Self-Reliance & the Trivium

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One of the first ways that we can become more self-reliant is honing our critical thinking skills & ability to decipher others ideas while communicating our own clearly. Self-reliant individuals are autodidacts who never give up the love of learning. Learning remains our best skill, and we must constantly strive to learn better & faster. The Internet provides so many paths to learning. I’ve used YouTube.com to learn how to do many of the repairs that I’ve done myself on my home. It’s amazing, & I’ve been able to save money by doing it myself, besides the sense of confidence that I’ve gained once I know how to make repairs that would cost a fortune if I hired a contractor to complete them. As an educator, I’ve spent my career trying to teach students to develop the skills necessary to be life-time learners with varying degrees of success. I’ve developed several skill sets that they need to learn & apply in order to become autodidactic. Self-reliance demands that we practice learning throughout our lives, & I want to share some of the skills & methods that I’ve assembled from a variety of sources to help people learn adeptly. 

  

"Blooms rose" by K. Aainsqatsi - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

First, let’s understand the path of learning through what’s known in education as Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. This taxonomy portrays a hierarchy of learning from the most basic to the most complex. The path begins with basic ‘knowledge’ followed by ‘comprehension’, ‘application’, ‘analysis’, ‘synthesis’, & ‘evaluation’. This stair-step progression helps to develop a process of learning that should be applied to any learning endeavor. Going from terminology & information to utilizing the information, analyzing the information then creating an interpretation of that information & finally evaluating the information & your interpretation. Educators strive to apply each of these levels of cognition to their lessons & longer plans. It is a process that self-reliant individuals should constantly apply to their learning. If we aren’t learning & evaluating our learning, we aren’t progressing. Self-reliant individuals don’t become complacent with their position, they constantly seek progress (Does that make us progressives?). This is how I interpret Nietzsche’s call for overcoming. We must overcome what we are in order to become what we can be. Humanity must overcome its limitations by a constant effort to progress & not retard that progress. I digress.

While Bloom’s taxonomy has a Wikipedia page that explains it more fully, I want to direct your attention to another method of learning that has been developed quite fully by Gene Odening & Jan Irvin on a website called gnosticmedia. This method is called the Trivium, & it places Bloom’s taxonomy into three categories that autodidacts can use to hone & apply their learning skills. The Trivium applies three levels of thinking: Grammar, Logic, & Rhetoric. Tying these levels to Bloom’s taxonomy means that Grammar represents the knowledge & comprehension levels, Logic is the application & analysis levels, & rhetoric is the synthesis & evaluation levels.
 

Grammar isn’t your English teacher correcting your syntax & usage. Grammar in the concept of the Trivium refers to the first four words of the age-old comprehension questions that teachers use: the "5w’s & h". Grammar focuses on the who, the what, the when, & the where. In the Trivium, we cannot progress until we know & comprehend these. Grammar is the terminology, the facts, the details & the quotes that we are studying. This is the first two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

 Logic refers to the next two levels of the taxonomy: application & analysis. Here the learner takes the Grammar & applies that next "w" question, Why? by applying the knowledge to experience & analyzing its value. Why do we need this knowledge? Why does the source put this knowledge out there? 

Rhetoric applies the next two levels through the how question. How doe this compare to my experience? How can I use this knowledge? How does the source use this knowledge? How well or accurately am I portraying the knowledge? How accurately does the source apply this knowledge? This is the highest levels of learning, & where we actually build our learning into wisdom. I created a chart for my students to help them analyze literature, although I use different terms for Grammar, Logic & Rhetoric:

Proficiency Chart by J K Van Nort is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Another way of seeing the Trivium is to think of the Grammar as absorbing information verbatim, then Logic as analyzing that information for accuracy, fallacious thoughts, & utility, then Rhetoric as evaluating & communicating that information to others. As we say in the education profession: the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to others. A self-reliant individual isn’t afraid to communicate their learning to others. This is why ultimately self-reliant individuals cooperate readily & successfully. How can I make such a bold assumption. Well let’s put the Trivium to work on this rhetoric:

A self-reliant individual isn’t afraid to communicate their learning to others. This is why ultimately self-reliant individuals cooperate readily & successfully. 

I’d begin by ensuring that I understand completely all the terms in the statement. Words that need agreement on the definition should be comprehended first. The autodidact would probably identify ‘self-reliant’, ‘individual’, & ‘cooperate’ as words that might be defined differently by different people. So self-reliance - The capacity to rely on one's own capabilities, and to manage one's own affairs; independence not to be dependent; cooperate - Association for mutual benefit, such as for purposes of production or purchase; & individual - A person considered alone, rather than as belonging to a group of people

The basic argument that I comprehend is that independent people (who?) don’t fear sharing their learning (what?) with others which implies that independent people associate for mutual benefit better (when? & where?). So I’ve done my Grammar, I’ve ensured that I have completely comprehended the ‘knowledge’ & ‘information’ in the statement.

