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This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.
Positive sum in terms of who's system of values? You may have a system that you think everyone should share, but not everyone shares it.
In some other value system, your most positive contribution to the world might involve immediate ritual suicide, to spare the rest of us the effort.
For a less extreme version, someone else's value system might have an axis that does not exist in your system, maybe including such things as "souls" and "afterlives" and suchlike. They might make decisions to de-prioritize improvement in your shared dimensions, in favor of improvements in a dimension that you think is imaginary. (Ritual purity laws might be a good example here.)
It's positive-sum in terms of material resources, which is what I was responding to given the OP's message.
I agree that not everyone shares the same system of values, with some diverging or even outright conflicting. For some, like Nazism, military conflict is required, but that does not necessitate "elimination of large masses of populations". Just some humiliation for the Holocaust and other crimes. For most others, persuasion will suffice. Communism was defeated simply by capitalism existing as a viable and better-seeming alternative. The great thing about democracy and the modern world order is that it heavily emphasizes persuasion as opposed to force of arms to solve ideological disputes. I'd prefer to keep it that way.
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Material wealth can be positive sum because we can add to it in discrete components.
Social status is innately relative, and as a function of that is innately zero sum. The lower classes have more absolute wealth than they did in 1800, but they don't have more status.
That just begs the question what social status is. I think ranking is too poor of a definition and instead esteem should be considered at least as an important part of ones social status. Then social status trivially isn't a zero sum game, as we for example could increase the total trust in a system, taking for granted that 'trust afforded' is a component of ones esteem. For example imagine a group consisting of a 1:1 split of gentlemen and Criminal Scum (tm) compared to one that's purely gentlemen. Hopefully I don't have to belabour the point of how the amount of trust and pleasant behavior are different for each group, and how the amount can be increased by decreasing the ratio of Criminal Scum (tm).
I think the closest to zero sum is attention, but even believing that to be zero sum can be likened to believing that material wealth is. Of course there is some maximal bound on both of them, but I don't believe we are anywhere close to saturating the amount of attention that can be given and not either it's quality.
But given that you believe that social status is innately zero sum, how do you think adding people to a system interacts with status? Is the amount diluted or is average kept (per person)?
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"Scarcity doesn't exist" is certainly a position, but I usually see it from the people far to the left of the leftmost motte poster. Because you sound like a techno-optimist, let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?
Humanity is thousands if not millions of years away from achieving Dyson Sphere tier technology. Your argument here is the equivalent of saying we should ignore life-extending medicine due to the eventual heat death of the universe. Maybe at some point in the distant future that will become relevant, but for now it's unabashedly a good thing, just as it has been for the entirety of human history. And who knows, maybe at that point in the distant future we'll be able to pull energy and matter from nothing.
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