This is a very deep rooted idea in American culture, the kill or be killed, you screw someone over before they screw you over mentality. It's actually something people from Europe need to learn about to be successful in business negotiations with American firms, as there are certain boundaries that we don't cross for cultural reasons and so we don't tend to take a negotiation all the way to the logical extreme and we lose out as a result.

I assume you've never been involved in many high level American business negotiations. Because in the real world it's nothing like that. Regardless of cultural boundaries, the most profitable business relationships last for many years so it just doesn't pay to screw the other side over.

The only major exception is perhaps for certain limited sectors of the finance industry where derivatives contacts are understood to be a zero sum game. So everyone looks for clever ways to screw their trading partners. But European financial firms are just as ruthless as their American counterparts. In fact the Europeans have often been more willing to cross ethical lines.

You're either lying through your teeth or using a very, very creative definition of "Europe" that excludes most of everything that once took orders from either Rome or Moscow.

Having to distrust your business partners is not uniquely American in the slightest.

That’s not how it actually works. Most businesses work together for many years and it is a win-win situation. If you screw over your business partners you will very quickly run out of partners to work with.

There will always be consequences. If you attack your neighbour there is a chance that it will go badly for you. There is also a chance that a group of neighbours will join forces to remove you as a threat. That’s the kind of dynamics that has created the modern society: groups of people joining forces to overpower individuals that refuse to leave their neighbours alone.

Odd, in most social animal species, the drive to be part of the group is stronger than the drive to exploit the group.

Of course, I'm arguing a tautology. And ignoring that while most animals in a social species are socially motivated, certainly some of them will 'cheat'.

The size of the group matters. Humans function well in small groups where everyone knows each other, and everyone must work together to survive (and then only if we ignore what happens to individuals that, due to character or a sudden health issue, can no longer pull their weight). But this doesn't scale past couple dozen people.

Meanwhile, the other strong drive that both humans and other animal species share is competition between the groups. Over the course of history, humans started to form groups of hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of people. In such groups, the drive to subdivide and compete dominates - the history of social development is one of inventing social technologies - cultural and legal mechanisms that keep those large groups whole and defeat our competitive instincts.

> But this doesn't scale past couple dozen people.

Modern corporations contradict that claim.

No, they don't. They're strong evidence for the claim.

Corporations are strongly structured internally. They usually have a "spine" of bog-standard hierarchical organization[0], and some form of secondary, graph-like, functional organization, different in every big company. Like e.g. (roughly real structure, but fictional names):

- Hierarchical spine: I currently work for team Awesome, under business unit BU1, under department D1; I report to manager Eve (Awesome), who reports to Fred (BU1), who reports to Greg (D1) who reports to Helen (CEO).

- Secondary organization: My team (Awesome) closely works with teams Invincible (BU1) and Jazzy (BU2), all with slightly different reporting chains.

There are dozens other teams in the corporation and several more BUs. I almost never interact with them directly. My social cooperation instinct covers my team and other teams in the "secondary organization" section. Separation of responsibilities and complex structure prevents my team from actively competing with other teams - we either cooperate with them, or don't know they exist.

This is how corporations scale. If you want to see a scaled-up system demonstrating competitive tendencies, that's... the market itself. And it needs the strong, top-down, hierarchical regulatory system to prevent that competition from immediately turning bloody[1].

--

[0] - Which is the fundamental social technology we've invented that allowed us to scale the societies and build a civilization. It's why every large (> ~100) group of people you can find has some form of hierarchical governance.

[1] - As a social technology, the modern symbiosis between the market and governments is a marvel. It's by no means perfect, but the fact still is: we didn't just suppress our competitive tendencies while scaling societies up - we've harnessed them and put them to work, and it mostly turned out OK.

True enough, I was incorrect to look at corporations from the outside, monolithically.

Social animal species with a strong drive to be part of the group are still quite happy to exterminate other groups of the same species. Just a random example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War , but there are many others in different species - illustrating that being socially motivated does not mean avoiding organized slaughter of your fellow species-mates.