Next I’m going to apply logic to the argument. Why does the statement make the claim that self-reliant individuals cooperate better? The author attempts to demonstrate that independence & autonomy lead to cooperation. His agenda is to convince others that self-reliance produces opportunities for cooperation. Why does he think this? First he sees someone with self-reliance as independent & capable, who won’t be harmed by cooperation significantly. Why is he making this argument? He’s making the argument to convince others that cooperation is possible between independent people, & in fact he’s arguing that self-reliant individuals make the best individuals in associations for mutual benefit. Why can he make that claim? He claims that self-reliance makes one less susceptible to being violated, & he also claims that independent people tend to cooperate more frequently & successfully. Why would I disagree with this statement? Well, I know that independent people can still be fooled or harmed by others. I also know that just because one is independent, it doesn’t mean that they will be willing to cooperate. They may very well seek to remain alone & without involving themselves in any associations with others. This doesn’t negate the statement; the statement remains possible & even probable when we consider that self-reliant individuals would likely have the confidence to associate with other self-reliant individuals to accomplish what they cannot accomplish alone.

The third step of the Trivium is rhetoric, where we ask the question how? How does this relate to the world around me? I know that cooperation is not an easy process, & that if I were personally going to create associations for mutual benefit, I would want to pick the people with whom I associated rather than just associate with anyone. How would this work? Well, let’s say that I wanted to develop a business to repair & re-purpose items that I’ve found. I might start the business by myself, then slowly adding individuals who want to do the same thing, build a cooperative that works together for mutual benefit. The association could determine how one becomes a member of the cooperative, & how the mutually shared tools & supplies are maintained & replaced or expanded. How would the cooperative remove members who didn’t fulfill or didn’t participate according to cooperative guidelines? The cooperative would have to establish rules for membership that must be fulfilled or the membership could be revoked. If a member didn’t participate according to the rules but made it difficult to remove him, then the whole association could be disbanded & the shared items distributed according to who provided them or in an equitable manner. Then a new cooperative could be established that didn’t include the non-cooperative member. How valuable is associating with other self-reliant individuals for mutual benefit? I’d value it highly because it offers ways to accomplish more than I could by myself. How should I go about engaging in cooperative associations? Carefully & with the full knowledge that I have to be actively engaged in the process at all levels to ensure that my concerns & interests are protected. That active engagement is what makes me a self-reliant individual, & if I associate with other self-reliant individuals, I am less likely to be abused by cooperating.

As you can see, this process is simply to gain mastery of the information that has been studied. The purpose of the Trivium isn’t to provide a fool-proof method for learning as much as a process for learning that increases the ability of the individual to determine the value & utility of information. The Trivium method can be applied to any learning effort. If I want to learn how to program computers, I’d follow the same procedure. This means that when I’m learning something new, I need to always follow the same procedure. The consistency of applying the Trivium process will make the process more natural for the individual & increase the ability of the individual to learn assuredly & efficiently. The Trivium should be applied to anything we decide to add to our understanding of the world. If we are shopping for siding for our house, we should apply the Trivium process to establish the best siding, the best contractor to install the siding, whether siding is our best option, whether we could install the siding ourselves, how much value would siding provide to our house, how much will it insulate our home? If we are going to answer these questions, we must use every level of the Trivium to learn about siding & make an informed & educated decision. This is the value & utility of the Trivium: to provide the self-reliant individual with the means to educate themselves on whatever area they deem necessary to function as a self-reliant individual. Self-reliance demands that we continuously educate ourselves on the world around us, & the Trivium is an excellent tool to accomplish that demand.

Non-aggression & Cooperation (Anethema to the Collectivist)

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A system of cooperation needs to follow the ways that people already cooperate, Saul Alinsky’s meeting people where they are. Any system of cooperation must find ways to incorporate cooperation into everyday life without making it into a doctrine. There is no doctrine in cooperation, there is only process. The process is not fixed as doctrine is fixed. Process is organic & malleable. 

When I study systems by their organization, I find that organic systems come closest to portraying human cooperation. Bear with my analogy here: A plant sends out feelers & branches in multiple directions. When those feelers find sunlight or space or whatever the plant seeks, the feeler prospers & grows. When it finds an impediment or an obstacle, it either stops movement or changes direction. Either result is based on the needs of the plant. Now before this starts to look like collectivism, the organic structure is a model of cooperation based on a consensus, so the root & main trunk of the plant in the organic structure represent the consensus. The feelers are individuals or small groups who push the consensus to where it needs to go. If the consensus is that we need to have better security, then each feeler is seeking the places that need to be protected. If the consensus is to build a barter system that provides needs to individuals, then the feelers are attempts to create needed commodities for the consensus to barter & exchange. The idea or the consensus must be continuously part of all the members of the organic cooperative, their actions are determined by the consensus. Anything they do outside the consensus is based on the self-reliant individual’s volition. It doesn’t reflect on the consensus unless it violates or goes against the consensus. 

