2020-08-03 – They talk a lot about competition and the invisible hand of Adam Smith and, yes, selfishness. Selfishness and invisible hands are what created the marvels of the modern world.

Don’t believe it.

This is the lie they tell to prevent competition. They don’t want you to know the secret that built their fortunes because you might use the secret to get rich yourself!

The secret is working well with others. Not competition. Not selfishness. Not invisible hands.

You’ve heard about the good-old-boys network. That’s it . . . well part of it. It’s larger than that. A corporation isn’t (usually) a collection of people squabbling with each other. (If it is, that corporation will soon fail.) A corporation is people working together. That’s why businesses form corporations.

I don’t mean to say that competition has no role to play in success. It most certainly does. Competition in the marketplace does spur innovation and efficiencies. But that’s why big businesses buy up competitors. They don’t actually like competition!

They don’t want you to know the power of cooperation—of working together. That’s why they make it way harder for workers to form unions than for them to form corporations. The only people that rich people like to compete against are people without money. They don’t don’t like to compete when there’s a level playing field.

But imagine a world where selfishness were not worshipped, but given it’s mundane place in the palette of human emotions next to kindness and cooperation.

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