Cooperation vs Competition

In my last two blog posts I talked a lot about the effects of cooperation.  In general the more cooperation within a group of people the more effective they are at achieving goals.  Cooperation requires trust within your group, and a common purpose.  Today I will look at Individualism.

People are a social animal, so the tendency towards trust and cooperation are in our nature.  However there is a competing factor, self-interest that tends to look after one's own needs before cooperating in a group.  This conflict is in everyone, and is probably the core conflict in our nature.  The movie cliche with the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other offering differing advice exemplifies this conflict.

 As good as cooperation sounds on paper it has it's own set of problems.   The two biggest, mentioned above are trust within the group, and a common purpose.  Another issue with cooperation is distinguishing us vs them, where we include only a certain set of people to cooperate with.  We want a more inclusive group to cooperate, but the larger the group, the harder it is to have trust and common purpose.  Our experiments in the last century with collectivism proved to be tremendous failures, because they tried to impose trust, and trust is something that is built-up over time, and cannot be dictated.  Entire countries tried to impose cooperation without considering factors such as regional dis-trust, and the self-interest that is also in our nature.  One way to mitigate the problems with cooperation within a large group is to have a hierarchy of groups with each level cooperating within the level above it.  But I digress.

Individualism favors self-interest over cooperation. It tends to dis-trust large social entities such as governments, in favor of smaller entities such as families and communities.  The obvious downside to individualism is the lack of effectiveness when compared to large scale cooperation.  But it has several advantages.  First of all it allows individual thinking so many more ideas can be pursued on a smaller scale.  It encourages pride in accomplishment, and motivates towards hard work, as individual accomplishments can be recognized and rewarded.  It encourages self-sufficiency and initiative.  Fundamentally an individualistic society is one that thinks more and, as a result, refines it's methods of production to become more effective over time.

Cooperation and Individualism are both strategies that take advantage of our duel nature as a social animal, and our desire for self-interest.  Many philosophers in the past have exclaimed one to be superior to the other, and many social experiments that adhered strictly to one strategy or the other have failed miserably.  Adhering to one strategy alone is basically a Utopian ideal that ignores the dual nature of our character.  It also ignores changing environmental condition that would favor one strategy over another.

The basic game of life is a struggle between society and nature.  Nature is completely indifferent to our needs, and if I may quote the Bible from Genesis 17-19:

“Cursed is the ground because of you; 
   through painful toil you will eat food from it 
   all the days of your life. 
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, 
   and you will eat the plants of the field. 
By the sweat of your brow 
   you will eat your food 
until you return to the ground, 
   since from it you were taken; 
for dust you are 
   and to dust you will return.”



Which states the truism that we all must struggle against nature to survive.  It is like a chess game, where nature is our opponent, and we cannot predict it's next move.  We must be willing to adopt whatever strategy might work best against the current situation.  I would say that, in general, cooperation works best when times are tough, and individualism works best when times are easy.  In addition these strategies cannot be imposed on a society, but must form naturally, perhaps with some encouragement from our leaders.

On a personal level, our ethic is also a balance between cooperation and self-interest.  This is a problem because no-one can say where that balance lays, so each decision must be thought through if we wish to lead an ethical life.  This philosophy offers little advice on how to act, and only indicates a process by which we can try to figure out how to act, both on a personal level and a societal level.

I think it is clear that these conditions of cooperation and individualism correspond closely to economic ideologies such as communism and capitalism. The two great experiments with communism of the last century were unmitigated failures, and both China and Russia now have blended ideologies under which they are beginning to thrive.  Our own experience with Capitalism in the United States has been tempered by strong cooperative groups such as our labor unions, and encouraging them has probably save us from the turmoil that both Russia and China experienced while imposing a single strategy on an unwilling society.

Capitalism encourages the free market.  The market is another natural element of all human societies.  Even in the most basic of societies markets exist and allow specialization to make us more effective as a society.  When the government tries to impose control on a free market, black and grey markets spring up like weeds. It is in our instinct to buy and sell, barter and trade, and to do so to our best advantage.

