Healthy Competition vs. Unhealthy Competition

Competition doesn't always have to be a Zero-Sum game. Yes there are winners and losers in life. That is natural, but losing in most situations in life shouldn't have to equate to destruction. Maybe in war, yes, but not running a business or feeding your family or sporting matches or going to school, or almost any other facet of life and society. 

Honestly, aside from warfare there shouldn't be any competition where the loser doesn't gain some sort of benefit or lesson from the loss, and even in warfare many times the loser is humbled to the point of reformation of their society. Just look at Germany or Japan after World War 2.  

    Yes, survival of the fittest is a very real concept and a very real circumstance in nature, but fitness can be taught and developed. The unfit don't always need to be weeded out and destroyed. A Darwinist approach works well...in the jungle...or in the wild...but it makes for a brutish and unnecessarily harsh and unforgiving environment when applied to human society. Social darwinism always leads to the wolves running the show.

 It always leads to oppression. It is unsustainable as conflict inevitably erupts in darwinistic societies and "survival of the fittest" style competition. 

Fitness, just like weakness, is not an inherent condition of someone's nature. Both can be gained or lost depending on the environment and depending on the conditions.  As a result, you can engineer and foster fitness on both an individual and collective level.  Mutualism, the taking care and strengthening of the weak and vulnerable, and more altruistic approaches to social arrangements and hierarchies are far more beneficial practices for a society and far more ethical.

 Mutualism and reciprocity of care and help leads to much more long term stability and is much more sustainable of a system.  Learning how to cure sickness, strengthen weakness, and increase the general fitness and intelligence of a population leads to a far more advanced society.  Survival of the fittest "every man for himself" mentality, from my perspective, stagnates human society and keeps us in a primal state.  It prevents certain levels of advancement, especially when the focus of training and conditioning within the society is designed solely to weed out or eliminate the weak. 

     There is an old saying "Nothing worth it in life comes easy." This is true with social advancement and the advancement of humanity beyond primal arrangements of power and authority. It takes a  lot more work to strengthen weakness than it does to weed it out, but for the society as a whole, doing so is far more valuable in the long run.

    In regards to competition, whether it be economic, social, sports, leisure, relationships, etc, there are two primary forms of competition. Healthy competition and unhealthy competition.

     Healthy competition is when you compete against an opponent and both you and your opponent gain a benefit even when you or they lose.  When you win, you bring your opponent up with you even in their shortcoming in the competition. They learn something from the loss and gain even in the loss. Also there is a level of mutual respect and value for the competition and consideration for the well being of an opponent. This is the ideal arrangement of sports and games. Even when you lose, you learn.

 Unhealthy competition is truly zero-sum. Someone wins at someone else's great expense. It is a hostile competition. You want to destroy your opponent and take all they have. You want to completely break the will and drive of your opponent, and any tactic or strategy is free game in the cutting down and reduction of your challenger. This is unhealthy because its intent is to destroy, not compete, and there is no lesson to be learned for the loser if they are destroyed. 

Healthy competition leads to healthy, stable, and sustainable societies and economies. It leads  to dignity, respect, and the value of human life and humanity.

 Unhealthy competition leads to oppression and a brutish, uncomfortable, and fearful condition of life. Unhealthy competition leads to mass death and consistent instability and decay within humanity and human societies. 

 Unhealthy competition often stagnates and sometimes even regresses a society. The great pitfall of social darwinism and true zero-sum competition is the death of innovation. You don't need to innovate as much when you just weed out or destroy your problems and weakness instead of learning how to correct and redeem them.

       Altruism, compassion, mutualism, and the strategies to the long term health of a species are not zero-sum games. In those situations, even the losers win.