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turchin's avatar

It looks like that now the competition is between nation-states. The problem is that this competition is often takes form of wars, and after the creation of nuclear weapons, it becomes possible for one country to blackmail the whole world to get what it wants via Doomsday weapons. This is not sustainable, especially if there will be several such blackmailers with mutually exclusive goals. Therefore, the price of competition becomes too high, and design starts too look more attractive.

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Morris39's avatar

Agree with your general theme. Competition may well be rooted biologically. The network of life is a zero sum competition for energy (nutrients) among all species with the exception of plants . Interesting you state 'Foragers didn’t overtly compete with each other, but instead made important decisions by consensus, and largely by appeal to community-wide altruistic goals.We have no evidence for this as written records do not exist. Whatever evidence there is and it is not strong points in the other direction. That is hunter gatherer societies contacted for the first time and cooperating social animals (predators).

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