The problem is that you can thrive by making others' lives worse, by crippling them/putting them out of business, etc. It's possible to keep things competitive and even greed-oriented if someone wants to be greedy, while making the competition focused on making others' lives better (per their subjective assessments).

Could you cite an example or two of "competition based on making others' life better"? Taking the definition of 'compete' from the online dictionary, for example,

strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same.

Not that this proves anything, but just to highlight the initial non-correspondence between the two concepts.

Here I'm sort of assuming that greedy individuals and corporate entities given sufficient amplification would under their pure logic willfully destroy their own environment by over-exploiting resources and taking minimal regard to it's human fuel; this is assuming there were no power in the form of social government to keep them in check. — kudos

It's not even necessary for a social government to keep them in check. It's in the nature of pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure that the person becomes dissatisfied with it. Whether this dissatisfaction sets in early enough to save the natural environment is another matter.

Hedonic adaptation/treadmill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Pleasure Paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism

Because I can make more out of what I have if I exploit the environment around me doing things such as lowering wages, benefits, and adopting certain labour-saving technologies, etc. — kudos

Actually, you don't make things better for yourself. If everybody's wages are lowered, everybody is worse, the capitalists too. Do remember that there is the important aspect of aggregate demand too (which Marxists seem to forget).

Imagine you have an island and basically you have all the people as prisoners and force them to produce some basic widget or raw material for export and basically feed them and keep them alive. That would be the extreme of this idea of "lowering wages and benefits". The problem is that there isn't anything else for you as basically the island is just a prison camp. And your labor forces is hardly invested in the enterprise, why would they be? Likely some would try to flee. But let's say you pay the prisoners more than just their food and living costs, that they basically will get something to spend. Even that would change the picture, but what could they do with the money they have? So why not give them a sound salary that they don't need to be prisoners (so you can do away with the prisoner guards). The islanders can voluntarily work for you or move somewhere else. And of course then your island could interest those looking for a job when the salaries are competitive.

The obvious difference to a prison camp would be that there would be a demand for other services, barbers, shops, a pub etc. and a true business opportunity for those as the islanders would have income to spend on. Possible immigration and prospects for people to start a family on your island. With those businesses a thing like land prices would rise as before the island was just one prison camp, the land had no price. Now you can rent or sell land to willing buyers.

Simply put it, a more advanced economy creates more wealth and more prosperity, which is really, genuinely, created. Not carved out from someone's back as a parasite: if you keep the people as prisoners and poor like in North Korea, they aren't going to create the wealth in the first place as in South Korea.

Fitting to the real World example of North and South Korea is that the North was actually the more industrialized part in the Korean peninsula before the division to North and South.

Is this concept really fundamental to Capitalism's survival? It becomes sort of true that If one person goes down, another goes up. Because I can make more out of what I have if I exploit the environment around me doing things such as lowering wages, benefits, and adopting certain labour-saving technologies, etc. — kudos

Maybe the popular term that covers some of your concern is creative destruction? The price for ever greater efficiency from business competition results industry transformation, unemployment and wealth transfer. The social/economic landscape of capitalism is always mutating at uncomfortable speed, because as David Harvey says, capital cannot abide a limit. The future is the gig economy.

_____

"The effect of continuous innovation ... is to devalue, if not destroy, past investments and labour skills. Creative destruction is embedded within the circulation of capital itself. Innovation exacerbates instability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime force pushing capitalism into periodic paroxysms of crisis. ... The struggle to maintain profitability sends capitalists racing off to explore all kinds of other possibilities. New product lines are opened up, and that means the creation of new wants and needs. Capitalists are forced to redouble their efforts to create new needs in others .... The result is to exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated .... The drive to relocate to more advantageous places (the geographical movement of both capital and labour) periodically revolutionizes the international and territorial division of labour, adding a vital geographical dimension to the insecurity. The resultant transformation in the experience of space and place is matched by revolutions in the time dimension, as capitalists strive to reduce the turnover time of their capital to "the twinkling of an eye".


Harvey, David (1995). The Condition of Postmodernity. pp. 105–06. ISBN 978-0-631-16294-0.