So for instance in the case of the bartering cooperative, individual volunteers can barter within the cooperative but also sell or trade outside the cooperative as well. They cannot be coerced into bartering only with the cooperative. They can volunteer to do so, but they can not be compelled. If coercion is used, cooperation has vanished. 

This is the gist: cooperation only exists voluntarily between self-reliant individuals. Cooperation cannot be coerced. That would be turning cooperation into collectivism. That is not the nature of cooperation. Cooperation is a natural human function that negates the need for coercion & force. When people speak of eliminating the state, they shouldn’t envision a new hierarchy. Instead, anarchists envision cooperation. The building of cooperation comes through consensus. A consensus is only as large as its constituency. If consensus is only between two people, that is the extent of its constituency. No coercion can force another person to join the consensus in good faith. Anytime someone attempts to claim the authority to coerce another, they have committed a crime against humanity (I don't use that term lightly. The claim of authority has always been at the center of the worst crimes against humanity, & those crimes would not have been committed without the claim to authority). As equals, we cannot claim authority over another. Because the moment that we claim that authority, we have to use coercion & force to hold that authority. This violates the basic premise that we all have equal rights to life & liberty. 

What seems like a given - this basic premise of equal right to life & liberty - is not a consensus. Those who promote collectivism do not concede this basic premise. They are always willing to use force to compel others to their beliefs. This isn’t cooperation. Cooperation isn’t an ideology, it is a process. Cooperation is a human action that requires empathy, imagination, communication & shared values. Consensus develops the shared values. Only the values that have consensus can be part of any cooperative effort. The empathy required for cooperation is the ability to see one’s self in others. By doing so, an individual can imagine opportunities to share work, play, creation, anything, once they can empathize with another individual. Without empathy, cooperation is a non-starter & collectivism finds the ground to purchase. Let me phrase that another way: without empathy, it is easy to seek collectivist means to achieve one’s ends. When we don’t feel empathy for others, we can do some really horrendous acts in the name of doing good. This is why Jesus’ command to love your enemy as yourself is a cooperative statement & not a collectivist statement. With empathy, we can find ways to work together in cooperation rather than coercion.

We need imagination in cooperation because imagination leads to the new ideas that can become the advances that benefit all. Imagination comes in many guises & generally creates both innovative & mundane ideas. Some make life better, some simply provide entertainment. Some imagination leads to collectivism, which inherently leads to violence, once the individual has determined that their imagined idea should be put into place by force.

Individuals have violent imaginations. What needs to occur for those within proximity of that individual is to not build consensus with this violence except the consensus that violent imagination must remain in the abstract & never become actionable. With empathy & imagination, cooperative individuals may find ways to build consensus with even someone who has violent tendencies & channel those tendencies into other arenas. Violence has a source. At the heart of violence is the nature of the world we inhabit. Violence is perpetrated by larger creatures onto smaller creatures to fulfill dietary needs. There is no end to violence. There is only purposing of violence. How do we purpose violence into positive needs? Hunting for food is one. Sports is another. Video games could be an outlet for violence, but an outlet isn’t necessarily a positive outcome. Violence is not self-defense, but violence can be channeled toward self-defense through martial arts that practice the martial art in non-aggressive methods. So there are ways to channel violence into self-defense & non-aggression. Do I need to explain here that non-aggression is not pacifism. Non-aggression incorporates self-defense. Self-defense is not violence. Collectivists always blur the lines between violence & self-defense to perpetrate war. The real issue is preventing violence from being a means to accomplish agendas that demand coercion & compulsory acceptance. Cooperatives have agendas (by consensus only), but these agendas focus on the needs of the volunteers of the cooperative & never seek to force these agendas on anyone, especially people who don’t share the consensus of the cooperative volunteers. In the collective mentality, the agenda is always to promote those at the top & enforce their ideas on the rest. In opposition to the collectivist, cooperation requires a non-aggression stance.

The United States has fought multiple wars claiming to fight for democracy & freedom. As these wars clearly demonstrate, violence & force will never bring democracy or freedom to others. War will continue to provide the excuses for limiting our freedoms. War will continue to degrade the limited democracy we now have. Aggression will never lead to democratic societies & will never extend freedom. Only through non-aggression can society become democratic & free.

The War on Imagination

This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less.

“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it” Diane di Prima.

