The Competitive Illusion

How Markets Breed Inefficiency and Monopolies

1. Introduction

A widely recognized and consistent consequence of market economics is the prevalence of so-called monopolies. Defined as the exclusive control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service, the repeated occurrence of such perceived market-power concentrations is, in fact, not an anomaly or a side effect of market economics, as many classical economists would prefer to assume. Rather, it is an immutable, inevitable, natural gravitation, driven by the most sacrosanct incentives and procedures of capitalism itself.

In the news today, particularly in the U.S., examples include Department of Justice investigations into Live Nation/Ticketmaster, a performance industry outlet with tremendous power over the live entertainment sector; the case of Google and its unfolding antitrust lawsuit over its search engine dominance and advertising; and the looming scrutiny over Amazon, Meta, Apple, and many others.

Such modern examples are just a small part of the broader historical trend, notably going all the way back to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, which controlled over 90% of the U.S. oil refining market, and even further back to the vast British East India Company, which was broken up as a monopoly in 1813.

As this article will explain, there is an enormous amount of myth and contradiction regarding the way people are conditioned to think about market-related outcomes such as the rise of monopolies. A kind of cognitive dissonance largely goes unrecognized, clouded by superficial assumptions in a sea of ever-mounting contradictions.

Instead of viewing the rise of a monopoly as the result of nefarious, underhanded decision-making by some 'greedy' company—as is commonly invoked—it’s time we consider the true systemic dynamics that define the economic structure creating them. The vast majority of people who believe in the system of market capitalism fall back on moral arguments for just about everything in their apologetics. The established notion of monopoly is largely a confusion or misnomer, rooted in a delusional romanticism of the role of competition.

2. Myth of Competitive Self-Regulation

To begin, let’s examine some philosophical and economic assumptions that continue to fallaciously underpin common defenses of capitalism.

Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) is widely regarded as the father of free market economics when it comes to theory. While markets long predate Smith, tracing back incrementally to the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago, his intellectual contributions remain highly relevant to modern economic thinking, particularly with respect to his passive yet highly influential notion of the Invisible Hand. Today, this idea is reinterpreted in the field of general equilibrium theory, where the expanded premise involves the nature of market self-regulation (and, by extension, market self-organization).

This context is critical because at the root of capitalist defense rests the widely accepted notion that competition is the core, indispensable mechanism that maintains the balance and integrity of the market system through competitive self-regulation.

This is one of the main reasons we hear so much about the “evil” of monopolies in public discourse, as they are seen as unfairly restricting "free market" competition by their existence and, in turn, disrupting the assumed economic-social balance achieved by more robust competitive forces. This idea is inherent in Smith’s Invisible Hand metaphor, suggesting that “truly free” markets naturally prevent monopolies from arising.

In his seminal work The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith confirms competition as the driving force of capitalism, benefiting society by promoting efficiency, innovation, and fair pricing. He argued that individuals pursuing their self-interest in a competitive market unintentionally contribute to the public good, with competition encouraging businesses to improve products, reduce costs, and prevent monopolistic practices that could harm consumers. From Smith's perspective, competition naturally regulates prices and aligns private profit motives with societal well-being, making it essential for a healthy and prosperous economy.

The above paragraph is the standard narrative that still encapsulates today’s prevailing belief system, taught to economics students in all major universities. If you examine any highly influential Nobel Prize-winning economist, such as Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek, you will find deep adherence to these ideas, while the public absorbs this same ideology through dominant media and conservative political propaganda.

The truth is that all these propped-up notions of balance and societal integrity through competitive markets are mere half-truths. Outcomes such as elevated public good, innovation, cost reduction, price equilibrium, and the inherent deterrence of monopolizing institutions occur—but only in narrow contexts and to a very limited extent, which can be dangerously misleading.

This myopic, reductive analysis ignores the vast array of systemic outcomes and factors that do not fit that idealized model, to the severe detriment of society.

As an analogy, consider a man-made digital program like a computer game. The game is inherently a system that organizes information flows with dynamic outcomes, engaged by players. We can analyze the nature of these dynamics and outcomes and qualify them in various ways in terms of how well or how efficiently it achieves certain ends. But the game is not the real world. It exists in a digital vacuum.

