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In TV land, the word “cooperation” is substituted for “submission,” as when the crime suspect is shown the jig is up and he’d be better off if he “cooperated.” Or the hostage you know is going to be killed is told by his abductor to “cooperate” or die. These are not instances of cooperation; they are admissions of defeat.
Thus, cooperation is dismissed as weakness, failure, and domination is evangelized. But the violence of domination is incessant competition to be top dog, war at every level, a sorry waste of effort and resources. Competition is the most wasteful of all extravagant luxuries.
Cooperation is the synergistic communal effort to save Baby Jessica from the well. No submission there, no defeat, but the highest benefit to everyone involved. Cooperation is commuters who escaped being crushed by the collapse of stacked highways in the California earthquake going back under the unstable rubble to help the trapped and injured. No weakness there. Cooperation is a neighborhood cleaning out some garbage-filled vacant lots to make a communal garden. It’s workers taking over a closed factory and making it productive again. It’s a farmers’ market. It’s all that is positive and beneficial to communities, yet there is a concerted effort to ridicule cooperation as weak Kumbaya crap. Power structures need people to be competitive individuals, so that we’ll be weak. Power structures need us to be polarized extremists so that we battle each other instead of working together for reform. Power structures need to demonize gays, Muslims, commies, immigrants, people getting welfare,-oh, let’s see, yeah, the list ultimately includes all of us, with different pieces of the list going to different demographics. Classic divide-and-conquer. Classic diversion from what’s important. Classic misdirection from the real culprits.
They make fools of us, and we play the role convincingly. We say we need to get our kids into top schools so they can be competitive, but we don’t see that this ramping-up of competitiveness has only made everyone else more competitive, too, so no one’s better off and everyone’s nastier. Way to go. We relish getting our buttons pushed, because it stimulates us like a drug. But it also keeps us under the thrall of our pushers. So smart. We believe the tale we’re told that the way to become rich and powerful is to swear off our genetic instinct to cooperate for mutual benefit, and become sociopathic instead. We believe the tale we’re told that the prosperous do well because they are competitive, but the core of world-controlling corporations is cooperation, a perverse cooperation, but cooperation nevertheless. It’s the suppliers who are put at each other’s throats, not the corporate cabals. It’s you, all the suppliers of brake linings for cars, who have to be ruthless, not the global car-making cartel. They play you, and you’re grateful to be able to survive by doing away with your employees’ health insurance. You would think, from how you’re treated, that there’s a surplus of what you make to sell, but a shortage of money to pay you for these goods. As long as you believe this tale, you keep playing the desperate survivor role. We all do, and it’s the cruelest game of manipulation imaginable, to keep us at each other’s throats so that the controllers can stay in control of us.
We are at our best when we’re saving Baby Jessica, and planting a communal garden where garbage and rats once ruled the neighborhood. Whatever we’re told is too nicey-nice, whatever we’re told is too suspiciously communistic, whatever we’re told is insufficiently American/patriotic/free-enterprise-loving,-whatever we’re told, question it, because we were probably onto something good. When one in 150 of us is in prison, control of us is apparently important to our controllers. Do you really believe we’re more evil than people anywhere else in the world? Or more controlled?
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