IMHO, a lot of the ideas about competition in society come from a deep (and sometimes purposeful) misunderstanding of natural selection.  [1] is an decent taste of this line of inquiry, and America&#x27;s early 20th century obsession with eugenics is fascinating in a really, really, really unsettling sort of way.<p>That said: I disagree that individual competition brings out the worst in people.  It <i>can</i> certainly do that - but applied properly, it can also improve attention, creativity, and other indicators of task-based performance.<p>Also, life&#x2F;society as we currently understand it <i>does</i> contain aspects of competition, often in subtle ways.  A person might decide between multiple potential mates; a prospective employee might negotiate their starting offer; a student might organize a club to help distinguish themselves from thousands of other graduates.  Whenever I buy food or clothes or whatever, I need to buy it from <i>someone</i> (not being a diehard homesteader), so there are multiple vendors competing for my attention and custom.  We might be able to do without some of this, but a lot of it is driven by limits on resources (material, population, etc.)<p>(You might also be interested in the New Games Movement, one of the many weird outcroppings of hippie-era counterculture: they sought to build a corpus of games that highlighted cooperation over competition.  The movement died a somewhat predictable death, but its games live on - if you&#x27;ve ever played any of the circle games popular with camps, youth groups, and teachers, you&#x27;ve probably played something that has its roots in the New Games Movement.)<p>(Last diversion: game-theoretic dilemmas are also really interesting, since most of them revolve around cases in which individual optimal strategies lead to worse overall strategies.  See also: bystander effect &#x2F; volunteer dilemma, tragedy of the commons.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Survival_of_the_fittest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Survival_of_the_fittest</a>