As was discussed in the previous post, the rotation of authority among members lessens the risk of usurpation, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Nothing will eliminate the risk of usurpation by individuals with miscreant intentions. However the rotation of authority & responsibility does lessen that risk. Another way that it lessens that risk also provides an additional benefit: increased expertise & capability across the membership. Since the various positions of authority or responsibility are shared & rotated among all the membership, the strength of the organization is only as strong as its weakest link. The value of rotating these positions is that even the weakest link becomes stronger with more practice & exposure to the responsibilities of the role. People can learn to be competent in a wide variety of areas. Could everyone learn to fly an airplane? The vast majority could if given the training & experience. There will always be members of the human race who lack certain cognitive ability, & a cooperative society would have to find roles for them that they can hold responsibly without feeling denigrated or denied. Each of us has limitations, some more drastic & complicated than others, but each has limitations. These limitations shouldn’t be seen as negatives however. A cooperative society would find ways to accentuate & utilize these individuals for their strengths rather than denying them based on their limitations. While a blind person shouldn’t be flying an airplane or driving a car (at least until these machines can be driven without needing to see), they can hold other roles within a society.
Rotating positions of authority & responsibility will provide the education & improvement of each member of the cooperative community. While some positions will require expertise in order to fulfill, the goal will be to spread that expertise across the community. Obscuring & occulting knowledge has been a real source of power in human society since the earliest civilizations. A cooperative society would despise such occulted knowledge & monopolized expertise. A society that seeks to improve itself will look to having all members of the society well-versed in all areas of expertise & responsibility. Why would they seek this? Competency across the community means that no necessary task is limited to a small group of individuals, but can be performed by most if not all of the community. This prevents problems when & if the expert becomes incapacitated for any reason. Beyond that, the community develops and improves on these tasks & responsibilities as competency grows. As the community becomes more fluent in a particular skill or task, individuals will begin to find ways to improve or innovate. The more individuals know about a body of knowledge the more that their individual experience & cognition will absorb and critique the way that the body of knowledge is being used. An example of cooperation with a body of knowledge shared & transparent would be the open-source programming community. Cooperation across disciplines is a common, if not necessarily commonly practiced, tenet of education. Students learn best when they see connections between the various disciplines. The same would be true in a cooperative society. Those with mechanical & structural skills will see the same problem with different eyes than the analytical & logistical minds. This will lead to innovation & evolution of the process to be more efficient & productive.
The rotational process also develops the new members of the community. Whether an individual decides to voluntarily join the cooperative community or the children of the community mature & become ready to hold positions of increasing responsibility, the rotational process acts as an apprenticeship for learning the procedures & skills necessary to hold and deliver the responsibilities of a certain position. As individuals matriculate through the rotational process, they receive the approval of the community to hold particular authority individually rather than as an apprentice. Whether the skills are managerial or leadership oriented or skill-based and artisan, the individual develops a competency that the community recognizes & rewards with the responsibility. The desire to be recognized & rewarded with increased responsibility is a motivation to improve one’s abilities & knowledge, perhaps more so than monetary compensation. That’s not to say that a cooperative society might choose to compensate individuals with higher levels of expertise & responsibility. A cooperative society would not deny any individual the opportunity to hold those higher compensation positions. The more individuals who had the expertise, the more individuals who could receive that compensation. If it came to a point where everyone had the competency, then either the competency no longer needs to be rewarded, or the opportunity to be rewarded is rotated among all the membership. This goes to the level of desire & motivation of the individual members of the cooperative. This sharing of responsibility & reward wouldn’t inhibit competition, but it would make competition fairer, without the monopolization of occulted knowledge. Let’s take the example of a cooperative ballet troupe. Instead of one or two individuals being the lead ballerina, the position would be rotated among all competent members of the group. Rather than a popularity contest or who knows who, who’s sleeping with whom, the competition for the position would rely on skill & ability to fulfill all the moves of the particular dance. If only two or three of the members of the troupe can accomplish the dance with competence, then the rotation is between those three. However the opportunity holds that any other member of the troupe can demonstrate competency & be brought into the rotation. The troupe’s membership would come to consensus on what these competencies would be. Anyone who has worked in the arts knows that many of the decisions about who will be exalted often have more to do with popularity or courtier-like behavior towards the arbiters of exaltation. Would rotating the lead role of a ballet stifle competition & stagnate the learning? Some would say that it would as the incentive to hold the role would be diminished because someone couldn’t hold it alone. That seems absurd. In healthy competition where the end result is not a zero-sum result (either I hold the role or someone else will), the healthy competition is to improve to a point where fewer & fewer can master the competency. As the skills become more & more difficult, fewer will be able to meet the standards, so the competition is to be among those who can. Perhaps even in a cooperative, there may only be one ballerina who can perform a particular dance at the highest level, but eventually there will be others who by aspiring to the role will achieve the competence. The cooperative individual will not be against sharing the lead position.
Naturally for any cooperative organization or community to flourish, it will require a changing mentality & attitude toward competition & sharing of knowledge. As long as individuals can benefit from occulting information & preventing others from exploiting the knowledge as well, the cooperative organization will struggle to grow. Never-the-less we also know that this monopolization of knowledge & expertise creates a society that is inherently unjust, divisive & destructive. The goal of a cooperative effort is to eliminate these qualities of the current system-in-place that prevent humanity from evolving & solving the complex & immense problems that humanity faces in the 21st century. Rotational processes would attempt to circumnavigate the monopolization of knowledge & skill for power toward a more just and humane competition of ideas. A competition to improve the lot of all rather than the lot of a few.
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