I believe a compelling view of the universe is the need for competition and cooperation as the only building blocks upon which we can grow. My quip of, "all growth comes from conflict, but not all conflict leads to growth" is true, and I think Competitive Cooperation is an explanation of why, and how to look for the right kinds of conflict.
What is Competitive Cooperation, Simply?
It is difficult to succinctly state the depths of thinking I've done over the years on the subject of Competitive Cooperation, but we'll try and we'll leave nuance and ambiguity some room here. It's not exacting as a philosophy and doesn't require hard lines in the sand, so I don't think misinterpretation is too difficult an issue.
Competitive Cooperation is the push and pull that pushes everything forward. In people you can see examples of rivals that detest each other but respect each other greatly, and they push each other to new heights as long as that balance holds. You can see it in groups. All sports are rituals of Competitive Cooperation if they are to survive. It is the hero's journey in all stories where the hero eventually must compete with their rival force, and conquer their limits by cooperating with the forces of growth they've brought. Sometimes the competitive and cooperative forces are the same, and sometimes they are not, but both are necessary.
When a person, regardless of age, gender, culture, or time period, makes a choice to do something, it is because of this force in their life. They see something that needs to change or be accomplished, or played with, or challenged, and they set out to do it. They will need to both compete with other forces (maybe just inertia, but always something) as well as cooperate with other forces. Lifting weights is a competition with ones own body and a cooperation with things like gravity. If they are not balanced, injury or lack of progress are the result.
This is Stupid, Why Should I Care?
Assuming you're reading this, I have to stress that I don't actually care if you want to use this in your life or not. I have found it useful as a framework for evaluating many things in my own life, and I'm writing it down to aid in my thinking. If you can benefit from it, finding the will to fight for peace or just stand in the winds of life to find happiness, that's a win for you.
I think it's a great framework for thinking about everything. It allows me to reframe things so I can ask questions like, "is this person yelling at me because they are mad at me, or they're trying to compel me?" That detaches the emotion I might feel about it into knowing if it's purely competition that I can address appropriately, or if it's someone trying to make me better in their view of what "better" means, which I can also address, probably differently. Seeing it as a component of balance between these forces allows more freedom to deal with the components as I believe they are. This pays dividends in both my mental state and my capabilities handling what life throws my way.
It also works on myself. I see us all as competing forces in a flesh bag. Unlike the "two wolves inside you" analogy where it encourages you to feed the good wolf, I don't see any side of myself as bad. I don't think there are such things inside people. The motivation isn't to steal, the motivation is to serve ones self. We absolutely should be selfish and want good things for ourselves. We just also want that to cooperate with the competing motivation to serve others and be part of the community. When I can arrange for both to be satisfied, I grow. It is always painful, because those forces don't naturally cooperate, they have to respect each other in their rivalry.
The Best Things in Life are Hard
I'm big on thinking longer term. I don't want to live a life I regret, and I know things so I have to consider things now. My definition of regret is not making a mistake, but making a decision that I should have known better with the information I had at the time. Basically, I will only punish myself for not thinking, but that of course competes with the fact that I need to decide. After all, indecision is a decision in and of itself.
With that longer term perspective, I can see that it would be really enjoyable to just watch all the shows my friends recommend to me and kill time. The doomscrolling is really easy to get into for a reason. The problem is later I will know I didn't get the value out of that.
Instead I can decide what's hard but worth more? I program several nights a week and often on weekends. I write, not because I enjoy writing, but because it is difficult to put my thoughts down and organize them and challenge them. I've rewritten over half of this article 7 times so far, and that's just up to this point where I'm writing this paragraph. It will be many more. This is a difficult article. I know it will feel better to get that out at the level I'm pleased with than I will ever get from a quicker dopamine hit.
I have this same philosophy in my leisure these days. I don't play as many video games as I used to, partly due to lack of time since I have other goals, but partly because I want to be picky and not just play whatever. It has to be an accomplishment (note that I did not say challenge). I don't mind if anyone else enjoys a visual novel, that's their time, I'm not competing for their time. I'm saying I see my time as something for Competitive Cooperation to spend, and if I'm going to spend the time, it needs to reward me, and my rewards will be different than others. In turn, their time can be distilled to me in a conversation over lunch or something and we can share our Competitive Cooperation results and explore together.
For all of us, though, that's the rub. The things all of us are going to want at the end of the day are worth the time and that is where this philosophy is so good. We need to do hard things. Humans die when life gets easy. We need struggle. We also die when we have too much lone struggle. We need a tribe. We need to Compete, and we need to Cooperate. Choosing the right things to Compete in and the right things to Cooperate with are critical to growth and happiness. We must seek both.
It's Not Just Human Relationships
The real reason I like this isn't because it helps me navigate the social dynamics or motivate myself. There's a lot of already available solutions out there that are frameworks like that. I think this also describes physics and life. I'm not speaking crazy here, this is just a framework for thinking about things philosophically, and I have not found a limit to it (yet, I'm sure I will), but that doesn't mean it's some universal truth or something. Just good communication fodder, really. It's nice to be able to have words for some of this that express something that causes a little different perspective.
Some thoughts here that I like to play with, but again aren't great truth, just a good framework for thinking or discussing the concepts and maybe imagining how things work differently.
If you go back to the roots of life, we have no idea where to draw that line or how it came to be, but we do know that some things sort of had to happen. At some point, a single cell organism ate another single cell organism, and neither died. Are they a single cell now? Is that how we got pieces of our cells today? What about multiple cells working together? That's just a complex system working together. How about messaging between different kinds of cells in your blood stream? They're just little biological machines, but they're competing and cooperating across systems, forming a bigger system, like your immune system.
You can think about molecules like this, too. Atoms bond by sharing electron fields. That force is strong enough to hold particles together, but it's also strong enough for you to lift weights because of several layers of systems interacting, even though it's mostly empty space. So these fields bond, and they also repel, which draws distinctions between materials and energy and their interactions. These systems Competitively Cooperate to create higher order complex systems.
RNA is a long chain molecule that then folds on itself to create bonds between pieces and activate bits of it to instruct portions of cells on what they should do. There's literally tiny structures walking DNA in every cell in your body right now. Literally walking along it, and they're only a handful of atoms. You can find simulations of what we know they sort of look like. This is what protein folding is, just long chains of atoms bonded that fold in each other in specific ways to form very specific structures. Thousands of them form cell walls, but they also form things like literal motors that run on electrons pushing them around (bond and repel, remember?)
I think this is fun to think about systems that sustain over time. They have to compete against similar systems and get good at their job, they have to cooperate to create bigger and better things. From an atomic level all the way to how you and I operate to how entire societies rely on each other while also hating each other. Where's the balance lines? How much rivalry and how much respect is needed for what purposes? When should competition result in the loss of a system? How many kinds of protein folding don't happen anymore that used to?
I have no answers from this, because again it isn't some universal truth, but it's become both fun and useful in my life to think about and operate with as one of the many tools in my toolbelt. Maybe you'll enjoy it, too. I look forward to where it goes regardless.