The relationship between cooperation & imagination runs deep. Imagination creates possibility allowing humans to hope & dream. Imagination introduces empathy, allowing humans to recognize themselves in others. Imagination produces innovation which gives humans the ability to work their way out of their problems. Imagination enlivens communication that builds connections between individual dreams & hopes. Imagination visualizes communities in positive, productive networks that share responsibilities & cooperative actions. Imagination allows self-reliance in the individual without compromising their membership in the family of man. Without imagination, man is an island, alone in a sea of indifference.

So when Ms. di Prima says that the war on imagination is the most important war, I have to agree. I have this quote posted front & center of my classroom because I fight this war daily. The imagination is under attack by the system-in-place that controls the majority. The system-in-place sees imagination as uniquely under its control & doesn’t want imagination cropping up in places that where it might question or deny the systems authority to control. This system must weed out the imagination where it sprouts in the orderly garden. If the system can’t eliminate alternative imagination, the system must co-opt it, corrupting it before it can flower into revolution.

Who comprises this system-in-place? Everyone & no one. This system continues because the imagination to see an alternative system or process being possible doesn't have mass exposure. When imagination envisions alternate ways of interacting as humans, the herd criminalizes those ideas. Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that “He who seeks may easily become lost himself. It is a crime to go apart & be alone. Thus speaks the herd.” That quote has always meant for me that the herd denounces anything that doesn’t compute in the herd mind. The herd will always seek to denounce those who find ways to travel outside the herd. Fear & complacency, two potent weapons against the imagination, reign in the herd, acting as sheep dogs to keep the flock together. Yet, even for those who do attempt to think outside the box, Nietzsche also points out that the herd’s voice still rings in their ears, & they must be constantly on guard themselves of these weapons in the war on imagination: what if I’m not accepted? what if people denounce me? what if I’m wrong? what if I’m exiled from humanity by my thoughts?

Plato’s analogy of the cave offers an image of that individual who ‘seeks to go apart’ when the individual who has been in the cave watching the images on the wall finds his way out of the cave & into the sunlight. In the sunlight, he finds a whole new world, one which isn’t simply flickering shadows across a darkened wall. He must ask himself: do I stay here & enjoy this new found place? or do I go back & bring others with me? Plato’s character returns & like the herd, those whom he seeks to enlighten, rebuke & eventually kill him. This is not a positive way to think about imagination being shared with others.

However, Socrates, who is often equated as the lonely seeker of the sunlight & was executed by the Athenians for misguiding the youth, created beyond himself & inseminated the Greek philosophy that is a benchmark of western civilization. We are all part of the herd, living in the world of humanity. We must be willing to risk imagining alternative ways of living together in peace & cooperation. We must accept the “slings & arrows of outrageous fortune” by empathizing with our fellow humans & seeking to communicate alternatives that don’t attempt to coerce others to accept. We must strive to be self-reliant without being misanthropes. We must imagine that others seek this self-reliance & peaceful cooperation as much as we do. We need to nurture collaboration between other self-reliant individuals. We need to recognize failure to communicate as merely a lesson in how to improve that communication so that we can build an alternative to the competitive, materialistic & nihilistic system that currently controls the way humans interact. Instead of pointing fingers at those whom we believe control the system, we need to point to those who find alternative ways to be productive & self-reliant without harming those around them. We need to model self-reliance by constantly seeking to be more self-reliant, & we need to model cooperation by not being afraid to cooperate with others to produce what we cannot produce alone. The fear of being cheated or disadvantaged by our cooperation must be overcome by attempts to develop ways to minimize those risks rather than denying that self-reliant voluntary cooperation can be benevolent & equitable. Possibly devolving into sloganeering, I reference the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine” where he simply asks people to imagine something other than what is. If enough imagine a better way to live together in peace, we stand a chance of getting out from under the system-in-place.

The war on imagination seeks to maintain the status quo. We must be the forces of change that imagine the possible & work to make it the probable until it can be the reality.

