Is nature inherently cooperative or competitive, or both?

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Darwinian evolution is largely based on national selection, which is an unintentional form of competition. However, we have things like families and symbiotic relationships as well. Do you think it would be possible to eliminate conflict, or reduce it to say, a game, in the human world?

sports

What do you mean by conflict? There will always be interpersonal conflicts due to clashing personalities. Conflict between nations, races, classes, creeds, and the like, however, I think could conceivably be reduced to nearly 0 in the very long term. But it would require essentially no disasters, depressions, or other bad things happening. Otherwise someone would inevitably become a scapegoat.

Nature is inherently nature

Like Jonathan Haidt said, sports is to war as pornography is to sex Sports is a great example of how deadly competition (in this case warfare) can be turned into friendly competition. For the most part anyway. Some hooligans still act as if their tribe was at war with another clan or tribe, but most sports fans live out their desire to kill, rape and loot the people in the neighbor village in a non-violent way.

Nature is inherently competitive. In fact, in a primitive world, your survival depends on how actively competitive you are. Notice how I didn't say, "how reactively competitive you are."

I think the key to peaceful and productive human interaction is so-called pseudo-kinship. Humans are naturally inclined to regard their family and close friends as kin and all other humans as competition, but pseudo-kinship can expand the circle of people that are perceived as kin.

Traditionally, this has been achieved through ideologies such as religion or nationalism. But these ideologies are deeply flawed because they contain an "us versus them" mentality and paint other groups of humans as enemies or people of lesser worth (which is known as pseudo-speciation).

The most advanced and evolutionary novel forms of pseudo-kinship are liberalism and humanism, which are often derided as "bleeding heart liberalism" by people with an "us vs. them" mentality. Liberal humanists feel a kinship with all human beings, and to some degree with non-human species and the environment in general. If anything can eliminate conflict and reduce competition, it is a liberal mindset.

Yeah right. Liberals are just as much about us and them as conservatives are. Any sort of collective is subject to this. Matter of fact this post is a great example of it.

That's a pretty wacked out psychoanalysis. I don't watch sports to sublimate some sort of a desire to kill, rape, and loot. If I did have those desires then I don't know how watching people dunk or slap pucks is going to somehow relieve me of them. Some people let their imaginations run way too wild when it comes to evo psych.

Anyways, nature is both inherently cooperative and competitive. Cooperation is necessary to co-exist without causing a break down in social cohesion while competition is necessary for preservation.

Make that natural selection.

That might be true on the political level, where competition is a necessity. But your typical "bleeding heart liberal" is concerned about the well-being of all people, even people in other countries. We are concerned about conservatives too and want them to have access to universal health care, free school education, fair wages, social equality, and everything else that we wish for ourselves



People watch team sports because they want to see their team beat the other team. And some people who attend sports events participate in the fun by literally beating the fans of the "enemy"

I also find it very interesting that one of the most war-like nations on the planet, with the biggest military budget, has invented very violent sports such as American football, is extremely enthusiastic about sports events, and bases a large part of the school system on team sports.

A surer way of eliminating conflict and competition is to exterminate all life on this planet.

Competition and conflict are part of life. Modern "liberalism" is anti-life.

PS - I just looked up the word "pseudospeciation", a word that had clearly been designed to pathologise a normal human instinct (ethnic and racial loyalty), and I found it was apparently invented by a member of the most ethnocentric tribe on the planet for the goyim's consumption. Why am I not surprised?

NO.



People are basically competitive, even though we live in groups. This is clearly unchangeable and believe me, Many, many right thinking people have tried!

I believe that humans become more cooperative in harsh environments.
Where failure to do so would men death. In less harsh environments humans
can afford the luxury of competitiveness.

Can you elaborate why you think that?



Do you think that racism is normal and necessary?

Pseudo-speciation is not only about ethnicity btw. Religion and other divisive ideologies can split mono-ethnic nations and even families into different camps. Which reminds me of Matthew 10, where Jesus explains pseudo-speciation: "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother ... a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household." Another example of pseudo-speciation is the hatred for LGBT people that is incited by the religious right.

And yet another prominent example is the dehumanizing of the enemy that happens prior to a war. A refugee Kuwaiti nurse testified before the U.S. Congress about an incident that had supposedly occured in her hospital in Kuwait City. She told that Iraqi troops, in the process of plundering the hospital, took more than 300 babies out of incubators in order to ship the incubators to Iraq. This was covered in every major newspaper, and the American public came to the conclusion that the Iraqi people must be some kind of inhuman monsters.

At the time of the vote authorizing the Gulf war, which passed by five votes, seven senators cited this incident as the reason for their pro-war vote. A few months later, it turned out that this supposed refugee Kuwaiti nurse was in fact not a nurse, but the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. The hospital story had been concocted by a P.R. firm in Washington in cooperation with the U.S. government. The girl was instructed to lie before the congress, and congress fell for it. The American public too, judging by their 92% approval rate for the Gulf war. But unlike the made-up propaganda story, the news that this gruesome event had never occured were buried in the back pages of the newspapers.

Last edited by CrazyCatLord on 29 Feb 2012, 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Even in relatively homogenous groups - families, for instance - people naturally tend to compete for affection, attention, favors, resources, and position in a "pecking order".

That is partially true. Tribal hunter-gatherers that depend on every person in their group show a lot more concern for their fellow people than city dwellers who often barely know their neighbors. But at the same time, harsh environmental conditions make groups more territorial and aggressive towards other groups. With enough wealth to go around, there is no need for territorial behavior and inter-group warfare.