We live in a competitive world. The slogan “this is a dog eat dog world” is throw around on the regular even though this is most certainly not a world which contains a large amount of dogs getting eaten by other dogs. In fact cannibalism in dogs is a very rare occurrence, it is only documented in a few cases where mother dogs kill their puppies due to extraneous circumstances.
Given that as a natural fact it is not a dog eat dog world we may ask the question why this proverb is used so often and with such assured confidence in its obvious and insightful correctness. Well of course when people use this slogan they do not intend to refer to dogs. People probably use this slogan to capture what they take to be a universal law of nature, that life is a competition and their survival and well being is
to be achieved by outdoing and beating everybody else. This is most definitely a harsh worldview. It is premised upon the principle of scarcity. There is not enough to go around so we have to fight for our share by dominating others. My increase is premised upon an others decrease.
I do however think that it is incredibly significant that the slogan is, in its literal sense, absolutely false. It is as if the proponents of this competitive world-view are ironically pointing to its refutation with the slogan they are using to express it. Cooperation as a principle is fundamentally more present in the make-up of the natural world than competition.
From one point of view an eco-system is a unified whole produced by the cooperation of each individual species of flora and fauna working together to produce the balanced and harmonious whole. The balance we find in nature is not something that can be brought about by competition and domination. We in fact see the absolute domination of man over nature has throw a system that had the tendency to attain to balance and harmony into chaos. If competition was a fundamental principle of the cosmos then I do not see how the cosmos would attain to balance.
But in any case I do not want to offer a cosmological argument against the view that ours is a dog eat dog world. Rather I just want to remind the people that use this slogan that cooperation is the fundamental building block of any society. Why do human beings band together? Presumably for a number of reasons but one of them seems to most definitely include the fact that we are more effective in groups. Human beings have in fact only attained to their lofty domination of the natural world through generations and generations of cooperation. It has taken the whole history of the human race to produce the society we live in today.
The exceptional level of cooperation that is needed to sustain societies is not sustainable if the individuals within the societies are convinced that they have to 
dominate. The degree to which a society of individuals are trying to beat and dominate each other is the degree to which that society is not cooperative and hence is dysfunctional. This is a point I do not even feel I need to argue for since it seems to me to be absolutely and manifestly obvious.
We have to realize that if we keep telling ourselves it is a dog eat dog world we are eroding the principle that society is built on. If we live like it is a dog eat dog world our societies will be dysfunctional as a matter of sociological mechanics. I am convinced we have to strive, within our organisations and within society at large, to live with the slogan like: “your success is my success” with the hope that we can stop ourselves from slipping into the competitive mind set that will sink our society.