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Originally Posted by Dunyain
LOL. Face it, collectivism sucks and is completely uncompetitive with capitalism. It always has been and always will be. Collectivism can keep trying to reinvent and reiterate itself, and the results will always be the same. Complete failure.
Capitalism is entirely founded on collectivism. The markets would not work unless we all agreed together to have them work in specific ways. The greatest asset of capitalism is itself the greatest example of collaboration and collectivism. All our needs are best served by going down market on weekends and selling our excess produce at a reasonable rate to busy people. You meet at the same place and time, you work out differences, you use identical methods of exchange, this is all collaboration. Without collaboration, if you want humans to live the way mountain lions live, we don't have *any of this*.
I'm not going to say that capitalism doesn't work extremely well. It does. Just that its direction and goals, being as they are at the behest of those with the most money and power, who only got to the position of having as much money and power as they because they like more money and power, will continue the process of making more money and power, perhaps in some degree to innovation and hard work but undeniably also due to exploitation, and will exercise their control of the markets in order to do so to whatever extent they can get away with before the people get too testy and threaten taking it back. Capitalism works extremely well at, for example, raising GDP, and then economists go 'hooray' as if it's clear and obvious that total money in a system goes up always equals society better off.
Co-operation trumps competition in a number of ways, borne out by game theory. When you're on your own, you have to spend a greater proportion of your resources on defence, and you can't really think about attack until you feel solid. You have the knowledge of one person. You don't get any specialisation benefits, from say 1 person doing the foraging and hunting and one person doing domestic chores. The hunters can only hunt small game. When you get home, you're tired and can't enjoy yourself.
In a group, where say 10 people have all agreed to stop competing and start co-operating, now you can just put people on defensive rotas so they don't get exhausted and you get round the clock coverage, and maybe you can feel solid enough to expand. You have the collective knowledge of 10 people. Some will be able to specialise and get better at and more efficient at just hunting or just cooking or just foraging or just making weapons and maybe if you've got the manpower spare a lazy creative type to draw pictures of the animals we're hunting on the walls of the cave and sing and tell stories. It is the logic of 'being more than the sum of our parts'. Network effects is the modern term for it. And they're all around us. If you don't see them, you're either choosing not to see them, perhaps because they're the very air we breathe and co-operation is so clearly baked in to our nature.
We can't even resort to nature to justify competition over co-operation. Yes, it's true that nature is brutal, and lots of individuals within lots of different species compete in a number of ways and in a number of niches and the result is evolution. But that's not the entirety of the story. It took us hundreds of thousands, or maybe arguably millions of years both to evolve clubs for fists, bipedalism (which is itself indirectly and directly a precursor to lots of other evolutionary advances, such as decoupling the action of the internal organs against lungs when running, allowing us to control our breath, allowing us to run for longer duration, allowing for us to hunt bigger game down to exhaustion, allowing for more protein rewarded in relation to how much time spent hunting, which afforded us bigger brains, which afforded us....) and ultimately over the last couple of hundred thousand years, the ultimate technology in collaboration - language. It is language and the collaboration that allows that has got us to a place where we're living in every livable corner of the globe and we're responsible for whatever vast % of the biomass in it compared to where we were. Where we were competing, we were competing for the chance to collaborate, something we see all the time in the modern human world.