We're far too civilized. Calamity is inevitable. For the sake of humanity, we must be more barabaric.... And deal with slimy creatures the way nature would.

I agree. So many people have gotten so much safety that they forget we are wild animals competing over scarce resources using both real and threatened violence. This is just the unavoidable nature of living in a universe with scarcity. Cooperation exists because it allows us to extract more from nature and competing humans than working alone. Nature does not imbue us with cooperation because an anthropomorphic nature sees cooperation as a grand noble trait worth protecting. Some people haven't forgotten. The people who haven't forgotten call those who have forgotten marks and plot mass robberies and eugenics programs for their marks. I'll be the first to call out some wannabe tough guy trying to make every interaction zero sum. Positive sum interactions do exist in nature and should be our first goal. My point is that the people who assume every interaction has a positive sum option and that the other person wants the positive sum path are also idiots.

Oh a possible synchronicity... I was just talking with someone about positive sum and zero sum games/interactions. The point I was making was really that economics is a spiritual science, and at its core has very little to do with math. "Economia" in Greek was a philosophical term that became a Christian term for a time, now pretty much forgotten, that basically meant the economy of spirit, or the movement of spirit. You can see the movement of spirit when you say something nice and it brightens someone's day and then they say more nice things and there's a growing wave that magnifies your choice, positive or negative. That's positive sum. I think most things are actually positive sum, and its the scarcity mindset that convinces people that they're fighting in a zero sum game. That said, beware : if a suit talks positive sum game, he's most likely a predator. I learned the term from such suits when I was studying econ. The same people who tell you business is positive sum also will fight to protect the system of usury and monetary supply expansion. They might not know it, but they are actually camouflaging their zero-sum mentality as nice positive sum rhetoric. They are right that business is positive sum ; but they are weaponizing a small right to convince people to support greater wrongs. And there's another aspect of economia - beautiful intentions lead to terrible outcomes.

If that is where your mind is at and you haven't encountered praxeology yet, I'm sorry and you are welcome for teaching you the word. @knutsvanholm wrote a book on the subject that I quite liked. The very condensed version is taking econ I repeatedly found myself thinking "except not really because that is a bad generalization or assumption." Praxeology is the formalization of all my objections to econ with explanations that make sense. We are mentally primed to obsess over the zero sum games because loss aversion studies repeatedly show we hurt more to unexpectedly lose 20ksat than we feel joy by unexpectedly finding 20ksat.

I could use a refresher on praxeology, but yeah its not new, but thanks regardless and regardful - I just invented that, I hope it makes sense