This is precisely the abstract way market economists are trained to view the market program, isolated inside a contained, self-referential world, with little to no true relationship to the real, external world in which capitalism actually exists.

Through this lens, the analytical tendency is not to qualify the behavior of markets against empirical, real-world measures but the reverse. Internal assumptions about what is supposed to happen with markets in theory are superimposed upon true societal outcomes, working to fit those outcomes inside the market model. Any examples seen in the real world that confirm those assumptions are accepted, while everything else is dismissed as an anomaly.

Economist Ha-Joon Chang also critiqued this tendency, saying: "People ‘know’ that free markets are the best. It is a matter of faith for economists, regardless of evidence, because the narrative has been so deeply ingrained."

Let’s take the classical model of supply and demand, the kernel seed of assumed self-regulation via the price mechanism. The premise and technical observation are simple: if demand rises and supply stays the same, prices will rise for those items or resources. Likewise, if a particular material becomes increasingly scarce, the price will also rise. The reverse is true as well. If there’s too much supply of a product and not enough demand, the cost will fall, as it does with abundant resources.

As generally predictive as this mechanism is in the market system, we have to ask what merit this framework has beyond simply creating a market price, as they call it, where supply “meets” demand.

The idea is that the price of something like a candy bar, say $1.50, is believed to result from the market’s collective intelligence. Various factors—ranging from natural resources and labor to perceptions of value to many other elements—are said to “come together” to determine what is considered the most "efficient" price. This assumption speaks to the heart of market efficiency through self-regulation through mass, competitive trade.

But is it efficient? Are such factors actually accounted for? Is this price taking proper account overall? What does this $1.50 actually mean in real-world terms?

It goes without saying that in order to conclude that the price of a given good or resource is truly efficient, there must be an accounting for all relevant factors related to the product or resource in question and the cause and effect aspects related and the inconvenient truth is that the efficiency perceived through these mechanics has no true relationship to anything, in reality, accounting for even a tiny fraction of the relevant factors related to the nature and influence of a product or a resource.

This is proven definitively by the rampant prevalence of “negative market externalities.” A negative market externality occurs when the production or consumption of a good or service incurs downstream costs that are not reflected in the market price of the good or service, and yet, they can be staggering in effect. For example, according to a study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), global fossil fuel subsidies, when accounting for externalities such as environmental damage and public health costs, amount to $5.2 trillion annually, or 6.5% of global GDP.

More dramatically, if you were to bring together all of the companies on the planet and calculate real-world profitability as compared to the cost of the “external” damage done, no company on earth would be considered profitable, taken as a whole. Hence, the mechanism of price has no defendable connection to real-world accounting, proven by its own internal logic.

Therefore, if this self-regulatory apparatus of the price mechanism, structured and guided through competitive market trade, is supposed to move toward balance or equilibrium, embracing true efficiency, it is thoroughly ineffective when it comes to complex real-world dynamics, as proven by all of the consequences generated by market behavior that are not accounted for in price, which are legion and deeply damaging to the environment and public health.

Epistemologically, what we find here is that there is a superficial assumption in the theory of market self-regulation that simply because there are some feedback features occurring with certain outcomes, embraced by price and guided by competition – it must be sufficient overall. Not so.

An analogy would be that just because a person consumes some kind of food product, they are going to be biologically healthy. In reality, the quality of the food and the nutritional nature of it, as per the needs of the individual, must be accounted for – not simply the blanket assumption that just because somebody is eating something they are going to be healthy.

As absurd as that analogy may appear, that is precisely what we see in the analytics of free market proponents when it comes to the perceived system dynamics of market behavior. The thought process goes like this: “Oh look, environmental sustainability must be inevitable since the price mechanism and supply and demand will raise prices on scarce resources! Therefore, market economics is a system compatible with environmental sustainability!”

No.

The reality is the market mechanisms and crude feedback relationships have very limited vocabularies and capacities, and any notion that the trading dynamics that govern our world, with billions and billions of transactions occurring every day, cumulatively result in some form of what you would call homeostasis in systems science is absolutely unsupported by not only empirical evidence (real-world statistics and trends) but formal evidence (data-driven system modeling).

Progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz highlights this inefficiency, once stating: "The belief that markets by themselves will lead to efficient outcomes is based on a set of assumptions—perfect competition, perfect information, complete markets—that simply do not reflect reality.”

Put more crudely, Adam Smith’s invisible hand (and the intent of general equilibrium theory) does not work to any viable, acceptable degree in the real world. It only works in the contrived, abstracted program model classical market economists attempt to superimpose on the real world.

Harvard researcher Jonathan Schlefer puts it even more bluntly in his work The Assumptions Economists Make (2017):

"Beginning in the 1870s, theorists sought to build a model of the Invisible Hand. They wanted to show how market trading among individuals, pursuing self-interest, and firms, maximizing profit, would lead an economy to a stable and optimal equilibrium. Those theorists never succeeded. Quite the contrary: in the early 1970s, after a century of work, they concluded that no mechanism can be shown to lead decentralized markets toward equilibrium unless you make assumptions that they themselves regarded as utterly implausible."

3. Paradox or Tautology?

That understood, the absurdity of the claim that the competitive function of markets is the savior of economic efficiency and the purveyor of balance becomes clear when one steps back from the myopic lens of the traditional economic model. The almost comical reality is that the very mechanism of competition—which is supposed to thwart the rise of monopoly—is, in fact, the very mechanism that creates monopolies to begin with.

The importance of this point may seem elusive due to the obviousness of the observation.

Imagine a jungle where it's argued that having many predators will keep the balance of nature by preventing any one species from dominating. However, as these predators compete for prey, the strongest among them grows larger and more powerful, eventually becoming the apex predator. Instead of balance, you now have a single dominant predator, which is akin to a monopoly, even though competition was supposed to prevent it.

Ecosystems in nature certainly do generate balance through competing forces as a guiding feature (interaction between positive and negative feedback loops), such as the predator-prey cycle where an increase in prey will result in an increase in predators. As predators eat more prey, an imbalance occurs, reducing the prey population, which then eventually reduces the predator population over time as fewer prey exist—and a kind of equilibrium emerges.

This observation, common to the field of cybernetics, certainly holds true, even though the real-world dynamics of predator-prey relationships have many other factors, just as economic factors do.

The fundamental difference between natural biological ecosystems, which tend to balance opposing forces, and market economics is that markets are man-made devices, deeply limited in system structure by design. Biological systems are universally responsive to their environment. A man-made economy is only vulnerable to what it is designed to be vulnerable to, proven, once again, by the existence of negative market externalities. While there is no shortage of economists who invoke the natural world when defending the system of markets, there is no viable comparison. Natural ecosystems are a product of long-term evolution, and every attribute recognized has a functional place.

The man-made system of market economics is an abstracted set of inter-relationships that overwhelmingly ignore and omit critical influences and outcomes. While classical economists love to engage in what you could call an appeal to nature fallacy—trying to pretend the capitalist ecosystem is just as natural as the dynamics of a rainforest’s ecosystem—it is provably not. In fact, it’s important to also point out that in the history of economic thought, proponents of markets have made desperate attempts to confirm continuity between markets and the natural world, hence arguing that the study of market economics is a legitimate natural science, via this assumption.

Yet, market economics is no more a natural science than studying the behavior of a computer game. While it may superficially share some features of the natural world as it is a complex adaptive system, it simply does not have the requisite variety to find compatibility with the real-world environment it exists within, failing to achieve symbiosis. It simply isn’t built for proper accounting.

Point being, returning to the context of competition-driven monopolies, while natural biological ecosystems have evolved with the proper vocabulary to handle common imbalances, the structure of market economics not only cannot account for what is required to achieve the same goal, it is actually designed to move away from any form of true balancing by nature of its fundamental functions. The mechanism of competition is an unbalancing function, masquerading as a balancing function.

When competitive market dynamics move a company toward embodying monopoly, we see that while robust competition in a given industry or sector may inhibit to a degree the rise of such entities for a time, there will always be an inevitable symmetry break at a certain point that allows a monopolistic entity to flourish, regardless of any other countervailing competitive forces. The outcome of this can also be seen today, holistically, with a very small number of corporations running everything from the food industry to the telecom and energy industries. Every year that goes by as the capitalist system continues to mature, you see fewer and fewer companies control more and more economic activity, when left unrestrained. This is 100% natural.

