Competing For The Greater Good
Expanding Paradigms - Spring 2004

Each year the same farmer won first prize for his corn. Each year the farmer shared his best seed corn with his neighbors. Puzzled, one of the judges asked why he would help his competition. The Farmer replied: “My corn knows nothing of competition and embraces windborne pollen without asking from whose field it comes. The quality of my corn will always be limited by that of my neighbor’s.”

Darwin wrote of competition as the driving force behind evolution. This view, over time, was embraced not only by biologists but also by economists and even some sociologists.

Social Darwinism, the idea that human society also evolves through competition and survival of the fittest, was used to justify the plight of the working poor during the industrial revolution and the subjugation and exploitation of weaker neighbors, whether they be individuals or nations. But, with the advent of systems theory, biologists found that complicated examples of cooperation between individuals and species played an important role in evolution, and began to expand upon Darwin’s original work.

For example, those species that compete solely for their own immediate benefit expand rapidly at the expense of their environment until the eco-system of which they are a part collapses. The most successful organisms, however, recognize their place in a delicate web of inter-dependent associations, as they balance their own growth with the welfare of the whole.
This is easy to see at the microscopic level when examining complex bacterial colonies growing in symbiotic relationships with plant roots. But it is no less true in the larger world of human society.

Nations that seek their own security by acquiring deadlier weapons than their enemies may feel safer for a while, but this security comes at the expense of those neighbors who then feel more vulnerable. The resulting arms race, driven by a collective desire for security, only serves to make everyone more vulnerable. In the long run, true security will only result from achieving security for all.