Competition: The World's Oldest Pastime

Everyone loves to show their might against someone that claims better then they are, who doesn't?  Competition has been around for longer than anyone or anything can remember, literally.  Prehistoric animals competed for territory, survivors after their extinction competed for food, and even now with humans, competition for everything, even more than what may be apparent.  Think about yourself in school, you may be trying to get grades that satisfy you in order to get into a good college and find a job and all that, or you might be trying to be the best in your class.  Competing against the other students to prove your worth and gain recognition.  Maybe you're in a band, trying to rise up from the rest and be the best.  Football practice after school, need to keep drilling all day in the hot sun to beat Maine South and look really cool.  Enough with the rhymes, there's more competition in America now than meets the eye.  American is a capitalist country, and capitalism means you can have a private business and have the right to make money.  But not everyone is successful, and in a world of marketing, politics, and and ever changing economy, nobody knows what will happen next.  It's survival of the fittest, baby.  Survival of the fittest is the oldest competition in the history of anything, and it's still very prevalent in our society.  In a matter of fact, capitalism and competition are listed as synonyms.  If capitalism is a core American value isn't it fare to say that competition is as well?    Companies are trying to one-up each other, making the best product, finding the cheapest materials, earning the most money.  But is competition the answer?  Wouldn't it be better to all come together and pool some collective knowledge, sharing ideas instead of keeping them from one another?  In an experiment done by Dr. John Tauer in 2009 at a basketball camp, he discovered that after having the kids shoot free throws against each other, and then in place having them reach a collective group goal of free throws, after being surveyed at the end of both these activities, the kids enjoyed going for a collective goal rather than competing against each other.  In this case we see that in a simple sense, cooperation can be better than competition.  While it has its perks, the right to private property gives those who don't want to share their ideas the right to keep them to themselves, this being another core American value.  Unfortunately, we have built our country on competition, making cooperation a hard goal to achieve.  Americans like their space, if it annoys us we have the right not to cooperate with one another (usually).  How could we go about things to bring ourselves together instead of slowly drifting farther apart?  Leave some thoughts.