Cooperation and Competition
A "anarchist socialist" commenter on my blog recently cited Kropotkin's Mutual Aid for my personal edification. But after skimming through the book and reading its conclusion, it seems that beyond a statement of obvious facts, Kropotkin has no theory, no explanation, no conceptual advance, no technique to propose to either understand humans better or actually enhance their lives. Kropotkin cites many many cumbersome examples of mutually beneficial social behavior in animals first then in humans; he vows to generalize from such disjointed examples a universal principle that would vanquish all. Kropotkin is obviously an emotionalist (NF), rather than a rationalist (NT): he never argues in terms of cause and effect, he just puts things together or pits them against one another, arbitrarily choosing his side. Now the existence of forms of cooperation in nature might possibly serve as counter-example to disprove theories denying any such cooperation, but such denying theories seem to be straw man setup by Kropotkin more than anything else. I don't doubt there were and are indeed lots of people just as irrational as Kropotkin and promoting the emotional glorification of different group interactions than Kropotkin, -- but then for all the fighting between socialists and such nationalists, they are to be put in the same bag of anti-rational emotionalist collectivists.
There is no dispute that animals and people sometimes cooperate and sometimes don't. The question is to identify the forces that lead people to either cooperate or not. Is cooperation a principle opposed to competition, that will ultimately trump it? Or is it on the contrary but a principle subsidiary to competition, already accounted as part of it? In this competition between the two concepts, I'll indeed choose the latter cooperative interpretation. Evolution competitively selects cooperative memes.
The very idea that there could be cooperation without or against competition is absurd. As I like to repeat, Not only is there no contradiction between egoism and altruism, but no altruism is possible without egoism - for what betterment to wish to an other person devoid of selfish desire, to whom any change is indifferent? Altruism can only exist as a tribute to the recipient's egoism, and only survive as an expression of the donor's egoism. There is no sense whatsoever in cooperation without distinct individal goals to fulfill, each rivalling the others in the access to the limited resources of the universe. (Or to quote John McCarthy, If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.) Mutualism makes obvious sense as a common means towards each of the participant's goal. But if you eliminate the participant's individual goal, what sense does there remain in mutualism? Henry Hazlitt in his masterwork, The Foundations of Morality, laid bare the foundations of how mutual interest is indeed an expression of individual interest, and not a phenomenon that goes against it. It is because their (believed and expressed) individual interest rests in cooperation that individuals cooperate in practice.
To return to the evolutionary point of view, individuals, their genes and memes, partake in cooperation inasmuch as this cooperation is a resource-efficient way to outcompete those who don't cooperate. Those who don't follow this rule (as well as others) and are soon outcompeted out of the individual/genetic/memetic pool. Competition is the cause and effect of any cooperation that may stably happen. Cooperation cannot possibly go against competition and succeed. Conversely, of course, cooperation is the key to assimilating and metabolizing more resources than one could control alone in an unfriendly world. Egoism, self-interest and morality can and do indeed exist where no cooperation is possible. But where benefit is possible from cooperation, even accounting for the costs of coordination and enforcement, then cooperation will naturally emerge from the competition.
The key to maximizing cooperation is to eliminate the negative sum games of predation that may happen between individuals. Which is exactly what individual property rights and only individual property rights can do. Any other political solution but opens a permanent war of all contenders against all other contenders about each and every resource over which individual property rights are denied, in which war the value of the resource is destroyed. And so, if we define Socialism as the dream of men cooperating with each other as much as possible, then Capitalism is indeed the utmost form of Socialism: Stygmergic Socialism (merci jesrad).