Creativity & Cooperation

I’ve been reading Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking which has elicited ideas regarding the concept of creativity & where that aligns with what Heidegger says. First let’s summarize the Discourse's ideas as I see it. Heidegger makes the point that there are two ways of thinking, the scientific way & the meditative way. The scientific way delves in facts & experience of physical presence, but doesn’t explore below the surface of reality. The meditative way looks deeper into the experience & the evidence to think about some underlying meaning behind the visible experience. These two ways of thinking & observing are part of being, but they also represent our subjective & voyeuristic observation of the world around us. Many choose merely to observe the surface of this world, to explore only what is available to the five senses without asking the more pertinent questions of why & how. They aren’t interested in implication or interpretation. Others want to explore the deeper comprehensions, to analyze these experiences & contemplate their implications in this world. These individuals become the synthesizers of the results of their analysis & meditation. They create beyond their experience. They will no longer seek to meet the expectations of others. This is what Emerson means by what he says in Self-Reliance: “that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion” and begin to plow his own field & reap his own harvest. This is the person who goes beyond the surface knowledge of understanding & the scientific knowledge to the deeper field under the surface, where the world will produce for those who till the soil. For those who simply see the soil as surface, as path, there is a limit to their harvest. It is the person who doesn’t simply exist, who doesn’t simply follow the example of others & find the job that pays the bills. It is the person who goes beyond, whether that beyond is profitable or not is not the point. If she can be self-reliant, then she can go where she likes. As I sat proctoring the mind-numbing Regents tests, I sat in meditation of the sort that I hope emulated the ideas that Heidegger was suggesting, that there was a horizon that had to be coaxed out with waiting, that if I simply existed while existence spoke to me, it would reveal at least for a moment what that meant. What that moment of existence became was the sound of violence, violence in the humming of the radiator & the electrical current, the violence of the scratching of pencils on paper or pages being turned, pages & paper that attacked the students, damaged them with the mirror to their ignorance & the education system that had developed that ignorance by dampening their flame of imagination, that had salted their fertile soil with meaningless & disconnected trivial information that had no connections to the things around them. Heidegger wanted to move people beyond the surface & into the violence that is often perpetrated upon them as they only look at the surface of their existence.

These tests inflicted punishment for the student's attempts to maintain their independence & creativity. It exposed them to the cruel world of quantification that values only measured results, that without quantification, their ideas & creations lack meaning, lack value. This is the core of the damage that has been done. This is the same damage that has quantified value into monetary value. The conflating of values with money leads to the place where everyone is measured by their monetary value to the system. Productivity becomes a quantifiable, monetary measure. Intelligence becomes a quantifiable, monetary measure. Individual thoughts only have value if they can be quantified by money. Look at how education level is valued only by the average salary that can be gained by pursuing the education level. This nullifies creativity unless creativity can be monetarily measured.

When we speak of creativity, it is necessary to discuss what creation involves. It involves taking the materials of the current world & compounding them into something new, something that hasn’t been on the earth before in the same form. How does this manifest? It manifests in the completed product, that may not be completely new (what really is new?) but new enough & unique enough to make it different from what has come before. It may not really do anything that impressive, but even using the waste of our current world to make a bottle opener is a start. Creativity may simply be producing a garden that wasn’t there before, or repairing a house to fit the needs of a family. These are creative acts that are self-reliant. This is the key to the creative necessity of life: creativity is a strong plank in the house of self-reliance. Self-reliance & cooperation nurture creativity. This creativity comes from necessity & innovation, innovation that seeks to solve problems with one’s own abilities. The more that someone attempts to create beyond their current abilities, the more they establish themselves in self-reliance. The more self-reliant they become the more creative they become, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have seen individuals who have build their own homes from scratch by learning how to do it & then challenging themselves to accomplish the mission or goal they’ve set. This is the reason why cooperation requires self-reliant individuals, who don’t depend on others, but who recognize that sometimes cooperation yields benefits for a group of self-reliant individuals willing to cooperate to accomplish a larger task beyond the scope of even the most self-reliant individual’s capacity.

This is precisely what the Regents don't promote. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) won't promote this either. The education that prepares students to pass either of these tests won't develop students' creativity, self-reliance or cooperation. Where is the creativity in regurgitating trivia? Where is the creativity in writing essays that prevent individuality because the rubrics demand specific formation & content? How is self-reliance developed when the CCSS implies that if a student can't pass this test, he must not be capable of anything society might value? Where is the cooperative spirit? Only in conspiring to cheat on the test, which students across the country have demonstrated great imagination & cooperation to achieve. Power to their efforts!

Creativity comes from necessity, & the self-reliant individual meets necessity with innovation & creativity as much as determination & confidence. In fact, it is the failures & corrections of the failed behaviors & efforts that lead to the innovation & creativity that develops the increasingly self-reliant individual. This goes for any skill or activity. Cooperation amidst self-reliant individuals will be competitive in trying to be the individual who discovers or creates the successful innovation that benefits the group or solves the problem faced by  the community. These cooperative efforts can be seen in a basketball team. Everyone must learn to work together, to try new plays & rehearse the routine skills like dribbling & shooting & passing. The better & more adept that each member of the team becomes at using these routine skills improves the deadliness of the team’s attack. The more they trust each other, the more they can push each other to innovate & create situations that exploit the enemy’s weakness. The more they compete with each other to be better & better, the more their competitiveness becomes a driving force against their opponents. In the individual the need to improve their skills becomes a competition with one’s self to achieve more than had been accomplished before.

Creativity has been usurped by the corporate world into the marketing/advertising realm. Many creative people become marketing specialists, creating the commercials & advertising that influences their fellow individuals. So much of creativity is being utilized to manipulate others rather than to create utility & innovation. Even when creativity begins as an honest attempt to make something new, it is often usurped by manipulation or the desire to manipulate.

