The story that grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and then Social Darwinism had a strong streak of “your gain is my loss.” The more that people and groups were seen as competing isles of ambition, all struggling for survival, the more life was analogized at every turn into a win-lose scenario. But the stories and science of the second Enlightenment prove what has long been a parallel intuition: that in fact, the evolution of humanity from cave dweller to Facebooker is the story of increasing adoption of nonzero, or positive-sum, attitudes; and that societies capable of setting up win-win (or lose-lose) scenarios always win. Robert Wright’s Nonzero describes this dynamic across civilizations. Unhealthy societies think zero-sum and fight over a pie of fixed size. Healthy societies think 1+1=3 and operate from a norm that the pie can grow. Open, non-equilibrium systems have synergies that generate increasing returns and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The proper goal of politics and economics is to maximize those increasing returns and win-win scenarios.

Liu, Eric; Hanauer, Nick (2011-12-06). The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government (Kindle Locations 379-386). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.