Non-Zero-Sum Game

Non-Zero-Sum Game …or why "take from the rich, give to the poor" is a fundamentally broken idea

During my time studying in the US, I found myself constantly pulled into debates about the so-called "rat race" — how exhausting everything has become, whether any of it is even worth it, and so on. These conversations had a funny habit of drifting toward a kind of suspicious left-leaning narrative that I never quite bought into.

Here's the thing: yes, we no longer need to survive the way our ancestors did. But the world hasn't stopped being a ranked competition — and it never will, because at the biochemical level, we're still the same dopamine-chasing creatures we always were. Status hierarchies aren't a bug in the system. They're the engine.

And honestly? That's a feature, not a flaw. Competition for a place in the sun is what keeps the evolutionary wheel turning.

So the way I see it, you've got two choices: either you accept the rules of the game and get in the race, or you opt out — and start positioning yourself as a victim instead.

I want to put these two approaches side by side.

Non-zero-sum games: when competition creates value for everyone

Thanks to centuries of accumulated technology — a direct byproduct of humans endlessly competing for status — the average worker today lives better than the most powerful person on Earth did 300 years ago. That's not a small thing. That's a miracle hiding in plain sight.

And Elon Musk almost certainly didn't build rockets because he was deeply moved by the plight of the American people. It was almost certainly the hormonal cocktail, the hunger to be at the top of the pyramid — that permanent state of low-grade euphoria that comes with it. The point is: his pursuit of status, his obsession with winning, ended up benefiting millions of people who never asked him to care about them. He didn't need to be altruistic for the outcome to be net positive.

That's the beauty of a non-zero-sum game. One person's ambition doesn't come at someone else's expense — it raises the floor for everyone.

Zero-sum games: when redistribution destroys the thing it's trying to share

Now consider the alternative. Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in the name of resource equality. The Soviet Union collectivized agriculture for the same reason. Both were attempts to flatten competition, eliminate individual incentive, and distribute outcomes evenly.

The result? The world's largest oil exporter became an importer. One of history's greatest agricultural powers triggered a famine. When you remove the competitive incentive from the equation, you don't get a fairer system — you get a slower, more fragile one that eventually collapses under its own contradictions.

The Soviet case is particularly bleak: you could build an entire industry, feed a country, and then one day someone would show up and tell you that you'd taken on too much. And just like that — everything you'd built, everything you believed in, simply ceased to exist.

And now, back to the present

Something strange is happening in the cultural discourse right now, and it's becoming harder to name without being immediately dismissed.

Over the last decade or so, a remarkably convenient new mechanism for gaining social status has emerged: adopting the posture of a victim. And once you claim that position, everyone around you automatically has fewer rights than you do. It's a zero-sum status game disguised as a justice movement.

I genuinely can't wrap my head around the logic: someone grinds 24 hours a day, sacrificing sleep, relationships, and comfort to build something — and then gets publicly targeted precisely because they succeeded. Because they ended up higher on the hierarchy. And the discomfort that creates in others needs to be managed somehow, so the obvious solution is to discredit them.

Where did this impulse to protect and celebrate that dynamic come from? Where is it going?

I'm asking sincerely, because I don't have a clean answer.

Not claiming to hold the truth here. Nothing is true — everything is permitted. Think for yourself.