It is. It is only our arrogant individualistic capitalist ideology which pretends otherwise. Cooperation, mutual aid, these are principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial. Biologists and anthropologists understand this. But economists think so highly of themselves that they see no need to study history or modern psychology, so they come up with equations they think describe reality, then ignore evidence which contradicts their models. The result is predictable. You get ecological catastrophe, a breakdown of social trust, and the breakdown of society itself. But oh how we lived like kings before the music stopped! Or maybe living like cancer is more appropriate, sucking up resources, growing rapidly, and fucking up system-wide dynamics. There's a reason why selfishness has historically been viewed as a negative trait, and it's instructive that a society as sick as ours lives by the mantra, "greed is good!".
Cooperation, mutual aid, these are principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial.
Those things are not incompatible with selfishness. If I'm pursuing my own self-interest, I might quite rightly choose to cooperate with my peers for mutual benefit.
Conversely, if I don't pursue my own self-interest, what exactly is the point of living at all? It's not like intelligent life serves any objective purpose or end, other than that which we individuals imbue it with.
We just seem to use a shitty definition of selfishness these days.
That's English for you, where every word seems to be overloaded with about a dozen different meanings...
The problem is, selfishness (in the negative sense) and what I would call selfishness are actually related in a sense, which makes it easy for people to slip in and out of using either meaning in conversation, and everybody winds up arguing for no reason.
I am not sure you can make the claim that cooperation and mutual aid are "principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial", nor would you find a large body of either biologists or anthropologists rushing in to support said claim.
Life on earth has gone roughly four billion years relying largely on predation, competition and survival of the fittest. I think you will find symbiosis and mutualism to be in the vast minority when quantitatively evaluating "things that work in nature".
I'm not saying that means cooperation and mutual aid are "bad". I just find it interesting when people impose their personal morals on nature.
There is, as I understand it, strong support for the ideas of "Reciprocal altruism" and "kin altruism," from the evolutionary psychologists / evolutionary biologists. Game theory research[1] by Robert Axelrod[2][4] has shed some light on the nature of altruism, cooperation and competition, as has the work of Robert Trivers[3].
I probably overreached in that comment. Competition and cooperation are both important, I just think that we've come to irrationally overvalue selfish tendencies, while forgetting the cooperative basis of social behaviors that have made our species so successful.
