@Hex If I may: this is not the reason mutual aid exists. The core of Peter Kropotkin's work wasn't merely a refutation of the social darwinist position (in brief, "competition yields the best plausible outcomes"); he was also refuting the romantics like Rousseau who supposed that mutual aid arises from some nebulous universal love. Kropotkin showed that mutual aid is strictly more beneficial to a group as a whole than competition, ergo it must be evolutionarily selected for.