Competition, Institutions, and Social Neuroscience

What if every scientist who arrived with a plausible idea were given the resources to pursue it?

For anyone writing a grant proposal, the thought is both relieving and absurd. Because of limited resources, modern society builds institutions that decide which ideas receive resources and which do not. A common mechanism for making these decisions is competition: proposals are scored, applicants are ranked, and some are selected over others.

This essay explores competition from two perspectives: the institutional problem it solves and the tension it creates with finding the one, that is living authentically by bringing belief, action, and emotion into coherence (see my earlier essay on finding the one).

Competition as a response to scarcity

Competition appears to be a reasonable response to scarcity. When there are more ideas or applicants than available resources, some mechanism must determine where those resources should go. Yet we do not experience competition only as an administrative procedure. We experience it through social comparison.

Competition necessarily produces relative winners and losers. Grant scores, university rankings, and professional titles are institutional constructions, but through learning they become associated with opportunity, recognition, and self-doubt. The result of repeated social comparison is hierarchy.

Like competition, hierarchy appears throughout human society. I think of it as part of order in human society. Competition is costly. Injury, lost opportunities, and, in other settings, death can make direct competition disadvantageous. Dominance hierarchies thus arise, which store information about earlier competition and reduce the need to repeat them.

Interestingly, hierarchy is not the endpoint of a society. Mobile hunter-gatherer societies have often suppressed would-be dominators through ridicule, gossip disobedience, and coalition formation, as described by Christopher Boehm as a form of reverse dominance hierarchy: groups can collectively constrain individuals who try to dominate them.

Return to the opening question

What if every scientist with a plausible idea were given the resources to pursue it? Would such a society eliminate competition?

Probably not. Indeed, human desire exceed what technology can provide. Competition could become more intense when everyone begins with similar resources and every prestigious position is formally open to everyone.

By contrast, in a society with a fixed hierarchy, competition for movement within that hierarchy may appear to disappear because the outcome is predetermined, or is believed to be predetermined. Yet a rigid hierarchy is not necessarily stable. When people perceive the allocation of resources or status as illegitimate, competition may shift from competition within the system to competition over the system itself.

Competition can create hierarchy; hierarchy can constrain repeated competition; and perceived illegitimacy can reopen competition. together, these structures help sustain a society in which collective gains are possible.

What happens if technology reduces scarcity?

Following the same logic, competition is unlikely to disappear, but its objects may change.

Physical needs such as calorie intake are bounded, and technological progress can reduce some forms of material scarcity. Human desire has no comparable fixed boundary. A digital society can produce effectively unlimited information and entertainment while human attention remains limited. Across history, competition over calories has become competition over land and capital. Moving forward, competition over capital can become competition over visibility, prestige, or attention.

The objects over which humans compete are often not biologically rewarding in themselves. A grant percentile has no nutritional or reproductive value. It becomes rewarding because an institution connects it to consequences that matter: resources, autonomy,and future opportunity.

Institutions therefore construct reward environments. Neuroscience tells us that the human brain places constraints on what institutions can successfully reinforce, but between biology and culture lies a large adaptive space. Human societies create symbolic systems, and human nervous systems learn to inhabit them.

I see a co-evolution between societal structure and biological learning. Institutions externalize collective goals into symbolic reward structures, while individual nervous systems internalize those structures through experience. Society changes the environment of valuation; brains adapt behavior to that environment; and those adapted behaviors then reproduce or modify the institution.

Losing hurts

To participate in competition is to enter a system in which losing is a structural possibility. Because humans attach emotional meaning to relative outcomes, losing can bring disappointment and a diminished sense of self-worth.

In the example of a grant proposal, success enables researchers to collect data, publish papers, recruit students, build collaborations, gain recognition, and improve their chances of securing future funding. Success can produce the cumulative advantage often described as the Matthew effect. Failure can also accumulate.

If we live to find the one, that is, if we try to align what we believe, what we choose to do, and what we feel, competition presents a problem. I accept that losing is possible, yet I still become upset when I lose.

Why? I have confused a socially constructed valuation system with my own beliefs. The same neural machinery that helps us estimate social position also contributes to emotions surrounding success and failure.

