Nature's balance is found as each organism struggles with all its might and ability to expand, but not by any organism voluntarily refraining from maximizing its production.
This is both right and wrong. What makes an organism? You are a multicellular system of cooperating cells. If this statement was true, you couldn't exist. The truth is that the most powerful adaptation to increase your organisms ability to compete is to in fact build a bigger organism. Your body is a product of that strong evolutionary trend.
Bacterial mats, multicellular organisms, forests, fields of grass, mamals, families, civilizations. All of these things are escalations in survivability due to every part of them choosing to "voluntarily refraining from maximizing its production." in favor of behavior that improves the status quo for others.
We call portion of organisms that revert to this competitive mentality "cancer" and eventually it does win. That doesn't make it morally right, just the last parts of a body to die after it kills the rest in shortsightedness.
Cooperation is definitely a popular strategy for survival, and our instinct for altruism benefits the survival of human families and small groups. Consider though, that in each of your examples, the collective entities formed then grow to the greatest extent, limited only by resource constraints and competition from other entities.