Within both economic game theory and evolutionary biology individual success has at least two meanings: success within a specific social environment, realized by actual behavior (personal success herein) and expectation across several such social environments. The Nash solution requires an ontology of multiple social environments; yet economic game theory equates individual success with expectation while denying ontological primacy to personal success; in consequence the Nash solution is too general, and attempts to refine equilibria (e.g., Kreps and Wilson 1982a, b; Kreps et al. 1982; Milgrom and Roberts 1987; Fudenberg et al. 1988) are arbitrary, in that they are ontologically ungrounded. Embracing the hidden ontology of the Nash solution removes this difficulty (cf. Pollock 1991). Within evolutionary biology, a similar false synonymy between personal success and individual success as expectation has lead to an arbitrary definition of altruism, where the class of altruistic acts is contingent on population structure; a definition of objective altruism is provided, grounded on an ontology of multiple social environments, which is invariant to social control over population structure (e.& dispersal patterns, effective population size per individual, and social interaction across Malthusian boundaries; cf. Pollock 1988, 1989b, 1991). Evolutionary success conforms to a Nash solution when social environments may be concatenated through the logic of expectation; such concatenation may be impossible, however, when Malthusian boundaries are created; worlds either compatible or antithetical to the Nash solution exist, and evolutionary success as persistence is not necessarily measured through expectation. This tension between personal success and individual success as expectation within both economic game theory and evolutionary biology is not coincidental. Following Wilson (1990) I argue that “individual success” has two semantic uses, each derived from a different form of human evolutionary competition. These competitive forms reciprocally recreate each other, both usages persist, often occurring in false synonymy. Nonetheless, an invariant definition of altruism provides ontological priority to personal success. Besides grounding the Nash solution, this ontology describes a form of altruism released from Malthusian competition.