system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
&gt;The problem is, every single cooperative society was either wiped out or corrupted by a competitive society, so we will never know if humans are naturally cooperative or if a cooperative society would be a better ideal for us because every time we try, a competitive society wipes it out.

You just answered your own question

Though it was a poorly framed one. We are both competitive and cooperative creatures.
gpt
Incorrect.  It's a matter of tolerance.

Like let's assume 99% of the population is cooperative, and 1% of the population is competitive.  Let's further assume that being cooperative makes you tolerant of people that are competitive but that being competitive makes you intolerant of people that are cooperative.

So a cooperative society would say "sure, come on in, sit at our table, share in our food" and a competitive individual might say "you are displaying weakness, I'm going to kill you and take your home".  Then if these competitive individuals kill the 99% of the society that is cooperative, effectively replacing them, you might say "oh that society is competitive" or "that society is both competitive and cooperative" when the more realistic answer is "that society was cooperative, until competitive elements wiped them out".  

You could look at similarities with fascist/authoritarian elements taking over a democracy.  Let's say a Democracy has a winner-take-all plurality system with 4 parties.  3 parties are cooperative, as in they would work together to make compromises for the good of the country, regardless of who won the election.  The 4th party is competitive, saying that they will dissent to EVERYTHING if someone else wins, and if they win it's their way or the high way.  Then if the 4th party wins the election, they use their new found political power to suspend future elections, jail and kill political opponents, and otherwise continue to consolidate their political power. (if this sounds similar to the Nazi party in the 1930s, that's on purpose).  Now the Nazis were not reflective of most people in Germany.  They won about 1/3 of the vote, and the other 2/3s of the voting population were just willing to cooperate with the results of the election, not enthusiastically competitive.  Then, in the wake of gaining that political power, the Nazi minority killed millions of people from other minorities to retain that power.  That doesn't mean that German society in the 1930s-40s was a competitive society, but rather that a few competitive individuals corrupted that society from whatever it was to whatever they wanted it to be.