No, it's the opposite, actually. Friends don't compete, they cooperate. Turning cooperation into competition is how you execute a divide and conquer strategy. If a group is too strong, you convince them that they are each other's true enemy; once they're at each other, you swoop in.

Most "competition" in our modern world is artificial. Try figuring out who benefits from it and where this mentality originates. You'll find that those two tend to overlap :)