Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer argued that
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Competition allows individuals to develop their talents and meet their needs.
Competition and cooperation are equally important in building a productive and compassionate society.
Human societies progress through competition, since the strong survive and the weak perish.
Human societies progress through cooperation, a natural instinct that should be encouraged.
God predetermines that some members of society are fated to succeed and some members are fated to fail.
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Social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer, argued that the history of human societies and races has been shaped by the same principle as those that Charles Darwin had postulated for biological evolution, namely the principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Social Darwinists, therefore, tended to interpret the geopolitical dominancy of Europe (and people of European birth or ancestry) in their late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world as both proof for the argument that Europeans were more highly evolved than other races and as a justification for continued European colonial rule worldwide.