Forum Post: Competition and Cooperation

If I am not mistaken, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift, a period in which the dominant view in things changes.

I believe we have reached the end-point of what can be called the American Enlightenment.

For more than two centuries, the values underlying the American Enlightenment have dominated the discourse, and it seems we are stuck. The fabric of the line of reasoning has been stretched to the limit and we can't push it any further without tearing it apart.

I think the central tenet of the American Enlightenment is "individual liberty", which gave rise to such notions as liberalism, republicanism, capitalism, socialism, civil rights, women's liberation, the sexual revolution and the social conservative movement.

For over two centuries, we have looked at society through the lens of individual liberty. At the time, this choice of focal point made sense. Feudalism had reached its end point. The fabric of that thinking had been stretched to the limit too. Individual liberty, was an almost inevitable focal point for people wanting the throw away the shackles of tyranny.

I think it's time we need to shift our look, not because individual liberties are unimportant and can be ignored, far from it, but because the view is limiting and another focal point is needed.

As an offshoot of thinking about "individual liberty" the notion of competition has become dominant in our thinking. In economics we tend to think about market places where supply and demand meet and competition leads to the most optimal price for a good. In education, we compete for positions at colleges, at our jobs we compete with co-workers for a promotion.

Our discourse is rooted in a notion of competition, yet this is but one aspect of our interaction with society. As an analytical instrument, competition renders us an imperfect picture of society.

What would happen if we start looking at the world in terms of cooperation?

Everything we like and value and that is not inherently part of "mother nature", is something we have achieved through cooperation. The laptop I write these words on, is produced through the cooperation of designers, engineers, assemblers, process operators, secretaries, people in warehousing and logistics. Hardly any human made product we own is the work of one person only.

Most of the threats in life can not be dealt with on an individual basis. We need the cooperation of many researchers to discover the right vaccine for a disease, as well as the cooperation of people producing those vaccines, drivers who transport those vaccines to various locations. We build levies to protect us from floods, the work of many people, done with the funding of many more people.

On a much more negative note, there is cooperation of regulators of an industry and representatives of an industry to dodge regulations. Conspiring to launch a terrorist attack is another form of wrongful cooperation, and many a war has been fought for all the wrong reason, through the cooperation of military personnel, people working to produce weaponry (sometimes to both sides of the conflict), bankers who finance war expenditures (sometimes to both sides of the conflict).

In economics we can see a system called "the market place", where buyers and sellers cooperate to find some reasonable price for a certain volume of goods, and where all sorts of businesses are involved cooperating to the supply of those goods. There is even something called supply-chain management to organize the cooperation of various businesses.

So we already cooperate, and we already think about cooperation, yet it is not the focal point of our philosophical discourse. President Obama last year launched an educational initiative by the name of "race to the top". This just to underline how central our thinking in terms of competition still is.

Competition is a worn out theme, used and abused by corporate powers to push people to there limits without paying to the limits for having someone perform that job.

It's time we look at the world through our cooperations. Maybe if we do that we can find the turn in history that makes a better future possible.