How Useful is Competition?

I was not able to go to this meeting, so I do not have the benefit of hearing what others had worked out about the topic, but one aspect has been coming up in web spaces I frequent.  As the product of a capitalistic society, I have absorbed the reverence for competition as the source of all advancement that good citizens should demonstrate.  By trying to be better builders, writers, healers, acrobats etc. than the next person, we develop our skills and create more efficient or safer ways of doing things.  If we were not worried about others being seen as more skillful, we would not put forth the effort to improve, and production of goods or providing of services would stagnate or even decline.  It makes a certain amount of sense, especially having been trained to accept the premise from the beginning.  We want recognition, we want rewards, prizes are not given out for nothing, all these ideas make competition a perfectly logical thing to base a society on.  Our Leader and the True Philosopher focused mainly on competition in business in their preparatory writings.  I suppose this was the aspect that received the most attention and discussion in the meeting.  However, I wonder if competition in basic human interactions was brought up.

Since most humans want a partner or partners, we have to make an effort to seek them out.  Even in societies in which the partners themselves do not work out their partnerships they must appear to be worthy of joining the family of the other, more worthy or desirable than other prospective partners.  In that sense, we compete with the rest of the world for our partners.  We have to show ourselves to have the desired qualities, and in more quantity or with more refinement than others.  Again, there is some logic to it, and we can see competition in the animal world in such apparent rituals as battles, displays of physical decoration, and gathering of resources.  In most cases it seems to be the male who performs these rituals to attract the attention of the female(s).  Humans, because of the requirements of raising young, seem to have rituals for attraction from both sides.  Both partners size each other up, deciding how compatible they are for each other.  However, there are some cases where the competition is not between other potential partners for the desired mate, but with the desired mate.  In this case it would be ridiculous to call the relationship a partnership, since the two are actively engaged in stealing from the other, either achieving material resources from him/her or "fooling" him/her into "giving sex".  The competition between other potential partners should be for a cooperative relationship with the desired partner, one might assume for the purpose of raising offspring, but what kind of positive relationship could result from competing directly with your "partner"?  One idea is that it is for acceptance among one's peers, placing the mate into an entirely different category of human with no other contact than to provide the goods and services coveted, and hopefully received through deception.  It may also be simply a way of expressing one's individual strength and power; I can survive without any support from others whatsoever.  Our individualistic society does seem to promote the latter to a certain degree.  Unfortunately, as social animals, our inherent need to belong to groups makes the full realization of that lack of dependence difficult if not impossible, and makes the first idea the more likely one to be expressed.  So, how useful is that sort of competition?  I suppose it depends on the type of society we want: for a hierarchical, highly segregated society, it would work just fine, since all our efforts are focused on pleasing our peers who are as like us as possible in all ways; for the society we generally say we want - open, egalitarian, free for all - it is not useful at all.