Modern life makes it easy to forget the world in which we evolved, Marc Defant reminds us, the Environment of our Evolutionary Adaptedness:
Most people in developed societies live at a considerable distance from predation, starvation, and violent death. We can simply buy food without giving much thought to the possibility of starvation, let alone the struggle required to stay alive through most of human history. The institutions that protect us from once-routine dangers work so well that we can lose sight of why we need them. From this comfortable distance, it is tempting to regard competition or scarcity as artificial products of defective social systems. If only society were organized more rationally or compassionately, perhaps these disagreeable features of existence could finally be eliminated.
Anyone who has seriously studied the natural world knows otherwise.
[…]
People cooperate internally, while the resulting groups compete externally.
That pattern is visible throughout modern society. For example, scientists cooperate within research teams while competing for discoveries and recognition, and athletes cooperate with teammates while competing against other teams. Nations depend on internal cooperation while competing economically, technologically, and sometimes militarily. This demonstrates that properly structured competition can discipline cooperation by requiring cooperative groups to produce results.[…]
Dominance obtains deference through control, intimidation, or the power to impose costs. Prestige attracts voluntarily conferred deference because others value a person’s knowledge, skill, judgment, generosity, or accomplishments. Anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White argued that prestige evolved partly because social learners benefited by identifying and copying successful individuals. A healthy society should restrain coercive dominance and encourage earned prestige.
[…]
The (political) challenge is therefore to be able to distinguish productive hierarchy from predatory hierarchy: prestige from dominance, contribution from extraction, and earned reward from political privilege. When economic competition is suppressed by the design of a political system, hierarchy does not disappear. It migrates into the state. People then compete for bureaucratic rank, party membership, favored occupations, access to planners, and influence over the distribution of resources such as licenses or housing allocations. In other words, society may compress visible differences in income while creating enormous differences in political power.
[…]
Capitalism is often described as a celebration of selfishness. That description misses its most extraordinary feature: a functioning market economy is a system of cooperation among strangers. Nearly every object in a modern household exists because thousands of people coordinated their activities. They may live on different continents, speak different languages, practice different religions, and disagree on nearly every political question. They need not love one another! They need only identify a mutually beneficial exchange in which the buyer prefers to have the product and the seller the money. Both expect to gain.
This is reciprocal cooperation extended beyond intimate personal loyalty. Money, enforceable contracts, property rights, and the rule of law allow people to cooperate far beyond the small circles of kin and acquaintances for which much of human psychology originally evolved.[…]
Socialism often promises to transfer power from owners to the people, yet extensive central planning necessarily transfers immediate decisions to government officials. The more comprehensive the plan (someone must rank competing needs, distribute scarce goods, set wages, approve investments, etc.), the more domains of life become dependent upon administrative permission. Power is shifted away from voluntary relationships and toward the institutions that control allocation—the very concentration of power socialism claims to overcome.
Nor does socialism eliminate competition. People continue to compete, but the object of competition changes: they compete for political influence (instead of competing for customers), persuade planners (in place of persuading consumers), and cultivate relationships with the officials who distribute resources. Economic competition shifts toward political competition.
[…]
The twentieth century produced abundant evidence of the failures of centralized communist systems. Yet socialism continually returns as though it were a new idea. Historical memory fades, while the moral aspiration remains attractive. In 2022, Pew found that younger adults were more likely to hold favorable views of socialism and less favorable views of capitalism than older adults. In 2025, Gallup reported that capitalism remained more popular overall, but its favorable rating had declined to 54 percent, while socialism was viewed favorably by 39 percent.
[…]
Capitalism is compared with its actual outcomes: inequality, recessions, unaffordable housing, or even corporate misconduct such as environmental pollution. By contrast, socialism is compared with its aspirations: equality, dignity, solidarity, security, and universal provision. When socialist institutions fail, advocates often attribute the result to insufficient socialism, bad leadership, foreign interference, historical conditions, or the claim that the system was never truly socialist. Then, definitions shift: The Soviet Union was authoritarian rather than socialist, China is capitalist because it permits markets, and Venezuela failed because of dependence on oil and corruption. Meanwhile, Scandinavia is described as socialist even though it preserves competition, bankruptcy, private property, and market prices.