Advocates for welfare programs, for instance, often run up against criticism that their policy proposals fail to understand to importance of “losing,” that they lessen the stakes of the competition innate to human social life. Indeed, any non-market-based solution to social issues usually falls prey to claims of utopianism, of ignoring the fundamental selfishness of the human species. More than just a cliché, though, the supposed naturalness of competition has played a central role in substantiating the laissez-faire variety of capitalism the majority of the American political spectrum has championed for the past four or so decades. Hell, your worst colleague at the office might even offer it as a justification for his one-upmanship. Even within centers of institutional power, like universities in North America, competition’s position as the central force driving evolution has been seriously challenged recently.įast forward a century and a half, and “survival of the fittest”-the expression social theorist Herbert Spencer coined to sum up Darwin’s thinking-is as much a cultural cliché as it is a scientific theory.
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