Spin Doctor: Cooperation Is Competition’s Armor
Everyone knows that two heads are better than one. And that scratching my back makes me scratch yours in turn. And that there is strength in numbers, when resources are pooled together under a shared purpose, resulting in better and more lasting outcomes.
Yet competition rules over cooperation. Why is that so?
In simple terms, competition drives innovation. It forces one to reach beyond one’s abilities and excel, enabling people to achieve the impossible. There is nothing like necessity to make one exceed oneself. But things often get out of control and turn nasty. Too much conflict can hold innovation back, or rather trap it inside a self-serving and self-reinforcing loop of attrition, turning it into a detrimental, closed loop of conflict that serves nothing other than the conflict itself.
Why is that? Evidently, passion can get out of hand, leading to excessive and destructive behavior, some of which harms oneself as much as it harms others.
Enter partnering up. Instead of competing wantonly one can seek help. A certain amount of cooperation is necessary, mandatory even, for individuals to progress and for innovation to grow in ways useful and meaningful. But herein lies the problem: cooperation as a concept has become tainted. It is a term bursting with connotations of weakness, inability, freeloading, cop-out.
Let’s examine this for a moment. Take a world of competitors and cooperators. How does the distinction between them arise in the first place? In simple terms, those who are strong and able to accomplish things on their own, compete. Those who are not, those who can’t make things happen as they stand, cooperate. Everything boils down to strength and personal ability.
The explanation is simple, simplistic even, but it provides insight on the undercurrent forces behind general behavior across parties. Those who do not need much help deem those who need lots of it needy and weak. The haves and have-nots stem from the do and do-nots, the can and cannots, the go-it-alone and the lend-me-a-hand-will-you-because-I-can’t-do-it! It leads to a divide between people according to their abilities, or more accurately, to what they have to show for themselves.
It’s a solid way of looking at things, but perhaps a little harsh and not very conducive to creating future opportunities. Disrespect for those who can’t cut the grain by those who do may be understandable – we’ve all had to tell people something clearcut and straightforward five and six and seventeen times, because they just didn’t get it; remember how that felt and how you reacted at the time? – but it also presents various problems. A gap between the got-it and got-it-nots is created. Jaded relationships are formed and a certain righteousness emerges. It is not the stuff progress is made of.
Lack of proficiency in given areas can be counterbalanced by cooperation. Personal ability may determine how one deals with life, separating the gifted from the challenged, creating losers in the wake of winners, but it also opens up the door to networking. Where the non-gifted used to fail on their own, now they can come together and pool their resources, forming powerful multicellular structures. They organize themselves into organisms, while the gifted go it alone just because they can.
But the story doesn’t end there. Cooperation is not a monopoly of the challenged. Coming together yields results for all those who seek it, despite of personal ability. Those who pool their resources and work together in pursuit of a shared goal have great advantage over those who don’t, period. Properly set up and with the right form of coordination, partnerships achieve great success on the whole, greater than any lone guns in the field.
Why is this so? Because organization has proven to be superior to romantic Don Quixotism in the long run, on account of its ability to cover a wider field. Personal ability is great when it’s sharp, but it’s even greater when coupled with extra hands and covered on all flanks. High achievers know this well by now, ego-driven and proud as many of them may be, finding ways to suppress their raw instincts and come together in ways that will enable them to achieve better results and outcomes.
Organization. The key to success. For those who have forgotten, or gotten carried away by recent semantics, organization is nothing other than a specialized form of cooperation. Whether carried out by few or many, by exceptional individuals or just average ones, it is evident that the process yields better results than lone riders do, sharp-shooting as they may be. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but we are talking the bigger picture here and are not concerned with brilliant anomalies.
Courtesy of Curran Kelleher
Now here’s the interesting part. In the grand scheme of things, as years go by, these smart and organized partnerships, cooperative as they are in and of themselves, begin to compete with each other more and more harshly, promoting innovation and growth. The ones who don’t do so, as well as all those who fail to cut the mustard, fall behind and perish, leaving the able to push forth. In the process they get edgy, aggressive, or defensive. They emerge as the new paradigms, single-minded and cohesive as any victor is prone to be. Not all of them agree on how to go about things, nor do they have mutual interests. Different agenda are laid out in due course and competition in its ugly form rears its head again, forcing things to diverge and take a downturn. The only way to escape the self-fulfilling loop of attrition is for the involved parties to seek ways of cooperating among themselves in an effort to become stronger and more able to cope with the challenges facing them. The process induces real progress and substantial innovation, getting things back on track. For a while anyway.
And so it goes, epoch after epoch. Down the future humanity spins, passing through high and low in an endless ebb and flow of organized competition. Beyond good and evil. Just working its way through time, cooperating in ways that beat the competition, competing in ways that only cooperation can afford. Just like all life does, to each their own, evolving at the turn of every challenge met.
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