It's hard to explain to others if they've never encountered a predator before. I'm quite literal when I say predator, I say: "Hunter of people". Someone who has the mindset of a predator when engaging with all other people, as if they were a wolf living among sheep.

A predatory mindset is absolutely zero-sum, but it's still a bit more than that. The predator obviously has to think zero-sum because they consume prey. The prey always loses in order for the predator to gain. They can't build anything, only take.

A human predator, a human hunter, is more pathological. Humans have always built because they are a species of endurance predators (which is in and of itself a terrifying prospect), but they are also omnivores, heavily communal, and have an intellect that allows them to engage in deception, making their most dangerous adversary: other humans.

Humans have obviously built civilizations and societies, and this comes from their excellent adaptability, intellect, and endurance which allows them to see beyond their immediate needs. Planting seeds in the winter so you can harvest crops in 7 months in an incredible amount of what I call "vision". It also requires a lot of stoicism, confidence, competence, and intellect. In economics, this is a "long-term time preference".

The predator is always short-term time preference. They don't need to build anything when they are just strong enough to kill something and eat it. For a human predator, a similar mentality takes place of short-time preference and zero sum.

But human predators / human hunters are pathological because they could engage in building things, but have chosen not to. What you normally find is that the human hunters think of themselves as more intelligent than everyone else because they see the value of simply consuming others, while others seem to wait ages for any long-term time preferences to pay off. A predator thinks of itself as a predator, and thinks of others as prey based on how those people perceive the world. This is because the distinction between predator and prey is purely cognitive. No lion thinks of lions as prey. And can seem to understand the difference between non-lion predators and prey. Alligators and Hyena don't get the same type of treatment as Water Buffalo because the lion knows the difference. Human predators / human hunters, know the difference based on how they act. If you act like prey to a human predator, the predator thinks you deserve to be hunted, because it see's itself at the top of the food chain. If, however, you treat them as a predator, they may not like it, but they will actually respect it.

No abuser is afraid of getting abused, they don't like it, but they aren't afraid of it because they see that as normal behavior. They can respect it like a predator respects the territory of another predator, so they can understand to stay out of each others way.

Put it more topically: if Johnny Depp had literally beaten the holy hell out of Amber Herd. Literally broken her jaw, she'd be more mad at herself for misunderstanding Johnny as prey, then she would have been mad at Johnny Depp.

A good example of this is Kyle Rittenhouse versus Gaige Groskreutz. Gaige was acting literally as a predator. He was literally hunting and chasing Kyle with a loaded gun in order to shoot and kill him. Then he feigned surrender because he was treating Kyle as prey. As soon as Kyle dropped the muzzle of his gun and started to look away, Gaige pointed the gun at Kyle's head because he is a predator attacking from ambush. After Kyle exploded his bicep, you can hear Gaige scream. But this scream is very different from the scream you hear people make when they get shot. It wasn't a panicky scream of fear and terror realizing that he had been grievously wounded. It was a scream of anger and frustration. The kind of scream you hear from someone who might walk outside and have a bird shit on his head. He was outraged that a prey had actually defeated him. Like a lion or a cheetah missing a gazelle, there's almost entirely frustration and outrage at having been bested by food that you normally just consume.

So, I would say that human predators absolutely think in zero sum terms, but that's not why they are thinking in zero-sum terms. The reason predators like that hurt people is because they believe other people deserve to be hurt, because they see them as food. The zero-sum is just the out-growth of a predator's mindset.

Now, there is a whole different kind of killer that our society has to deal with, but they aren't normal predators. They are the suicide bombers of society, the people with the "school shooter mentality", the people so hurt by the world around them, and so angry with resentment and hatred towards the world that they would rather see it die than improve. These are the people that Jordan Peterson said were seeking: "revenge against God for the crime of being". They're not really predators, because they don't even seek self-preservation, just destruction as a whole from their pathological nihilism. But that's a different topic.