cooperation > competition

An interesting excerpt on Medium from Douglas Rushkoff's upcoming book, Team Human:

Evolution Made Us Cooperative, Not Competitive

This is something Peter Kropotkin and Stephen J. Gould both argued—something I personally agree with myself. Life is a struggle. It continually fights against decay, entropy, and catastrophe in the tiny space it occupies within the incomprehensible vastness that is the universe. But somehow, we've learned over time to thrive despite the harshness of it all. And the main way we've done this, I believe, is through increasingly-greater levels of cooperation and an ever-expansive sense of community.

Our history is ultimately one of an intricate and interconnected web of ideas, events, and social relations that have given rise, over numerous generations, to civilization as we know it today, with its beauty and its horrors, its triumphs and its tragedies, its heroes and its monsters. So many mistakes have kept us in a state of nature that's often savage, distrustful, and broken. But the stronger our bonds, the greater our achievements and the higher we ascend. And our biggest mistake is that we've grown accustomed to seeing ourselves as isolated, individual atoms that simply swerve here and there and bump into one another in a chaotic dance of self-interest.

Yet, nature isn't limited to this kind of dance. Individual atoms also cooperate, bond together to create molecules that themselves combined with other molecules again and again to eventually form the myriad of things we can see and hear and taste and touch and contemplate. The stronger their bonds and the more complex (and cooperative) their structures, the more amazing the things they create, even the mystery of life itself. And looking at the state of the world around me, from the threat of catastrophic climate change to the destructive power of war, the only hope for the future I see is a higher degree of cooperation and a more expansive sense of community than we currently have now, as individuals and as nations, overcoming barriers and borders in the struggle to create something altogether new.

Despite whatever fears we may have about the world and one another, and about the harshness of life we're sometimes confronted with, we must abandon our atomistic and overly competitive ways of living and begin to more fully embrace all the positive forces that bind us together. If not, everything that we see and love and hold close to our hearts, our whole world based on interconnectedness, will fall apart in the chaotic dance of self-interest.