found in the real world today.
Surely Italy at the time had a far larger population base than Switzerland.
Also, Switzerland did produce something: a much better society, which served as an example to others. Unfortunately, just as we see today with the difference between developed and undeveloped nations, people are generally too stupid, in groups, to actually learn from others' examples.
It should, however, be possible to opt out of competition (in any particular area) and still live a good life. I think it's perfectly possible to achieve that in a post-scarcity society. Furthermore, a political & moral advancement could ensure that all "common" wealth (infrastructure, land, property, energy) is more-or-less equally distributed (i.e. "you don't deserve to own that penthouse just because you were born in the right family"), perhaps using taxation by "renting" from the society (e.g. more valuable property owners would be paying more taxes/rents to the rest of us, so they will only be able to keep it if they produce outstanding amount of wealth themselves). Then, the only competition would be based on things like intellect and creativity.
The story Manna [0] includes something similar, where energy is distributed equally among all citizens, who can then "use" it (e.g. to create food, clothes, ...) or "donate" it (e.g. to interesting science projects).
When there is competition, there are winners, there are losers, and there are significantly more losers than winners. There is a _reward_ for winning, whether that be tangible (a trophy, or monetary sum), intangibile (pride of winning), or reproductive (potential mates prefer winners). And therein lies the rub - the losers can surely "live a good life"....depending on your definition....but they surely are not in a Utopian setting, as there are intangibile "rewards" to losing as well - lack of partners, shame, insecurity, among many others.
It doesn't matter the arena of competition, the implications of competition are the same - but to different extremes.
Basically, as long as we have different values, there will be different "competitions" going on. The only reason we even consider some people "successful" is precisely because winning in certain areas bring something most of us value (money). But in an abundance-utopia, money would have no value, so the only important outcome of competition would be status among the people that value whatever you competed in. Which seems quite good to me - I'm sure there will be explicit "non-competition" communities as well for those who really don't want it (meditative monks and such?!).
Do note there is also a "Meta" competition which each of those subjects you mentioned are all vying for market share amongst each other. For example - Twilight fan subculture is dwindling, online gaming subculture is growing. Given a finite, albeit considerably large, number of resources, each subject, at the "Meta" level, competes with each other for the [wo]manhours of eyes spent and invested on it.
To get to the bigger point: Within each of those "arenas" you posited, there are few winners and many losers. Money actually is a minor concern even in our society today. Money is a means to an end.
A "fictional" fiat currency does not hold inherent value but the purchasing power that comes with it!
And actually, amongst professional poker and golf players, the top players have shown time and time again to have already removed themselves from the prize money and are in it for the victory, despite the "Purse" being what every casual observer sees. Wearing the Green Jacket of the Masters means significantly more to many of the seasoned players than the money.
In your "abundance-utopia-with-competition" the status is everything, and to be quite honest, it has already been everything. Save for the barest of bones, rags-to-riches stories of people going from dead broke to being successful, many people at the top of their fields would have been fine, monetarily speaking, if they didn't have this success.
But the key phrase here is "monetarily speaking." -
- More importantly to many people than the money, the mating opportunities do not come to losers. We are closer to chimps than bonobos. That inherently is not a utopia. You're missing this.
Are we?
Most of our greatest achievements seem to have come about through collaboration rather than competition.
The Internet has its roots on a network developed by the US department of defense.
The first nuclear reactors were a byproduct of the development of the atom bomb.
The first computers were developed during WWII to perform cryptanalysis and solve military problems.
I'm sure opposite examples can be found (mapping the human genome ?) but I doubt they would make a vast majority.
Einstein, Salk, Tesla, Marconi, etc.
These people were't competing with other humans. They were competing with and seeking some dominance over NATURE.
Competing with other humans is a very tribalistic primitive behavior. Like gangs of chimps in a forest.
We need some outer force to compete against instead of turning on each other.
Competition is very much alive and well (not to mention quite vicious) even in the pursuit of knowledge.
Seems like you may need a bit of healthy competition to make the breakthrough, but afterwards cooperation is crucial otherwise the gains of the breakthrough are never realized.
I think it's just a product of the societies we've had. In all those cases it was the cooperative aspect that made the breakthrough. The competition was only needed to allocate the resources for it, though, given the nature of our society.
Far from me from not giving collaboration its due, but it is undeniable that the prime mover of many a human achievement was due to competition.
The real challenge for constant progress, I think, is to make this competition "healthy", as in "not depending on a world war or the threat of nuclear annihilation"...
The desire to survive against a perceived threat may have been the impetus for all of these but immediately beyond that, all of these could not have been possible without the collaboration between scientists.
If we could but discover a new motivation for technological innovation besides murder, such innovations could occur at a fraction of the time and cost and not run the risk of being used to suicide the entire species (i.e. nuclear weapons).
Additionally, when taking into consideration the existential threat of climate change, the survival of the species may now depend on a status quo of mutual aid rather than mutual sabotage.
I suspect much of our current technological age has its roots in the aftermath of the Manhattan project. Bombs led to use, led to other countries developing bombs, drove surveillance, drove space travel, drove the miniaturization of electronics in cycles that eventually gave us Hacker News on a smartphone [2].
[1] Richard Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' [2] Steve Blank, 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
More like the aftermath of WW2 - radar, jet engines, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, computers, nuclear power...
In a militarised competitive culture there's a huge "tax" on innovation, because maintaining a competitive posture is so incredibly draining and expensive that it starves all but a handful of possible projects of oxygen.
So instead of a tiny collection of stand-out military-sponsored projects you'd get a broad spectrum collection of equivalently powerful breakthroughs in many more areas.
Medical research on narcissism is still very young, but so far we have indication for genetic inheritance and therefore potential genetic markers have been found, we observed defining prefrontal cortex signatures, and reproducible and predictable phenotypes (e.g. atypical responses to an environmental stimulus). Similar trends are also observed in altruism, which is seen as the opposite narcissism.
edit: Big science projects like the LHC maybe?
Actually, I'd argue that big science projects are international competitions for getting to the right answer first.
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...
Instead of sating this desire by building power over (or commuting violence against) others, you exercise domination over yourself.
As a sometimes climber, it's a nice - if incredible - thought.
It's too bad our branch of the great apes family is the one that evolved high intelligence, instead of the branch that has the Bonobos. If they were the ones who grew huge brains and high intelligence, they'd probably already have Utopia by now.