Netflix is running a documentary on the history of the earth called Life on Our Planet. It is an eight-part series with gorgeous CGI.
I recommend it to anyone.
I have one serious problem with the story line. The same problem I have with the consensus view of commerce. The presumption in both cases is that competition is the dominant operating force. Commerce is supposedly about competition. Evolution is supposedly about competition with some species as the apex predator.
The fact is that both are overwhelmingly cooperation. Commerce, which I know deeply, is better than 95% cooperation. Workers, suppliers, customers, and landlords are cooperative nearly all the time. Commerce couldn’t work unless everyone helps everyone else. Which is why tribal and communist societies are poor. Poor in every meaning of the word.
I’m not a biologist but I love mycology. I know that the barren landscape after a mass extinction event would not be habitable without the mycelium processing the land surface to make it habitable for all the fauna phyla. That is cooperation on a grand scale. The Netflix documentary focuses entirely on competition and the grand master of competition; the apex species.
Sharks and big whales may be the apex predators in the ocean but together they are an infinitely small part of that biomass. The same is true for lions and tigers on land and eagles and hawks in the air.
Cooperation in life is the core reality in biology and commerce. Why competition and the apex predator model are so popular escapes me. It is wrong and absurd. It doesn’t come from Adam
Smith.
Part of the problem is the word ‘cooperation.’ We don’t say a father and daughter are cooperating when they are behaving normally like family members, nor do we say the door man taking a message for a tenant is ‘cooperating’, the doorman is just doing his job. Cooperation is the norm of behavior, or vice versa, the norm of behavior is cooperation. We just don’t have a word that acknowledges normative behavior in English.