Competition and Cooperation

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species holds that “all living things are weeded out through competition for resources in nature, and those that survive as a result are the ones that have evolved.” This stance of natural selection, an unconditional endorsement of competition, lies at the core of our competition-driven society.

Accordingly, every company is said to be weeded out through fair competition, and those that survive are the ones that have evolved. Economists believe that this principle of competition is what drives economic growth. How much nature that competition destroys, how many lives it takes, how far it shifts the climate of the planet we live on: economics could not care less. In keisei saimin (経世済民, “ordering the world and relieving the people,” the phrase from which the Japanese word for “economy” derives), the “world” does not include the natural world, and the “people” do not include the creatures of nature.

A Society Centered on Competition

A competitive society also produces a kind of pollution that damages health. Working people are treated not as living beings but as jinzai, “human material.” The character zai (材) here means a piece of timber cut from a tree. Nor is the problem solved by swapping in the homophone zai (財), “wealth”: that character originally referred to the seashells once used as money. Either way, people are not being treated as living beings that carry life. The proof is that the health of those who sacrifice their freedom day and night to survive in the free-competition system hovers right at the line of the “minimum standards” (the Japanese Constitution guarantees a “minimum standard of wholesome and cultured living”). Whether their lives are “cultured” is harder to judge, but if the freedom to watch TV whenever you like counts as culture, that bar may be cleared with room to spare.

Working people take part in competition pushed to the limit, like race cars in a Formula One Grand Prix. You have to be tough to enter this terrifying race every single day, where a moment’s lapse in concentration or a bit of poor tuning can lead to a major crash. A society in which the company’s victory and survival take priority even as people grow exhausted and stressed and their bodies and minds break down: that is the society most of humankind lives in. Replace “company” with “nation” and the picture stays the same.

An Education System Run on Competition

School is a mirror of society. Today’s education system reflects what society demands of it. Naturally, the education system of a competition-driven society is itself competition-driven. Everything in it proceeds competitively, from start to finish.

Every child is evaluated through competition. Those who win through to the end are rated excellent, the rest are rated fair, and those who lose early on are branded “dropouts.” Even those who do not compete at all are “dropouts.” Since it would be a problem if nobody competed anymore, competitivism punishes the “insolent” ones who refuse to take part by giving them the lowest possible grade in every subject on their report cards.

As for children who lose every competition early, or who are born with disabilities, the system would really like to give them the lowest grade across the board and label them “dropouts” too, but doing so would call the evaluator’s character into question, so they are placed in “special support.” Special support is an evaluation meaning “in need of special support (because they are too weak to survive in a competitive society).” It looks as though they are not being treated as dropouts, but they are still being evaluated faithfully according to the rules of competition.

Tests that sort winners from losers by results, report cards that regularly announce the outcome of the competition, homework done so as not to fall behind, whole-class instruction that keeps everyone at the same pace so they can compete, grade levels that bundle children by year of birth so they can compete, national standardized achievement tests, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): almost every program that makes up the current education system exists to make “competition” possible. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), despite having the word “Co-operation” in its name, is in fact fostering “competition” for the sake of economic growth.

Cooperativism as a Counterculture

Who will make room for the people who cannot win in this harsh competitivism? NPOs and social welfare organizations? Is it a problem that religion or politics should solve? If even the “non-profit” education system is this competitive, society will inevitably be a hard place to live for everyone but a few winners. The “difficulty of living” that everyone feels somewhere in their heart lies in “competitivism,” which obliges us always to strive to be winners. Competitivism is the root cause of the dilemmas, absurdities, fatigue and stress that no one can quite put into words and that we end up attributing, haphazardly, to one “social problem” or another. So how can we give up competitivism?

If competitivism is the essence of society, then any force that opposes it may be considered antisocial. Even so, we at Polymath Research wish to raise the banner of “cooperativism” against competitivism. And we are convinced that this is the cosmic social system that nature itself has adopted. It applies at every level, from elementary particles to galaxies.

A quark does not compete with other quarks. A photon does not compete with an electron. An electron competes neither with a proton nor with a neutron. A chloroplast does not compete with a mitochondrion. A cell does not compete with other cells. An organ does not compete with other organs. The right hand and the left hand, the right foot and the left foot, the right brain and the left brain: far from competing, they get along beautifully! The Earth does not compete with the Sun, nor with the Moon, Mars or Jupiter. The Solar System does not compete with other star systems. The Milky Way does not compete with the Andromeda Galaxy.

From the tiniest scales to the vastest, all things simply cooperate to keep the universe running. Are “living things,” observable at the human scale, the only ones that compete? Do plants, animals and fungi really compete with one another for resources? That is very hard to believe. If we think cosmically about why living things acquire resources, why they have life at all, and why life exists in the universe, it becomes clear that such a view is impossible.

All Competition Leads to War

If someone had not first said that “evolution occurs through natural selection by competition,” if someone had not then declared that belief “Correct! Wonderful!”, and if someone had not combined it with Mendel’s discoveries and announced “This is exactly how biological evolution works,” we might not have ended up with a society that endorses competition so unconditionally.

