>It's just my impression, and I could be mistaken, but this sounds overly pragmatic. Living life this way leads to getting entrenched in local maxima.

You find a lot of people who suffer from severe social maladjustment and view life as a zero-sum game all over the place (I blame the rise of using game theory to model real situations without a finite turn limit). It's very rare you'll be able to "argue" these people into conceptualizing other humans as unique individuals, it pretty much always comes from problematic upbringings