While classical market economists still argue that 'proper' or 'free' competition will naturally prevent monopolies, the incentive structure of the market—maximizing efficiency, reducing costs, and outcompeting rivals—can and will lead to one firm eventually outpacing all others in a given industry and in total. This leads to monopoly and market consolidation as an inevitable, system-level consequence. This is due, once again, to the very same competitive force that is erroneously claimed to restrict the rise of monopoly power.

4. System Dynamics of Market Tyranny

A monopoly can be achieved through many mechanisms. One common method is the use of economies of scale, where larger firms lower prices and drive smaller competitors out, (seemingly) paradoxically using the competitive process itself to reduce competition.

Research from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that, between 1997 and 2017, the percentage of U.S. industries where the largest firms controlled more than 50% of the market increased from 25% to 42%, demonstrating the accelerating pace of industry concentration and monopoly formation through such mechanisms.

Consider the nature of Amazon.com, which is also currently under antitrust scrutiny. There is certainly no shortage of complaints about the dominance of this massive institution, which engages in various competitive techniques to keep customers buying, such as strategic free shipping programs and technology-driven cost efficiency.

Amazon has been criticized for its treatment of third-party sellers, who make up the vast majority of those selling on the platform. These sellers must participate with high fees and overhead, at a disadvantage due to Amazon’s dominance. If a company does not sell on Amazon, it is likely they will see significantly fewer sales overall. Numerous stories have surfaced of sellers who lost access to their Amazon accounts and saw their total sales plummet, as many consumers choose to shop exclusively through Amazon.

Given all the complaints about fairness, when you examine the incentives of capitalism and review all the strategies agents use to secure more market share and profit per sale, it is absurd to pretend that these conditions are anything but natural to the system.

It’s all a matter of degree. The system is inherently unfair in its very construct when it comes to strategic competitive advantage. The distinction between what constitutes a monopoly and what does not lies in subjective factors, such as market size, company market share, effects on competition, and consumer impact.

Everything is still based on 'voluntary agreements' (a critical concept in libertarian economic thought) between agents, and no one is coerced in the immediate transaction. Amazon, like other monopolistic entities, is not engaging in illegal, secret backroom deals or overtly unethical behavior.

The idea that there is any true illegality in such basic competitive outcomes, which is precisely what regulatory agencies like the Fair Trade Commission seek out and claim, can only be subjective once again. Where is the crime if these companies are engaged in voluntary business transactions for mutual benefit, following the fundamental logic of competition in the marketplace?

Consider another example: Google.

Google is currently being pursued as a monopoly by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) due to allegations that it has illegally maintained dominance in the online search and related advertising markets. A key part of the case centers on Google's agreements with companies like Apple, Mozilla, and Samsung, where Google pays significant sums to ensure its search engine is the default on browsers and mobile devices.

These deals, which the court argues foreclose competition, prevent rivals from reaching sufficient scale and hinder innovation. By controlling 90% of the search market, Google is said to have created barriers that make it difficult for competitors to enter or compete effectively, thus harming consumers by reducing choice and stifling competition.

Let’s think this through: what is the crime? The Google search engine being preloaded onto software platforms or devices is textbook commercial promotion achieved through voluntary transactions between economic actors.

Is it forbidden, anti-competitive territory when a restaurant signs an agreement with Coca-Cola or Pepsi to exclusively serve one brand of beverages? What if a car manufacturer like Ford signs an exclusive agreement to source its tires only from Goodyear to get a better deal? What about a supermarket chain like Kroger, which has an exclusive contract to sell its own private-label products in its stores, preventing other stores from selling the same brand?

These are not irregular initiatives. What we see here is a continuum, where a false dichotomy is forged through subjective interpretations of what constitutes 'too much power.' That’s all it is.

And the punchline of the whole situation is that every company or entrepreneur on the planet is moving toward monopoly or market consolidation, because if they did not, they would lose their competitive edge as rivals work toward the same goal. The pursuit of monopoly, which is simply the pursuit of competitive dominance, is the fundamental goal of all businesses, and it is thoroughly incentivized.

