The purpose of life is to make a living.
Successful life forms appear ‘clever’ because they exemplify how the rich extravaganza of life has adapted to an amazingly wide range of particular environments. Life has found ways to ‘make a living’ from freezing polar ice caps to hellish equatorial deserts.
As you would expect, if you need to make a living, it pays to be selfish. But being selfish means in the strategic sense not in the moralistic sense.
Sometimes, the most selfish strategy of all is to play ‘nice’. At first, this seems strategically counter-intuitive or even morally contradictory.
For many people winning is everything. These people take the approach to life that they are better off being highly competitive in the situations that come their way. Kill or be killed. It’s a dog-eat-dog world we live in. Get the other guy before he gets you etc etc.
But, a great deal of scientific research show that this is not the way life really works. Even at the molecular level of life, as well as the organism and community level, competition is usually a counter-productive way of trying to make a living. Co-operation very often turns out to be the more successful selfish strategy.
In life in general, but not always, it pays off to be co-operative rather than competitive. In the next few lessons we’ll explore why this is so.
DFQ #07:
We all learn valuable lessons in life. In less than 100 words, give an example of such a lesson.
Describe a life situation you were in where you behaved competitively. However, you later realised that, for selfish reasons of your own, you would have had a much better payoff had you co-operated rather than competed.