Creation doesn’t have to be on the Picasso level, it can be as simple as creating a new way of doing something. Whether I’m working on my garden & making it not only functional but also individual & beautiful, I’m creating. When I’m establishing contacts & cooperation between disparate people or neighbors, I’m creating a network that wasn’t there before. We have this notion in the world that somehow creativity is the purview of artists only. Only those who have been ‘recognized’ and have ‘attention’ deserve the adjective, creative. This is a fallacy. There is creativity happening everywhere. The sooner society begins to recognize folk art & people’s arts, the sooner it destroys the notion that the only important art is that which comes from corporations or exists in museums. This is one of the ways that the value of art is put ahead of the value of productivity.

The same is true in athletics. There is no doubt that a great athlete has creativity in their discipline and mastery of their game, but should such an athlete be making outrageous salaries for that? Should they be crowned as something so special that we need to treat them as superior beings or classes?

Celebrity has been one of the greatest of the efforts at trying to demean the average person. Because he's not creative like Bobo here, he should be glad that he's getting anything in this world. What does he expect?

Are we to be satisfied with mediocrity? No. We shouldn’t be satisfied with mediocrity, but the way to dispel mediocrity from our lives is not to shame those whose behavior has been mediocre, but to applaud every effort to rise above mediocrity. Rather than compete for the small pedestal that recognizes only one or a few as being worthy, why not work to make everyone worthy? Why do we feel that if others succeed it lessens our success? Why do we think that if everyone were capable of independence that would somehow infringe on our independence? This is the error in judgement that leads to the ‘zero-sum game’ mentality of the current culture. In a cooperative society, the zero-sum game would have no place. Instead of the mentality that I only win if others lose, the mentality would become (not initially be, but become) 'as everyone gets better, the situation gets better'. Another way of thinking about this is to compare it to the open-source programming versus the Microsoft/Apple nexus of corporate control of source programming. The Linux software becomes better & better as more & more individuals contribute to the programs, which means that many bugs in programming get worked out by everyone to the benefit of everyone. In the corporate model, we must wait for the ‘Genius’ to come along and save us. We are dependent on the ‘Genius’ to solve the problem, leaving us at their mercy & in their ‘debt’.

Cooperation versus competition leads to more not less creativity.

The Temporary Nature of Cooperation

Rotation is the means to temporary authority, but the purpose of temporary authority is more than just prevention of usurpation or permanent hierarchical structures. Instead temporary also defines the length of the actual authority itself. Most collective actions should be temporary as a rule, self-eliminating when the need no longer exists. The best example that I have to support this would be the modern union. Collective bargaining is a necessity for workers in a capitalist society, & the workers need to negotiate directly with the corporation as a collective for the power to negotiate as equals with the corporate power. Even a few hundred workers need an individual or a committee to represent them in negotiations. What often begins as a grassroots, cooperative effort among the workers, becomes a stepping stone or a position to gain power & prestige by collectivists who seek to control others for their personal gain using the "good of the whole" mantra.

In the earliest efforts of union-building toward collective bargaining, the grassroots efforts had leaders & individuals who pressed the majority toward the necessary steps to make the collective bargaining effort possible. Again, let’s differentiate between collective action & collectivism. Getting together to watch a movie is a collective action. Workers joining together to demand better pay, working conditions, respect is a collective action. They are not collectivism necessarily. If the individuals get together & support what is ‘best for the whole group’ because they are told to do so, then willingly sacrifice some individuals to the whole, that is collectivism. If workers begin to offer up some members of the union as sacrifices for the good of the whole, say let’s give the corporation power to fire the older/younger workers so that the whole group gets a pay raise, this is collectivism.

This is the problem with the current unionism in this country. For the most part, the leaders tend to protect certain constituencies within the union that are either the most vocal or the largest in numbers. Unions become part of the hierarchy of the corporate world, standing between the workers & the corporate executives. This role, which appears as one of protection, becomes a place of power maintained by coercion & propaganda. The head of the union almost always doles out prized positions in the union structure that provide it with vocal supporters & useful idiots. Both protect & support the union leadership. The union leadership has to find justification for its existence when the collective bargaining process has ended. They generally get heavily into political efforts to elect candidates that they ‘evaluate’ as being ‘pro-union’ or ‘pro-worker’. They promote the union as benevolent & philanthropic. They provide the legal advice regarding due process & work to keep teachers from being fired unfairly or ‘not by the contract’. They also spend time promoting the union process to the membership, demonstrating why the union dues must be collected & why these dues are so important to the good of the whole. This occurs because workers within the union are led to believe that the union must be protected over everything else, that any attack on the union was an attack on them, & that they must be ready to sacrifice for the union.

