Cooperating Sincerely
Unfolding what really makes us thrive.
Whenever we enter a moment of cooperating sincerely, we feel it. It can be as easy as helping someone lift a table.
The emphasis, though, is on sincerely. If we cooperate solely to further our own goals or our personal gain, we might end up cooperating instrumentally.
But if we sincerely see the other humans we cooperate with, if we feel that they see us, and if we are able to feel ourselves during the process, then even a small act of cooperating sincerely can make our day.
It's not that easy
In today's world, such moments are astonishingly rare. They can feel like a break from our current standard mode, which is me solving my problems by myself, for myself.
Even in team settings, we’re often inclined and expected to look after ourselves. And sometimes we might even view other team members as competitors – for pay, for promotions, for recognition, or in the unspoken contest for who's the brightest, the most productive, or the most likable in the room.
The currently dominating paradigm is cooperating instrumentally
Much of our current social and organizational environments are reinforcing a competitive mindset. They constantly expose us to a perception that we have to compete for things that are scarce. The deeper we integrate this perception into our perspective on the world, the more we develop a scarcity mindset that constantly prevents us from seeing and enjoying the beauty of life.
This ‘social programming’ is reflected in widely used theoretical frameworks, like game theory and neoclassical economics. Both rest on a paradigm of scarcity, resulting in an instrumental concept of cooperation. On a practical level, this programming can lead us to loose our capacity to trust and replace it with a fear-driven need to control. In result, cooperation might become a tool for controlling other peoples’ behavior through a transaction logic.
Overview: Cooperating Instrumentally versus Cooperating Sincerely
It starts early
For many of us, the social programming towards cooperating instrumentally begins early in life. For example, the school grading system trains us in developing a competitive mindset that is driven by fear.
Often, this mindset is transmitted to us even earlier through our parents. They themselves might have been trapped in mindsets of scarcity and competition in their jobs and social environments. For them as well es for us, these mindsets can be reinforced by the constant struggle to get our needs met under the diverse pressures we face from a fear-dominated society.
Even if we happen to grow up in a protected environment with progressive schooling methods and care-takers who are loving and relaxed: Once we enter the broader, less protective society, we might face competitive pressures that force us to choose between ‘toughening up’ or ‘losing out’.
We can try it out any moment
The currently dominating social and economic structures tend to constantly distract us from developing a practice of cooperating sincerely. But it’s pretty easy to see why this mode of cooperation is healthier and more fulfilling than acting out of a mindset of scarcity and fear.
We just need to look back to the last time we cooperated with someone without expecting something in return, like in the example of helping someone lift a table from the beginning of this text. How did that feel as a state of being? It’s this feeling that cooperating sincerely is about.
We can observe the opposite just as easily. As soon as we get frustrated or driven by our fears, we feel a need to look after our own claims. Instead of enjoying the beauty of life, we get into defense mode. We build castles around our feelings and start fighting for our own advantage to prevent others from taking advantage of us.
We just need to remember the last time when we where in a situation with people who we normally like and feared that we wouldn’t get enough. How did it feel to ‘look after myself’ in that moment?
Cooperating sincerely is what we ‘e made for
None of this comes as a surprise. The inclination to cooperate is a fundamental aspect of our evolutionary ‘programming’. It’s what made us humans so successful as a species. Check out Rutger Bregman's book ‘Human Kind - A hopeful History’ for a fun to read overview of studies and historical examples of how cooperation-oriented we humans actually are by default.
The competition mindset, by contrast, is just a fallback mode that we resort to when we feel threatened. We can also simulate such a threat in playful ways, when we compete for fun in games or sport.
But the real, underlying problem is that our current social and economic structures constantly make us feel threatened to some extent. Even in materially rich societies, where life is objectively safer than it has ever been for human beings, we constantly fear to miss out materially or in terms of status and self-worth.
To make things worse, we tend to take on patterns of excessive consumption in our attempt to compensate for our fundamental unease in this setting. Which contributes to real, self-made threats like climate change and the devastation of our natural ecosystems.
On top of that, a fear and control-driven mindset makes us search for power. And being in positions of power reduces our capacity for empathy and compassion. If our fears are very deep, we might even get addicted to power and in result we might start making the world a more threatening place for everyone else.
So how to get back to cooperating sincerely?
Now the fundamental question is, how can we create social and organizational environments that enable us to sincerely practice our cooperative human nature? How can we build and protect environments in which we feel safe and happy, without being driven by a ‘need’ to gain power and take advantage of others?
Fortunately, there are examples of communities everywhere that cooperate sincerely at least to some extent. Sometimes it happens within families, sometimes within religious communities, sometimes within communities who connect around other common purposes.
Yet, even these communities and their members face constant pressure from the broader social and economic structures that undermine our mindset of cooperating sincerely.
And even if we are lucky enough to live in a democracy, our current political and economic institutions tend to fail to create safe environments for cooperating sincerely at large scale. This comes at no surprise, as they are deeply intertwined with the mindset of scarcity and competition due to the influence of the corporate logic.
Strengthening islands of sincere cooperation
Nevertheless, there exists a colorful diversity of communities who practice sincere cooperation in one way or another. For some of us, it’s easy to find a home in these communities. For others, it may seem incredibly hard. And almost all of us are times and again confronted with the pressures of the scarcity and competition that currently dominate our societies.
This is why we started an initiative to build a social network to support people, communities, and organizations who want to unfold and develop their capacity for cooperating sincerely.
We call this initiative Cosyland (“Cosy” standing for Cooperating sincerely). Our common denominator is the sincere wish to live in harmony with our cooperative human nature. We build this on the rich ground of existing movements and projects all around the world.
And since we are living in a moment in history where the advancements in artificial intelligence are about to accelerate all of this in ways that are hard to predict, Cosyland is accompanied by the cooperative project CosyAI.
Check them out, join us in co-shaping them, drop the self-restraining mindsets of scarcity and competition, and let's cooperate sincerely. :)