What is competition but the quantifying and assessment of differences.
Competition has nothing to do with measuring our differences and everything to do with, "I get mine before you get yours". If competition was only about measuring our differences sporting events wouldn't keep score, and the players wouldn't be trying to achieve a goal while keeping their opponent from doing it. In fact, there wouldn't even be opponents. Just participants.
But it's ALL ABOUT pitting us against each other, and beating our opponent. To see who is the "better man". The "winner". And who gets the reward. It's all about the glorification of ego and the legitimacy of selfishness and the idea that, "might makes right". And none of this is good for nor necessary to a healthy, effective, efficient society.
You cannot eliminate differences and therefore cannot eliminate competition. It is how we acknowledge and handle those differences, the unavoidable comparison, that is important.
We also can't eliminate violence, or thievery, or deception, or addiction, either, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it as a society, and pretend it's good for us. Because we can at minimize it, and by openly condemning it we can learn to live better without it. This isn't 'pie in the sky'. Humanity has been struggling to become more human for eons. And we ARE more human now than we once were.
Is it your position that anyone who wishes to be a medical doctor be granted that position, regardless of ability or even effort to attain the required skill? What about in engineering or design? Shall we assign societal jobs strictly by lottery, blind to talent and motivation so as to eliminate competition?
Why are you even asking these questions? Why do you think a society that's based on mutual cooperation for everyone's mutual benefit would mean having to allow unqualified doctors? See, this is the kind of nonsense that the capitalist propagandists have been spewing for decades; ever since Milton Friedman's "greed is good" mantra back in the 1970s.
Surely you agree that in our large, modern societies of today, disregarding differences is quite unrealistic, and hence, competition is unavoidable.
I don't know why you're so focused on differences. As neither competition nor cooperation has anything in particular to do with people's differences.
Let's use that bridge analogy, again, as something that would benefit all or most all of the people in a given community. Which makes more sense; 10 people each trying to build their own bridge just for themselves to use, or 10 people working together to build one bridge for all of them to use? How do their "differences" matter? It seems to me that working as a group creates the possibility of a larger skill set to draw from because the individuals are different. Creating a better bridge. As opposed to 10 individuals with different skill sets each building their own bridge using only their own skill sets. Cooperation is also inclusion, and inclusion increases the range of knowledge available for whatever task is being undertaken.
And these suggestions relate to not letting the dog chew your slippers, but something else instead. The trick is finding the right incentives to direct the instinctual behavior appropriately.
The incentive is that everyone needs a bridge built. And the question is how best to answer that need. I say that cooperation is far better than competition as a methodology. Not just at bridge building, but at nearly every activity that we humans engage in to fulfill our needs.
I wholeheartedly agree that culture can exacerbate negative aspects of human instincts instead of mitigating them. But the fact remains that those instincts are there and cannot be eliminated, only directed.
I disagree. they can, like all the other negative instincts we humans have as animals, be mitigated, significantly. That is, after all, the most significant aspect of becoming civilized human beings, as opposed to remaining uncivilized animals.
If your social system does not appropriately acknowledge and incorporate all aspects of human behavior, it will be unsuccessful.
We can acknowledge our negative behaviors without "incorporating" them into our social systems and structures. As we do with any other behavior we deem 'criminal' because it is detrimental to civilized society.