I’m not well-educated on the history of the UFT, but I’m fully aware of the UNITY faction & its control of the union hierarchy. First let’s point out that every district representative & all the leadership of the UFT are members of the UNITY Faction. The faction gives out those positions as rewards for loyalty & productivity. This gives the UNITY leadership great power to wield & determines that those in positions below remain loyal to the collective. Delegate Assemblies are blatant examples of this, where any proposal not approved by the UNITY faction will be voted down in lock-step fashion. UNITY uses collective mentality that guarantees that some membership will be sacrificed for the the good of the whole. Let me be fair: no other faction in the UFT has a platform for cooperative, consensus-based organization either.

First, there is always some segment of the membership that has to be sacrificed, currently the ATRs are the sacrificial lambs to the UNITY collective. The most outspoken & active segment of the union, as well as the ones most capable of putting in the time for activity & speaking are the retirees. The retirees hold sway currently. This has not always been the case. Now however, as the baby-boomer generation retires, they represent the largest segment. Demographics is one reason for their larger position, but the other is perhaps the most insidious part of the NCLB/RTTT Common Core examinpolooza that the reform movement is perpetrating against teachers. With each of their efforts to quantify education, as if an annual test could possibly quantify the education & knowledge of anyone on any more than a snapshot, the reformers seek to discredit collective bargaining & due process. More to the point as these younger teachers are attacked, it is the retirement segment that sacrifices new teachers & allows such damage to our contract as changing the process to receive tenure & allowing certification to be called ‘professional’, hiding the fact that professional means a re-certification process every five (5) years. The old ‘permanent’ certificate meant much more even if it didn’t sound as economically viable as ‘professional’. The 3-year period where teachers can be let go without the level of due process that longer serving teachers escaped is another sacrifice. New teachers face increasingly difficult standards to teach & prepare students for the mindless testing process known as Common Core. These sacrifices lead to lower retention rates for new teachers. UNITY tells teachers that they want the testing challenge as a way to quantify good work. Again, a year's worth of effort to educate a child cannot be quantified by a high-stakes test.

As to the reformers, let me end the idea that Bill Gates & his foundation have any honest desire to improve education: Where, in any of the ideas presented by the reform movement, is it suggested that computer programming should be taught from kindergarten? If they really wanted to prepare the American children for competing in the 21st century, that would be common sense (especially from a software ‘genius’). They should probably also be learning Chinese or some foreign language from that age as well. Instead, the reformers promote more testing that numbs the minds of students beyond repair.

Back to collectivism in unions, the leadership of any union will be controlled by a faction if it is allowed to become a permanent part of the community. The long-term goal should be to put those who put their work & effort into the production in control of the means of production. For that to happen, the workers would have to be cooperative & based completely on voluntary consent to the organizing of a collective bargaining union for negotiations. It won’t happen with the traditional hierarchical system that currently occupy unions.

As factions gain control, they work for the good of the individuals with the most clout. In the 1970s during the Brownsville/Ocean Hill conflict between the parent boards & the union, this became clear by the Jewish contingents ability to force the union to fight the will of the public & the parents. They took a very unpopular stance to protect something vital to the union (due process), but as a leadership they did it without consensus, without a process that demonstrated that the union leadership actually spoke as the whole union. It must have been a very difficult decision, one that shouldn’t have been made by a small committee. The committee might come up with the suggested decision, but ultimately the union should have to come to a consensus on what that decision would be. Perhaps they would have all recognized the good reason for standing against the parents, namely due process. Unfortunately the leadership made a decision which became a division between the union & the parents/public. This division still haunts the teaching profession, as hedge fund backed 'parent organizations'  exploit that divide. 

Ultimately in a consensus-based organization, the sharing with all members of the union might have brought out options that hadn’t been explored by the committee. Consensus unifies the individuals participating; they feel empowered. They feel informed, justified by the consensus of their peers, invested. These are reasons why consensus is preferable to democracy. While there is the ability to disagree with the majority in a democracy, it always creates riffs, riffs that allow those in charge to remain in charge (divide & conquer). Collectivism at work. Now if the union were temporary, only established when negotiations needed to occur, usurpation by collectivists would be less likely. In the case of cooperative-ownership (through the cooperative process) responsibilities & authorities would be rotated among the individuals & temporary by rotation. Again, a union doesn’t have to disappear in a cooperative, but until that is in place, it should disappear between contracts as an authority-wielding entity. The membership would need to be & would be informed & comprehending of the contract language (since they had given their consensus to the contract), so that advocacy (the bread & butter of the union hierarchy) remains at the individual level, only large violations require committees, which again can be filled by all individuals on a rotational basis. What this means is that a ‘permanent’ union becomes the cooperative of individuals actually owning the means of production. Until that happens by peaceful means, then the union must be a temporary union, brought together when necessary to negotiate or strike.

