In our book club meeting last week, we got off for awhile on a tangent about cooperation and competition and human nature. This was in part because we were discussing a book on Elinor Ostrom\u2019s work on the commons, which is a form of cooperation.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m a big fan of the cooperative approach from way back \u2013 I organized food co-ops, lived in housing co-ops, and am currently a member of at least three credit unions. And I also think competition tends to be overrated, especially since it so often leads to cheating and overemphasis on the winner of some contest.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, competition is a good way to block monopolies and to give us the diversity of enterprises we need.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the thing about cooperation that really hit me: we don\u2019t just use it to do good.<\/p>\n
As my Aikido friend Ross Robertson once observed when we were discussing the subject, one of the first things human beings cooperated to do was war.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s likely that they cooperated to raise kids and feed each other first, but war does go back quite a way in human history. It\u2019s not new.<\/p>\n
And while an army usually has forced cooperation, it can still be seen as a cooperative enterprise, with the competition side coming out in fighting with others.<\/p>\n
I mean, mobs can also be a form of cooperation. Social groups cooperate to keep others out.<\/p>\n
We are social beings, and standing up against the group is difficult, even when we\u2019re right. So while I\u2019d like to think that true cooperation isn\u2019t done for evil purposes, the truth is that people cooperate for both good and bad reasons.<\/p>\n
Which, to get back to Ostrom and the commons and various kinds of co-ops, is one reason why it\u2019s important to create solid and workable structures for such enterprises. <\/p>\n
It will probably not surprise you to hear that I have opinions on this subject. I learned early on in my co-op work how important it was to make bylaws that both complied with the law (because the law governed how they were interpreted) and represented how the co-op itself made decisions.<\/p>\n
A lot of co-ops failed because they didn\u2019t have bylaws that worked when things started to fall apart.<\/p>\n