Just share: We can all be winners “L

oser!” If there were a key word to describe our problems, this is it. We misinterpret our life and honor hatred and meanness. The U.S. culture, specifically, has embraced notions that need to be corrected and revised in order for us to move forward as a worldclass nation in the 21st century.

It boils down to the fact that we have been “brainwashed” to fixate on what is referred to as “vulgar social Darwinism,” which is a fancy way of saying that we think that the way to live is by a belief in “survival of the fittest” in our relations with each other, thus setting us up to believe that this is a dog eat dog world in work, economics and social relations.

We portray animals constantly fighting, living on a steady diet of death and mayhem in the media with guns and violence everywhere and we accept, deep down, that capitalism and corporate capitalism and the huge disparity in income and racial supremacy is the way life is and needs to be.

In short, you have to battle your way to the top in order to not be a “loser,” and this is what we think Darwin was reinforcing, though he did not even use that expression, “survival of the fittest” (someone else coined it), and he was mostly referring to mating practices and the multitudes of years that it takes for creatures to slowly adapt to their environments and thus change to survive.

We have tried to dominate nature without the use of respectful relations with Earth. Anti-socialism (even though the “happiest” countries in the world invoke the notion of the welfare of their citizens; that is why they refer to themselves as “welfare states;” the word “socialism” does not have to come into it), the espousal of zero-sum solutions to most things (President Barack Obama did know what this expression meant and negatively referred to it at times) is ubiquitous; I win, you lose; winner takes all; which are often close to 50/50 splits, so what gives the winners complete takeover rights? There is gridlock in politics because the parties must, by the laws of vulgar social Darwinism, prevail and win in all cases.

Gangs and prisons are best examples of what survival-of-the-fittest mentalities really look like. This carries itself forward to irrational fear of welfare, Medicare for all. Ignoring the already-existing road systems, water supplies, state universities, trash collection, research subsidization and more existing welfare systems, creates distrust and foot planting rather than the time-tested notions of making decisions based on compromise and probability.

The existing presidential world allows us to bury ourselves in hatred, fear, revenge, competition, aggression, racism, sexism, huge income discrepancies; we actually culturally accept the notion that the super-rich are fully entitled to be the 1 percent and that we who are not are just some form of losers, who deserve to be fired (and doomed to extinction somehow).

There is ample evidence in the world, for many species, that there is natural altruism and cooperation and compassion (think of the person instinctively jumping into the icy river to save a drowning person), that countries like China have, for centuries, practiced using “doing business” as a way of surviving, not warfare (why kill off your customers?). Win-win, that’s the goal. This “loser” thing has got to go, and then we will kick off the extreme cultural illness and begin to recognize: “When we all do well, we all do well.” When the West Coast Natives got a whale, they shared it with the village and said, “We store our food in our neighbor’s stomachs.” Happy sharing.