Trees may work together somewhat, but so do people — somewhat. But trees, like people, are also somewhat competitive, and shade out other trees and plants sometimes.

The only real reason why some trees aren’t hundreds of times bigger than average trees (like how the wealthiest people are hundreds of times more wealthy than average people) is because gravity prevents them from growing past a certain size.

But our current capitalist system doesn’t have a built-in “gravity” provision that caps people’s wealth.

But people don’t have any particular “addiction” of infinite growth that isn’t represented elsewhere in the universe. Think, for example, of viruses, or black holes.

And if you think about it, humans’ “lack of gravity” is actually a relatively new problem, brought on by technology and globalization. Because, historically, any single human’s power used to be limited to the size of their small community. But now, a single tech business owner can have wealth that is sourced from the entire world.

So this isn’t an intrinsically human problem, or even a particularly capitalist problem — it’s a problem of globalization and technology — which we haven’t found an effective way to govern or regulate yet. But the tendancy towards infinite growth is not an anomolous addiction or “religion” as some people seem to think. And as long as we think of it in these terms, it will be harder to come up with a truly effective solution.