Thanks for adding some Interesting thoughts. Ambition as antilife. I offer you a quote from my own (not yet published) novel, regarding ambition:
"Ambition is the driving force of civilization and the one trait we seem to share with no other creature on this earth. [...] Ambition is our worst trait, our best trait, our most inculcated. Ambition is also unnatural. Nature tends toward a certain harmony, but ambition is violently opposed to harmony."
So I guess we are on fairly similar wavelengths with this. :-)
I've often posited that we are an evolutionary anomaly, in the sense that evolution normally gives a species just enough so survive in its environment, and no more, leaving the world's ecology in a nicely balanced symbiosis.
Somewhere along the lines, some wires were crossed and humans were created, with capabilities far greater than what we needed to survive in our environment; capabilities great enough to allow us to compound knowledge from generation to generation, ascend up the food chain despite not being particularly athletically gifted, and eventually drastically alter the world around us.
The world was never meant to support a species like us. But we're here, and I'm pretty sure most of us don't want to retreat back into the wilderness and give up houses and forks and shoes and internet and aeroplanes. So we've gotta make it work. Ambition helps make it work, but it also causes just as much, if not even more harm.
Also, in reply to your previous post, while ambition and empathy aren't directly opposites, I think it is fair to say that lack of empathy is a very common side effect of the second definition of ambition you listed there. That's why things like tall poppy syndrome exist.
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