The free market and the currencies that we create to facilitate them require trust.  The more trust we have in a market, or a currency, the more efficient they will be.  In markets we would like to trust that we are getting the best deal possible for both the buyer and the seller.  It helps to have a dis-interested third party observing trades to ensure that no cheating is occurring, especially when the market is dealing with very complex abstractions such as the multitude of derivative contracts now traded.  The government would normally act as this third party, and it is with the domain of the government to 'promote the general welfare' to do this.  Having a watchful eye on these institutions promotes trust, and encourages money and goods to go where needed with the least amount of loss.

Trust for currency is two-fold.  First of all we have to trust that the currency will retain it's value, since the paper it's printed on isn't worth much.  In actuality money will always lose some value over time due to economic forces.  The idea behind currency is that we shouldn't keep it, as it is worth very little if we simply stuff it in our mattress.  Any currency that we have should be spent on our needs or should be out doing something.  So we put it in a bank, and the bank loans it out to someone with a good idea on how to produce something and make more money, and pays it back with interest.  We get some of that interest ourselves, so our money is out doing something and returning us more money.  Other investments such as stocks and bonds work the same way.  The basic idea is that money that is just sitting around is losing value, but money that is out working will likely at least retain it's value if not increase in value.

That brings us to the second element of trust concerning currency.  In order for our money to be working for us, we have to trust people we are loaning it to, or the bank that we are depositing it in and loaning out for us. As always the case with trust you can have too much.  If you're too trusting and you loan your money out to people that have little chance to pay it back, you risk losing your money.  As a society, we seem to run in a cycle of trust, as we slowly build up trust, until we begin to trust too much.  Then when loans start to go bad and people start to loose money, our trust plummets.  When our trust plummets, people with good ideas that are low risk have trouble getting loans, and the economy slows down, because our money is not working hard enough.  Again, the best way to avoid this is to 'dampen' the cycle by not allowing to much trust.  And once again, the government can act as a dis-interested third party to keep an eye on loans and impose regulations to prevent loaning money to too many high risk ventures.  Trust is the lubricant that spins the gears of our economy.

The free market can be seen as a natural entity. It pops up naturally where ever people gather.  It is like a jungle where a little rain and a little sunshine produce growth without any other input.  Left of it's own accord, the law of the jungle reigns.  It is interesting to hear the cognitive dissonance expressed in our current Republican primary where 'vulture capitalism' is decried and at the same time an unimpeded free market is promoted.  The free market will produce both wildebeest and lions, and if we can't stomach watching the lions take down the wildebeest and the vultures picking over the carcass, we need to impose a little bit of control over the situation. Survival of the fittest works great in the jungle, but stability is a rational concern for society and it's components. So again the government can step in an impose anti-trust laws and support for fledgling enterprise.

Individualists abhor big government, libertarians believe that people can govern themselves.  And yet without enough government, the law of the jungle reigns.  Such Utopian ideas as promoted by libertarians ignore human nature and the conflict in us all between cooperation and self-interest.  We will always have conflict between people, and we need a trusted dis-interested third party to help resolve such matters peacefully.  In my previous blog on ethics, I describe the concept we create in our minds of an ideal outcome to situations, but how nature is indifferent to this ideal.  Government is a fundamental way that we can wrestle nature towards the ideal outcome, and help satisfy our desire for justice and equal treatment for all.  Government cannot create the ideal outcome, but it can help to soften the blows of fate, and make life more enjoyable for all (the pursuit of happiness).

Since the optimal solution is a balance between cooperation and individualism (big government vs little government), and that balance is impossible to calculate, the best that we can do is find the balance as a result of the democratic process.  That will not find the optimal balance, but it will find one that is considered as fair as possible by most people. And it tends to be self-correcting as we do correctly identify when we have way to much of one or the other and swing in the opposite direction.  Unfortunately, it is a compromise, and a good compromise is one that makes both sides equally unhappy.  So if you're unhappy with the size of our government, whether you think its too big or too small, take heart, you're not alone.