luke wilson said:
Do STO beings compete with/against each other? Capitalism is build on competition. The statement being, through competition we encourage innovation, through competition we encourage efficiency etc etc. However, it is interesting to watch the biggest economic entities out there destroy competition against them. To them competition is sin. Yet they encourage everyone below them to compete.
In my view, one of the problems with 'Identification and competition' is related to a particular way of looking at life that is mechanical and is programmed into us from childhood. A view of life in it's various contexts where there is such a scarcity of things to 'be' and things to 'have' and things to 'do', that one forms attachments to whatever comes along and evokes a bit of feel-good brain chemistry.
When I think about it from the point of view of logic, the whole universe is a single, logically asymettrical object which, as a totality, simply exists. Within it we have evolutionary processes. In these evolutionary processes, differing life-forms collaborate to create rich ecosystems, each motivated by their own self interest.
That's probably why the mathematics in the Game Theory formulas don't always have predictable results. They don't take the effects of cooperation and collaboration into account. (Which reminds me: have you read
Adventures With Cassiopaea?)
People stuck in a mechanical, hypnotized, narrow, concentrated-focus mindset, with the brain chemistry balance that keeps them there, tend to see only in pairs, while completely unaware of the third man theme or of any inter-related background context. The logical AND - the true mode of logical juxtaposition - is converted into logical OR. Instead of bee AND flower they must see bee OR flower - they can't see both, or any number of elements at a time, working as a system. The individual who does understand he is a part of a larger system lives in a universe of collaborative co-evolution. The narrow-minded, hypnotized people live only in a universe of competitive evolution.
Mechanical man sees mutual opposition everywhere, and they come up with example after example of competition, using their logic to prove that in the universe of OR, there is not any co-operation anywhere. It's rather sad, actually. They can't get their split little brains around the idea that competition AND colloboration can co-exist in a system, and what matters is the
dominant trait.
If competition was really the dominant trait in evolution, rich ecosystems would degrade into very simple ones consisting of a single life-form, which would then drop dead of starvation. Needless to say, two-pole only thinkers deliberately arrange their own business affairs in exactly this way, and then when they lose everything, they claim that it was an inevitability of nature, or something.
Waking up to the background context of interrelations between everything and everyone, including all of us here, is one aspect of the Work as I understand it. :)
