I believe star ratings on Amazon.com and IMDB.com, World Cup trophies and Olympic medals, school grades and exam results, even Google search results, etc. suggest that this is fairly common phenomenon everywhere.

Cart before the horse. Most of these competitive measures exist because the economic (i.e. political) framing of transactions and relationships is pre-defined as competitive.

It's a top-down phenomenon. When 'competition' is defined as a good thing, then competition appears everywhere.

bruno-ken:

Of course I don't mean to suggest that we should be trying to get society or the planet into some kind of state of "cosmic flow".

I'm unconvinced that this would be an inferior alternative.