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My grandfather’s idea of an Easter egg hunt involved hiding money in colorful plastic eggs sprinkled around his house on Long Island. Most held coins, but there was always one with a crisp, new $100 bill.
My cousin, Billy-O, and I were the only players. We were usually playful partners in mayhem but as competitors, we took on every hunt with gusto, flipping over cushions, throwing open cabinets, knocking each other aside until, without fail, Billy-O found the $100.
The first time he won, I fought back tears. But after a few years of losses, I exploded.
“It’s just not fair,” I yelled.
“Life’s unfair,” my grandfather told us. “You win or you lose.”
This is what’s called zero-sum thinking — the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another. And these days, that notion seems to be everywhere. It’s how we view college admissions, as a cutthroat contest for groups defined by race or privilege. It’s there in our love for “Squid Game.” It’s Silicon Valley’s winner-take-all ethos, and it’s at the core of many popular opinions: that immigrants steal jobs from Americans; that the wealthy get rich at others’ expense; that men lose power and status when women gain.
But nowhere is the rise of our zero-sum era more pronounced than on the world stage, where President Trump has been demolishing decades of collaborative foreign policy with threats of protectionist tariffs and demands for Greenland, Gaza, the Panama Canal, and mineral rights in Ukraine. Since taking office, he has often channeled the age he most admires — the imperial 19th century.
And in his own past, zero-sum thinking was deeply ingrained. His biographers tell us he learned from his father that you were either a winner or loser in life, and that there was nothing worse than being a sucker. In Trumpworld, it’s kill or be killed; he who is not a hammer must be an anvil.
What we are now experiencing, especially in the United States, is effectively a rejection of the belief in abundance and cooperation. It is an uprising against the premise that many groups can gain at once — a cynical, contagious us-or-them attitude, spreading across countries, communities, and families.
Maybe zero-sum thinking can even encourage restraint. In the same paper declaring that purely zero-sum situations are “exceedingly rare,” two psychology professors found that “the zero sum mind-set predicts both hyper-competitiveness and anxious avoidance of competitions.”
Some zero-summers may not compete, they concluded, because they do not want to cause the pain or face the costs that they think are necessary for success. They also may avoid contests that they do not think they can win.
Mr. Trump may end up fighting and fleeing, depending on the circumstances. He views other nations in only two ways, Mr. Immerwahr said: “Either they are completely in your thrall or they are threats.”
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