Competition: Struggle for Life
The clash of living-forms for supremacy and survival.
Competition, or the struggle for life, constitutes the principal motor force of evolution in everything from bacteria to humans, as well as history. Even the most fanatical pacifists acknowledge it. Competition affects every domain of existence; it’s observable between individuals and between groups. Communal solidarity is the sole element mitigating its harshness. In blunting the individual’s egoism, its goal is to ensure the superiority of the community over other communities.
Even religions that ‘submit to God’ (Islam, for example), which might appear to renounce competition, appeal to it. For an individual or for a people, decay sets in once one starts believing that competition and the struggle for life are ‘unjust’, that enmity toward the Other is ‘abnormal’, that the state of peace is natural and war unnatural, and that the Garden of Eden is possible on Earth. Competition, the struggle for life, is the normal, permanent state of all living things — pacifism renounces life; it’s a morality of slaves.
There’s no use complaining about enemies: we should instead take satisfaction in fighting and eliminating them, knowing that they will always be with us. Those who declare that they have no enemies, that they aren’t in competition, that peace is perpetual, have succumbed to the entropy of extinction and death, which will pitilessly eliminate them. Even the most sincere cooperation is never definitive. An individual or a group or a people not in competition with one another are threatened in the long run by dying off. Vital forms of harmony are paradoxically born as much from struggle as from concord. And the choice of one’s friends is inextricably linked to the designation of one’s enemy.
The enemy is never wrong, if he wins. A ‘superior people’, a ‘superior individual’, a ‘superior group’ (whether military, economic, religious, etc.) operates not with abstract, ontological principles, but on the basis of the concrete results that come from competition. This is the case for all living things. One is never ‘intrinsically superior’ to others. One is superior only in successfully achieving supremacy. It’s the law of the strongest, the most capable, the most flexible that always dominates. Vae Victis, death to the vanquished, such is the law of life; there has never been born a philosopher who could prove otherwise. If an individual possesses talent and will, he can defeat multitudes. Competition is economic, political, ethnic, etc. It’s based on an alliance of will and talent. One ought never to complain about being dominated. It simply comes from not being strong enough — not effective, not clever, not wilful enough.
The key to victory in any competition, as Robert Ardrey saw, is the combatants’ solidarity. For humans, competition and the struggle for life are not primarily individual, but collective. In this way, the friend-enemy polarity is formed, a polarity which is the source of life itself.
Robert Ardrey (1908-1980) was a widely read and discussed author during the 1960s, particularly his books African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966). Ardrey’s most controversial hypothesis, known as the ‘killer ape theory’, posits that what distinguished humans’ evolutionary ancestors from other primates was their aggressiveness, which caused them to develop weapons to conquer their environment and also leading to changes in their brains which led to modern humans. In his view, aggressiveness was an inherent part of the human character rather than an aberration. In more recent years, however, Ardrey’s theories are no longer upheld by the mainstream scientific establishment.
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