Competition develops into war. If you believe this world is a competition for resources, you specialize in order to acquire them. Once you specialize, the niche (ecological position) you have acquired becomes the object of turf wars. Turf wars inevitably develop into war. In the case of humans, the boundaries of turf are national borders.

Cooperation Is the Path to Peace

Cooperation does not develop into war. If you believe this world is a cooperation in distributing resources, you divide up the work of acquiring them. Once work is shared, a niche held by one species is dynamically handed over to another species as needed, so turf wars do not arise. If there are countless partners to share the work with and the efficiency of resource distribution is high enough, then, by the law of increasing entropy, energy that can be converted into resources keeps being supplied, so the resources available keep increasing. Along with this, species also multiply to take on new work. And as species multiply, the energy-conversion efficiency of the ecosystem rises further still.

Through this repetition, usable energy accumulates, under gravity, on the surface of a sphere, and a “peaceful ecosystem” that brings order to the chaos of the universe is naturally called upon to expand, eventually leaping out into space. There is not the slightest hint of war in it. In a world where usable energy is abundant and never runs out, and where everyone has enough food, clothing and shelter, all the technology and budgets now spent on taking lives will instead go to building “life instruments” that make life thrive and enrich our living. From space, no borders can be seen.

All Cooperation Leads to the Cosmos

Maria Montessori and Buckminster Fuller, whom we at Polymath Research regard as our mentors from afar, championed “cooperativism” and spent their lives spreading its importance throughout the world. Maria Montessori sublimated developmental theory into a unique method of education grounded in cooperativism. Buckminster Fuller sublimated geometric theory into a science of cosmic structure grounded in cooperativism. All things are interrelated, and each plays its own role in the universe. Both the society of children and the invisible workings of the universe are built on cooperation. Its importance cannot be overstated.

The universe is designed so that, as long as a civilization holds to “competitivism,” a cosmically mistaken idea, it can never reach the level at which it can travel freely through space. Only when a civilization makes a complete transition to “cooperativism” does it gain access to deep space. There is even a time limit built in: a feedback mechanism acting on the living environment of the home planet. Through this feedback mechanism, any civilization that adopts anti-cosmic “competitivism” will sooner or later perish from the side effects of its own actions.

This means that (1) you cannot advance to the next stage until you figure out how that world works, (2) the same player cannot play forever, and (3) the player may even be replaced. This perfect game design, which might be called the safety valve of the universe, feels just like playing a classic video game. You sense the same kind of consideration as in a designer saying, “The player really needs to go into that cave and find the sword here, or they won’t be able to enjoy the rest of the game, y’know.”

Maximizing Cooperation Is the Supernatural

We at Polymath Research believe that enabling humans to avoid specialization and preserve their innate polymathic potential is what will bring evolution to “the human being as a phenomenon of life.” By performing supernatural work for the Earth as the habitat of all living things, humankind can evolve into the next species and advance to an interstellar civilization. Beyond that lies the possibility of a galactic civilization, and ultimately a cosmic one.

Expanding into space is essentially a question of “how to protect life,” and it is absolutely impossible to get there without technologies that make life thrive. Nor is there any possibility of machines replacing humans. The entire human genome is only about 800 MB in size¹, and human history will come to an end before humankind invents any machine architecture equivalent to DNA, RNA, chromosomes or viruses.

After continuing its short-sighted trial and error, science will ultimately realize that we would have to create every living thing, from microorganisms to creatures large and small, from scratch by ourselves. That means realizing that we would need to recapitulate the entire phylogeny of life on Earth to date, which in turn means realizing that we would need to repeat the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth, and the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe.

Even if, to shortcut that history, we acquired the technology to enter a computer simulation as beings of information, there is no physical law by which the diverse life born there could be carried over into a higher-dimensional world, that is, the world we live in. Nor, because of chaos, is there any guarantee that this miraculous universe could be reproduced in simulation at all. The future awaiting a science that seeks to replace the universe with artifacts is the discovery that “it can’t be done,” and the end of humankind.

Now Is the Time to Cooperate with the Earth

We are, in essence, beings of the cosmos. Just as traveling a great world teaches you to appreciate home, we want to cultivate a culture of cooperation for the sake of the Earth, which, seen from space, is the common home of us all. For the transition to cooperativism, too, we want to build relationships not of competition but of pure cooperation. That is why Polymath Research operates as an NPO: so that we can cooperate with any individual or organization.

Through the “Cooperating with Earth” project, we are always looking for individuals who want to make Earth restoration their work. We are also always looking for sponsors, so that our staff can make a living through concrete Earth restoration activities such as improving the methods of primary industries and carrying them forward in integrated ways. Through the cooperation between the people who take concrete action to solve problems and the people who support them, this project will become a driving force for restoring the Earth.

As collaborators increase, cooperative relationships increase exponentially, and the vector toward achieving Earth restoration supernaturally grows stronger. Its benefits will be received by all life on Earth. That includes us as we are today, as well as our descendants who are yet to be born.

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Footnotes

1. An estimate. There are various ways to calculate it, but it comes to around 1 GB at most. ↩