Competition as symbolic immune

Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, which I encountered through Stephen West’s Philosophize This! podcast, led me to rethink competition. Sloterdijk describes human beings as creatures who construct forms of protection against vulnerability. Beyond biological immunity, humans develop institutions and symbolic practices that help them cope with danger, uncertainty, and contingency.

In this sense, civilization, including institutions that organize competition, makes an unpredictable world more inhabitable. The misalignment between competition as an efficient way to allocate resources and the upset we feel when facing failure arises because, as humans construct systems to protect ourselves from uncertainty and vulnerability, we are also psychologically invested in those systems.

To exemplify Sloterdijk’s idea that competition is constructed to make an otherwise uncertain existence more inhabitable. Imagine a society in which resources are allocated randomly. This situation is uncomfortable given resources are insufficient. Separately, I tend to believe no matter how advanced our technology has become, human desire always exceeds what can be produced. Back to the example: in this imaginary society, everyone has reasons to believe their project matters, but nobody knows which idea will succeed; thus, there is no objectively obvious answer. Competition resolves this uncertainty. The competition process actually allows people to navigate the social environment.

Broadly, I can think of several values and functions that competition might have, though a perceived reality need not have an ultimate explanation to exist and cannot have one. In biology, Tinbergen’s four questions formalize what it means to ask why. In Building the Perceived Reality (Part I), I referred to different ways of making a phenomenon intelligible as levels of explanation. I argued that repeatedly asking “why?” need not terminate in a final explanation. Each answer can simply generate another question at a different level, forming a chain: Why do I seek pleasure? Because the nervous system treats certain states as rewarding. Why did such reward systems evolve? Because they promoted behaviors that supported survival. Why does survival matter? Because survival allows continued experience, including pleasure, attachment, and curiosity.

Here I discuss one level of explanation of competition based on Sloterdijk’s framework: Humans are biologically vulnerable creatures who cannot survive the raw, indifferent universe without structural protection. We survive by building immune systems. We developed a biological immune system. Socio-technically, we build houses, make clothes, and physical infrastructure. Symbolically, we have language, myths, religions, philosophies, and political ideologies. Symbolic immunity is the network of shared narratives and beliefs that shield us from existential dread, the absolute certainty of death, and the [meaninglessness of cosmic space] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus).

Science is part of the nature

Thus far, I have discussed human society and competition over resource allocation as though society could be taken out of nature. Modern science often positions humans as observers who model and manipulate nature. Ontologically, however, humans remain part of nature. The knowledge generated by studying another brain is part of a brain’s consciousness. We may describe a brain as a system that receives sensory inputs, transforms information, and produces behavior. Such a model delierately ignores behavior produced by one brain changes the environment, which interacts with other brains, and eventually alters the sensory inputs and internal states of the original brain.

A model of the brain isolated from nature is a carefully constructed perception of reality for a particular purpose, not reality-in-itsel. A simple yet useful model is powerful etymologically, because a it is easier to understand, test, predict, and use. Living as I argued in finding-the-one-Part I, includes exploring multiple frameworks of perceived reality.

Seen from inside an individual life, a rejected proposal is a loss. Seen from inside an institution, it is one outcome of allocating scarce resources among uncertain possibilities. More broadely, competition, discovery, and invention can be seen as ways the universe finds the one by aligning its dynamics from the universe’s perspective. In this vision, the cosmos grows a self-reflective organ, one that can wonder about its own place, examine its dimensions, and, through species including humans and their activity, become curious about itself. Perhaps finding the one is not mere internal consistency, but an effort toward alignment across scales. What religious traditions call love, what biology describes as cooperation, and what I have called finding the one are different perspectives on a recurring problem: how parts exercise their own agency while participating in a larger whole.

This framework is compelling because the universe is built for flourishing. Note a couple caveats: Evolution does not optimize for harmony in a universal sense. Institutions do not optimize for human flourishing.

Summary

Competition and hierarchy are not evils to eliminate. They are tools for coordinating limited resources under uncertainty. By attaching opportunity and recognition to symbolic variables such as rankings, titles, and credentials, institutions construct reward environments that human nervous systems learn to inhabit. Individuals adapt their behavior to these environments while their collective behavior reshapes the institutions. Recognizing this has helped me participate in competition with more curiosity. I can conduct research enthusiastically, share ideas openly, learn from comparison, and remain motivated after failure. I can treat an institutional outcome as information without treating it as a final description of myself.