Satirically, you can imagine a Harvard business class and the teacher lays out all of the methods of providing superior this or that, pursuing cost efficiency, using advertising for promotion, advancing design and technology to increase efficiency, and so on and so on. And then at the very end of the course, they say: “Oh, by the way, make sure you don’t go too far with all of this strategy to be competitively superior, because after a certain point your company’s dominance will be considered illegal!”

That’s how logically faulty all of this is, proving that it is the market system itself that is the problem, if the issue has to do with market consolidation (monopoly) and problems therein.

All companies are seeking to maximize profit against consumers. All companies are seeking to diminish the power of their competitors. Moving toward a lack of fairness isn’t a development it is a constant state with different degrees of amplification. (BTW,  this market consequence moves far beyond concepts of fair trade. A report by Oxfam International reveals that in 2023, 1% of the world’s population owned nearly 50% of global wealth, while the bottom 50% controlled less than 2%. Fairness is a delusion in the context of market dynamics and outcomes.)

To run this into the ground more so, if you put two people in a boxing ring and one eventually severely hurts the other, it doesn’t mean the other did anything wrong. They are literally fighting. What did you expect?

At the same time, we might recognize the referee standing around these boxers trying to control things as well, which now leads us to the role of the regulatory state in this mess.

5. Government & the Failure of Control

As described, the idea that capitalist markets, through the competitive function, naturally self-regulate toward economic balance, by whatever measure, is a dangerous half-truth that is fundamentally wrong.

The world today is buried in a litany of negative market externalities, from poverty to lack of sustainability, deep inequity, market power imbalance, cartel and monopolistic behavior, irrationally disproportionate wages, high unemployment, and everything else. Mechanisms of balance that are promoted by market proponents simply do not exist on any truly relevant level.

So then, what do you do if you have an out-of-control system that clearly cannot self-regulate properly? You have to find means to regulate it externally.

This is where the antitrust lawsuits, trade regulatory agencies and hence the role of state government come into play. Make no mistake. It is an empirical and formal fact that the only reason any level of stability is currently achieved in balancing market forces is because of democratic-state intervention. You name it: poverty, environmental preservation, consumer safety – all such externalities are addressed because of government intervention which, by extension, also means democratic intervention in many cases.

Yet, nuance here is also very important: this intervention, as will be explained, is also deeply sabotaged by the same competitive market forces, to the tragic degree that instead of solving such instability caused by capitalism, it is only capable of slowing it down.

In the case of market power consolidation in the form of monopoly, an external regulatory apparatus is tasked with determining when things have gone too far. It then intervenes by working to restore some kind of competitive balance, usually through legislation.

While we certainly see historical actions against entities, such as breaking up businesses to restore balance, we must also recognize another factor: the perpetual influence of businesses on the political system to derail regulation through campaign contributions, lobbying, and other forms of monetary influence.

You see, markets do self-regulate efficiently in certain ways—but largely in the wrong direction, through perpetual regulatory sabotage. If there’s anything missing from Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the analytics of general equilibrium theory, it is the complete omission of one of the strongest reactionary tendencies of competitive market forces: the incentive to resist any form of external regulation using the power of money. This is not an anomaly or a corruption.

The omission reflects the myopic bias in the narrative people have been taught about what market capitalism is supposed to do, whereby anything that doesn’t fit the prescribed model is dismissed as a side effect or anomaly. Any notion that politicians and legislation are influenced by vested monetary interests is not considered a natural part of the system, though it should be. Instead, it is seen as an aberration or side effect, which highlights how market theorists continue to try and fit a square peg into a round hole, seeing only what they want to see.

The fact is, attempts to diminish the power of regulatory institutions are just as much a function of the competitive nature of markets as the dynamics surrounding supply and demand. The key difference is that, rather than competing directly against other companies in the market for profit and dominance, companies compete through intervention against the state as an intermediary.

However, the end goal remains the same: to create conditions that improve a company's bottom line by working to remove any legislative or regulatory obstacles. This is motivated by a short-term, business-minded pathology. (Returning to the referee analogy, the competitive angle is to pay off the referee to limit their influence in one area or amplify it in another.)

