[larkeith]

> You can't opt out of competition any more than you can opt out of gravity.

Perhaps not as an individual, but I wonder about as a society - I don't know how we would get to this point, but imagine the sheer potential we as a culture could unlock by moving to a more cooperative model; consider the billions upon billions of person-hours wasted on things like stock trading, internal politicking, and marketing/advertising: all the things that provide no value to the race, but "required" to facilitate interpersonal competition.

Of course, none of that is against your primary point, which is that hard work is still, on the whole, required. It just irritates me to see competition equated to a law of nature; we're not animals, we can choose whether and how competition applies.

[xyzelement]

Sure, I agree with that. There is plenty of cooperation in the world, when two strong parties come together and say "this will work out better for us if we do it together."

My main point and I think you agree, is that you can never get there from a position of weakness and laze. No one is going to throw in their lot cooperating with you if your ethos is to "do nothing" or if you aren't functioning as an adult (whether an adult individual or an adult nation/country.)