rivalry and divisionHumanity's greatest achievement is not our ability to defeat another person, but our ability to create something together that neither of us could create alone.
1. The Problem with the Old Model
Competition is one of the most important mechanisms of the modern world.
From an early age, we learn to compete for grades, university places, jobs, customers, money, attention, prestige and a sense of significance. In many areas of life, we have taken it for granted that competition is the main driver of progress.
The logic of competition rests on a simple premise: for someone to win, someone else must lose.
For one company to gain market share, another must lose it. For one person to get a particular job, someone else must miss out. For one party to gain an advantage, another must be defeated, displaced or weakened.
This model can lead to products that better meet people's needs, lower prices and a stronger incentive to act. It therefore has a practical rationale.
The difficulty arises when competition stops being a tool and becomes the foundation of our entire way of thinking about people, the economy and society.
We then become less likely to see another person as a partner, a fellow creator or a member of our community, and more likely to see them as a rival, an obstacle or a threat to our interests.
As a result, a vast amount of human energy, knowledge and creativity is spent on gaining an advantage over others rather than creating value together.
This raises a question: should competition really be our basic way of organising social relationships?
2. Why It Once Made Sense
Competition did not emerge without a reason.
For a long time, it was an effective way of selecting better solutions. It helped people compare products, test ideas, reward efficiency and discard approaches that did not meet people's needs.
In an economy with limited resources, rivalry could help organise activity. When several providers offered similar solutions, competition pushed them to improve quality, reduce costs and find new ways of working.
Consumers could therefore receive a better offer, while businesses were encouraged to develop.
Competition also helped challenge monopolies, limit stagnation and prevent a single player from imposing its terms on everyone else.
In this sense, competition answered real problems in earlier forms of economic and social organisation.
But a tool that is useful in one area is not necessarily the best principle for organising all of social life.
3. Why It Is No Longer Enough
The contemporary world looks less and less like a simple contest over a limited pool of resources.
Knowledge does not work like land, gold or fuel. If I share knowledge, I do not lose it. If I share experience, I am not left poorer. When many people solve a problem together, they often reach a solution that exceeds the sum of their individual capabilities.
In a world of knowledge, technology and complex systems, an increasing share of value is created through cooperation.
No one person built the internet. No single company created the whole of modern science. No country can solve the challenges of climate, energy security, pandemics, cybersecurity, migration or the management of shared resources on its own.
More and more challenges extend beyond the boundaries of individual people, organisations and states.
Under these conditions, effectiveness depends not only on the ability to outperform others, but on the ability to work with them.
Competition can improve what is offered under certain conditions. It does not automatically build trust, resilience, shared responsibility or the capacity to solve problems that affect everyone.
4. Examples from the World
Wikipedia is one of the clearest examples of cooperation in action.
Wikipedia is the largest modern community-created encyclopaedia. It was not created by a government, a single corporation or a closed team of experts hired for the project.
It grew through the work of people who freely chose to share their knowledge with others.
Its model shows that knowledge can be created, corrected and developed openly. Articles are expanded, corrected and updated by people around the world — not because they are competing to win, but because they are helping to build a shared resource.
As early as 2005, Nature compared selected scientific entries in Wikipedia with those in Encyclopaedia Britannica, showing that community-created knowledge had become a phenomenon that could no longer be ignored. [source]
Linux works in a similar way. This open-source operating system is developed by programmers, researchers, companies and enthusiasts around the world. Today, it underpins a vast share of the internet, cloud infrastructure, data centres and many devices we use every day.
Its development was not the work of one company competing against rivals within a closed model. It grew out of global cooperation among people building a solution available to everyone.
Research on open-source communities suggests that these projects rely on participants' motivation, self-organisation, commitment and shared responsibility for developing a common solution. [source]
OpenStreetMap likewise shows that maps of the world can be created by a community. People add information about roads, buildings, paths and places, building a resource used by humanitarian organisations, public bodies, businesses and ordinary users.
Advocates of competition point out that rivalry can improve prices and what customers are offered. It is harder, however, to explain why the world's largest encyclopaedia, the foundations of the internet and most modern scientific knowledge emerged through cooperation rather than a struggle to defeat a competitor.
These projects show that people are capable of acting for reasons beyond money, promotion or an advantage over others. They can also cooperate because they see meaning in a common purpose, want to leave something of lasting value and understand that collective action can achieve more than the sum of individual efforts.
5. What Research and Practice Tell Us
Cooperation is more than an appealing social ideal. It is also one of the fundamental mechanisms through which life, organisations and civilisations develop.
In Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation, published in Science, Martin Nowak showed how cooperation can emerge and persist in biological and social systems. It is therefore not an exception to the principles of evolution, but one of its important mechanisms. [source]
Every human being is living evidence of this. Trillions of cells in our bodies cooperate every day. If they began competing ruthlessly, the organism would cease to exist. In biology, the system that succeeds is not the one whose components fight one another most effectively, but the one that best coordinates their cooperation.
Research by Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel laureate in economics, showed that people can manage shared resources effectively without placing everything under a single decision-making centre or basing the entire system on competition alone. [source]
Ostrom studied communities managing shared forests, pastures, irrigation systems and other common resources. In many cases, people were able to establish lasting rules for cooperation based on trust, responsibility and reciprocity.
Research on the commons, social capital and cooperation also shows that trust, relationships and the ability to self-organise strengthen communities' capacity to cope with crises. [source]
Cooperation makes a system more resilient. A system based solely on competition encourages specialisation and the pursuit of maximum individual benefit. It can be highly efficient, yet more vulnerable to disruption. A cooperative system builds a denser network of connections. When one part runs into difficulties, others can help, take over some of its functions or find a solution together.
Contemporary research on the relationship between competition and cooperation suggests that the two can coexist, but require careful management of the tension between rivalry and creating value together. [source]
This means that competition can remain a useful tool in selected areas, but should not be the basic principle around which the whole of society is organised.
6. The Essence of the Change
Moving from competition to cooperation does not mean giving up individuality.
Nor does it mean that everyone must think alike, act alike or perform the same roles.
Cooperation is not about uniformity.
It is about bringing different skills, experiences and perspectives together around a common purpose.
An orchestra works not because every instrument sounds the same, but because they can sound together.
The same is true of society.
Its strength need not come from everyone fighting for an advantage. It can come from different people combining their abilities to create something that none of them could create alone.
The essence of the change, then, is to move away from the question:
“How can I beat others?”
And towards the question:
“What can we create together?”
The aim is not for one side to win.
It is not to defeat a competitor.
It is to create value that cannot be created alone.
Cooperation does not eliminate ambition. It gives ambition a different direction.
Instead of competing over who can gain more for themselves, we can take on the problems that limit people's lives: disease, poverty, loneliness, lack of knowledge, insecurity and environmental degradation.
In such a world, the greatest achievement is not defeating another person.
It is creating something together that neither of us could create alone.
The history of civilisation can be told as a story of ever-widening circles of cooperation.
From the family to the local community, nations and states, and on to global networks for sharing knowledge, technology and help.
Competition can sometimes improve products, prices and performance. But cooperation builds languages, cities, science, culture, the internet, communities and social resilience.
If the world's largest encyclopaedia, the foundations of the internet, modern science, open technologies and numerous communities managing shared resources grew out of cooperation, perhaps it is time to ask a different question.
If people achieve the most when they can cooperate with others, why do we still organise society as though rivalry were our greatest strength?