This short-termism is the guiding force of market incentives and business structure. No company in a competitive economy has the luxury of thinking ahead about problems like climate change. If any such concern threatens the profitability of a company, industry, sector, or even the national or global economy, all pressure moves to suppress that threat for the sake of short-term gain. 'Short-termism' is the reality of the capitalist condition. It’s about maintaining quarterly profits, keeping shareholders happy, CEO acclaim, and so forth. No business is going to sacrifice short-term profitability for the sake of long-term social integrity.

Hence, billions of dollars a year are “invested” in the political apparatus toward the ends of more “freedom in the market,” while simultaneously the same money power uses government as a tool to selectively inhibit certain economic institutions, for precisely the same end.

Consider tariffs, widely accepted as a normal means of 'protecting national economic interests.' Tariffs are external competition inhibitors designed to preserve the profitability of domestic industries, with enormous lobbies dedicated to this purpose in corporate interests. Such use of the state apparatus for competitive advantage is common, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s applied internationally or domestically.

The critical point here is that if you’re going to base an economy on the premise of “free” competition, it is nothing but naïve and ridiculous to assume the required competitive incentive will not expand outward into every other peripheral arena toward the same goals of corporate profitability and protection. Politics is and will remain entirely “corrupted,” as they say.

6. Understanding True Efficiency

It is time to fully appreciate the reality that economic competition is not the balancing, equilibrium-seeking force we have been told it is. Associating efficiency with economic competition is a fallacy when examined more closely, and I will provide a few critical examples.

Regarding our case study on monopoly, let’s return to the example of Google’s current antitrust woes. In the documents pertaining to this case by the Department of Justice, Google is described as being a superior search engine due to its dominance. This dominance exists because search engines reinforce themselves every time someone conducts a search. Google leverages user data and feedback through machine learning and other advanced algorithms.

This is considered part of the problem with Google’s dominance, as it pays to be the default search engine on Apple devices, web browsers, and similar platforms. It is argued that this creates an unfair scenario for other search engines, as they are unable to achieve the same level of search efficiency that Google has accomplished through disproportionate mass participation.

But hold on. If one search engine is able to optimize for public utility through mass participation, isn’t it counterproductive to reduce Google’s dominance? How does that serve the general public? Yes, there are other concerns, such as how it charges advertisers due to its market position, but that is a separate issue. The average user isn’t engaging in commercial contracts with Google—they just want a good search result.

Antitrust actions against Google in this case are a disservice to the public when it comes to search efficiency. Having thousands of search engines may equalize advertising revenues and create some diversity in search outcomes (if one were to argue that Google censors results, for example, but that is a different issue). However, overall, this only creates unnecessary variance and duplication, limiting optimization by diffusing participation.

The same reasoning applies to Amazon. From a technological standpoint, Amazon has developed one of the most efficient systems of product organization and allocation ever seen. If we were to examine this institution outside the toxic dynamics of the market economy—focusing only on the technical framework, from public interaction to goods receiving, fueled by advanced networked feedback—we would recognize it as one of the most efficient systems of economic organization in human history, particularly in terms of distribution.

But, as with Google, it is the pursuit of “fair” market competition that undermines the obvious efficiency of Amazon’s technical structure. This is not to say there aren’t significant problems with the scale and power of these institutions. However, when you remove the competitive-market element and focus solely on technical efficiency, it becomes clear that competition-driven economies are inherently inefficient.

7. Myth of Competitive Freedom

As noted, all of this absurdity is supported by an absent-minded, archaic, mythological economic philosophy ingrained in most people today: that without economic competition, everything falls apart, and that without this force, society will be led to some form of freedom-restricted totalitarianism.

F.A. Hayek, in his famous book The Road to Serfdom, explicitly expresses his loyalty to the competitive function, arguing that without the preservation of this idealized competitive state, the inevitable consequence will be a command or centrally planned economy that ultimately leads to tyranny, often invoking associations with 'socialism' or 'communism.'

He wrote: 'Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist, we are at his mercy.'

