re:

Or: this got long so I decided to make it its own post.

Certainly, being a few bong hits short of a Darwin denialist means I agree competition served its purpose in getting us to here and now, but I believe it is counterproductive in this moment in history in the degrees to which we currently take it. When saturated markets are inflated and advertisements distorted to sell people more of the same thing they don't need--when scarcity and obsolescence are planned to ensure profit--when power is an opportunity to abuse people instead of serve them--when the recognition and the rewards that are meant to be the indexes of productivity become detached and more coveted than productivity itself, then it's appropriate to de-emphasize competition in favor of cooperation, especially given how much the latter is currently neglected in favor of the former.

Moreover, I don't believe the arts and scientific research should ever be driven by one-upmanship. They should be driven by a desire to innovate, explore possibilities and contradictions, to create and discover something different from what existed before. Competition should only come to play when evaluating the results, and even then only in a relative way. Besides, in either one of these fields one is likely to encounter so much discouragement that one won't get very far with only the feeble impulse to do the world one better, without Rilke's proverbial "I must." (c/o N.)