Cooperation and Competition

There is a fallacy in science that cooperation and competition exist as merely strategies for survival and animals and people can adopt whatever strategy seems best at the time. Actually, cooperation and competition go much deeper – and it is nothing to do with survival. In fact, if it was a matter of survival then nobody would be competitive! (I realise that needs explanation, but not here.)

Mere survival is no reason to live, does not provide sufficient motivation to get animal or person out of bed in the morning. Animals and people must WANT to live, and they will only want to live if life has something to offer by way of fun/pleasure/interest and so on. So the most important thing is that life should be good.

First off, and most simple, life is good if you are surrounded by friends and bad if you are surrounded by enemies. This is, I think, self-evident – I mean, for starters, you just sleep better when you are surrounded by friends! If you are cooperative, then EVERYONE is your friend – EVEN YOUR ‘ENEMIES’. In other words, a cooperative person simply does not, and CANNOT have enemies.

This cooperative frame of mind always seeks to accommodate, sees the alien-ness of others as an opportunity for self-enrichment; i.e. it is not that ‘cooperative’ means ‘tolerant’, or ‘self-sacrificing’. It is much more positive, and actively so. Others, as I said, are an opportunity for enrichment, so the more alien they are, the better; and an ‘enemy’ (the use of the term actually denoting the state of mind of the other i.e. an enemy is someone who sees the cooperative person as their enemy.) is just an opportunity to ‘make’ a friend – for this you have to see the mind as a growing and developing thing so, e.g. an opportunity to make a friend means an opportunity to develop new abilities and thus expand the mind and expand the range of possibilities open to oneself.

Where a competitive mind sees a CHALLENGE, something or someone that is a threat and must be outdone or defeated, a cooperative mind sees an OPPORTUNITY for growth and development and enrichment.

Thus cooperation and competition are fundamental mindsets, not just strategies. Also, they have a profound effect on the ‘state’ of mind, a feedback which in the case of competition is negative and damaging, but in the case of cooperation is positive and facilitates healthy growth AND ENJOYMENT OF LIFE – but that is beyond the scope of this post.