In his view, the so-called command or centrally planned economy is effectively a monopoly, based on the assumption that once any power concentration is achieved, it will inevitably lead to abuse. Today, many decades later, this assumption remains a central part of the fear campaigns propagated in conservative economic and political thought, conditioning the public to fear anything that deviates from capitalism.

The problem is this is all conjecture based on anecdotal experience and perception with no grounding in true system dynamics, social psychology, or relevant empirical history.

The thesis that a non-competitive economic structure can only result in tyrannical outcomes is, in reality, a psychological projection by those who have been so immersed in the competitive dynamic for centuries that they assume any type of collaborative organization will result in hierarchical abuse. Why? Because that is exactly what the force of capitalism leads to as well!

If you are trained to believe that market-driven monopolistic development inevitably leads to abuse, regardless of how this reality manifests only within the ecosystem of market economics, you are likely to extrapolate this conclusion to any other form of centralized engagement. This happens even if there are nuanced approaches to consider, such as the true application of democracy to economic functionality.

In my research and work over the past two decades, along with that of many contemporaries, theorizing and system development have been unfolding to validate the truth that we can indeed build a democratic economy that allows the true technical efficiency of modern science and technology to prevail—perfectly in line with so-called human nature—without the competitive function.

That revelation is certainly worth investigating, given how dangerous our competitive reality has become. It has not only manifested negative market externalities that threaten civilization itself but also obscured the incredible public health advantages of living in a society not structured around the competitive ethic and mindset. Modern scientific studies prove that this mindset is far more toxic than supportive to human well-being.

On the broadest sociological level, competition is not a positive force for personal development or social stability and integrity. It is fundamentally coercive by nature. It leads individuals to measure their self-worth based on comparison to others, fostering a deep sense of inequality that translates into aberrant, dishonest, and violent behavior. Competition also harms basic human relationships, eroding trust and truly cooperative behaviors—behaviors that have been far more important in the advancement of human evolution than competition. While competition has indeed played an evolutionary role, it is a secondary attribute in nature when compared to collaboration. Building an entire economy based on competition is, in fact, deeply unnatural.

Likewise, while rivalry and mutual hostility may produce some level of productivity through tension, the productivity that arises is deeply overshadowed by the damage that accompanies it.

Innovation, often viewed as a product of the competitive drive in economics, requires further examination. The interest in perpetually working to sell something does not necessarily mean that true public-serving innovation is taking place. That assumption is merely theoretical.

For example, pharmaceutical companies often prioritize 'me-too drugs,' which are slight variations of existing treatments, rather than genuinely groundbreaking innovations. Research published in JAMA found that, between 2000 and 2018, 73% of new drug approvals by the FDA were for drugs similar to existing treatments, showing how competition can stifle rather than foster meaningful innovation, as there was more money in such “mirror” ventures, with less risk. In effect they were/are creating virtually meaningless variations just to get into a pre-existing market for income.

The fact is, the drive to constantly produce for income and market share within the competitive game of capitalism generates enormous amounts of unnecessary waste, consumer disregard, vast inequity in wealth and income, as well as deep levels of employee exploitation and overall interpersonal abuse.

The very idea that one could think about ethics and morality in an economic game immutably rooted in cutthroat competition—since markets are driven by the root premise of exploiting scarcity—is ridiculous. There will always be a significant cross-section of people that do tremendous damage to the ecosystem and others as a sociological “side effect,” no matter what the prevailing shared morality of that society is. Once again, there are no anomalies.

In conclusion, whether you understand competition in the economic context or the institutional context, extending even to international warfare, it is time we fully accept the fact that, regardless of assumptions about competition in nature, organizing human life around this fundamental premise is not only inefficient but also extremely dangerous for the future of civilization. The dogmatic narratives that shape public discussion only serve to reinforce the values of elites who benefit from this competitive system, gaining not only hegemonic economic control but also political control. The hierarchies created by this competitive structure have no long-term positive value.

It is time we begin to think about a world where the fundamental mechanism of societal progress is not competitive warfare and the pursuit of disproportionate advantage at the inherent expense of others. We must now recognize the need to build not only a new economic system rooted in collaboration but also a new value system.

As Carl Sagan put it in the context of global society as a single organism: 'An organism at war with itself is doomed.'

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