Is competition the natural consequence of limited resources?
I don’t think so. There are many instances of people sharing or pooling resources to make things stretch when faced with limits
But I don’t want to lock myself into the thinking that competition is bad so early. What about healthy competition?
Competition can help people grow and improve. Serena Williams would not be incredibly elite tennis player that she is if she had spent the last 10 years only playing tennis against people like me (I have 0 skills. I played once and somehow managed to hit the ball over the high fence to my left and out of the court when I just wanted to get it over the net)
Actually, is it competition that helped Williams grow? I think it may actually be more accurate to say having challenges was what brought the growth, and some of her challenges came in the form of athletic competition
But in competition there is usually a winner and a loser. One person gets the prize one person doesn’t. In the case of survival, one person gets the thing needed to survive, like shelter or food, and the other person doesn’t
Competition as we know it excludes a win-win scenario. Maybe the case of a tie come close to this, but ties are often, but not always, considered to be a competition with no winner as opposed to both people/teams winning
Competition may be win-lose but a challenge can be win-win
Like with everything, competition isn’t good or bad. You can have friendly, fun competitions or deadly ones
If our competitions are mostly win-lose scenarios that says something about where we are as a species