Temporary cooperative actions of a community would best serve the community. This is because the cooperative actions would have specific goals to reach or problems to solve. Once the problem has been solved or the goal reached, the need for the action disappears. In my previous post I mentioned the mythology of the barn raising cooperative efforts in the pioneering west. This is an example of a temporary cooperative action of a community. Once each member of the community had a barn, the organization would self-eliminate. As such, the need for cooperation would never be a permanent fixture like a union, a corporation, or a state. Instead, the cooperative process would simply be structured & modified to fit the temporary goal until the goal was met. Certainly the community could come together to evaluate the success & necessary improvements to the cooperative processes (evaluation being a part of the cooperative process). However few cooperatives need to be permanent. Individuals who cooperate to provide a service or product for the community might be permanent, but the leadership roles & responsibilities would be temporary. This means that the temporary nature of cooperation has two facets - temporary in goal orientation & temporary in responsibilities/authorities. 

Let me explain: the temporary goal orientation means that most cooperative actions don’t require a permanent or long term structure. Cooperative processes to reach a specific goal would be temporarily established to achieve the goal. Once the goal had been met, the need for the cooperative would be eliminated & therefore superfluous. This is one of the significant differences between cooperation & collectivism as I discussed in my previous blog post. So for instance if a cooperative community decided to establish more energy autonomy by installing solar panels onto all the roofs of the community, once the solar panels were installed, the need for the cooperative would vanish. Any necessary maintenance could be done by the self-reliant individuals who belong to the community. Since they had worked together to establish the solar panels, they would have received the necessary training to maintain the solar panels. If some permanent maintenance rotation needed to be established, this could be a cooperative of some of the individuals to provide that service, each individual sharing in the responsibilities & labor as well as the benefits of providing a service (i.e. charging a fee to those who are not part of the maintenance cooperative).

The argument is becoming stronger everyday that the local is going to be the way to get things done in this world. There is no simply occupying the current system: it’s crumbling. What we can do is stay out of the way of the ruin & survive the accompanying disaster, whether that disaster is war or just economic or environmental disaster. What will the future look like? I suppose that it will be much bleaker than today. I don’t have an especially positive attitude toward the future. In every direction I see strife & difficulties. As such I don’t know whether I’ll have a struggle with my fellow man or a struggle with nature. Neither will be pleasant, & both will not have great difficulties delivered randomly & meaninglessly. When does it begin? I hope that this continues to be a slow decline into epic fail, but I’m afraid that it won’t be like that.

Collectivism vs. Cooperation

I've been told that my cooperative processes sound like socialism or communism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cooperation is not an ideology, like socialism or communism or capitalism for that matter. These ideologies are just collectivism in action. Cooperation is a process. A process that promotes voluntary consensus. Collectivism demands coercion to enforce the ideology of the collective.

What does it mean to act collectively? We do it all the time. A corporation is a collective. A football team is a collective. Much like other loaded language in the political arena, a collectivist has come to be equated with communism, nanny states, & totalitarianism. These are forms of collectivism, but they are not the only examples of collectivism. If we think of a collectivist mentality, it is one where the individual’s needs & rights are subordinate to the needs & authority of the collective. Take a football team where the coach yells to his players “sacrifice your body.” What is more collectivist than this? The military is the ultimate collectivist organization, teaching its recruits to literally die for the greater good. Besides taking the good of the whole as being more valuable than the good of the individual, the collectivist sees the world as an either-or dilemma: as George W. Bush’s famous quote after September 11th, “You’re either with us or against us”. This is collectivism at its core. Everyone must be coerced into the collective, or they become the enemy (those who refuse or resist the coercion). War is collectivism in action.

Propaganda is necessary to keep collectivism going. The corporate collective spends a great deal of time proving how the corporation is providing “value” to its shareholders, workers, & the public at large. If the workers don't continue to be more productive, then the company cannot continue to provide them with jobs: economic coercion. The state, the highest form of collectivism, always requires propaganda to support its abuses in the name of collectivism. The benefits of collectivism are coerced & unnaturally delivered. Let’s just take the fact that social security payments are taxed as income. The wealthiest individuals in this country will receive social security benefits that they don’t need, that wouldn’t sustain their ‘lifestyle’ for a day. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just let individuals keep their money & provide for their own social security? Not according to a collectivist. We are told by propaganda that social security protects the elderly from poverty & tragedy. Naturally poverty is real. Poverty should be eliminated, if such a thing is possible. However, after 80 years of social security, poverty has not been eliminated or even lessened. The only difference between then & now is that our poor can actually afford goods that don’t support them (TVs, cellphones, etc.). They still struggle to pay their rent, feed their family & themselves, and struggle to survive, even when holding more than one job with a collectivist corporation. Categorically the efforts of a state to maintain their collectivist paradigm means suffering for those coerced into the collective.

It is coercion even for those who think they support it. They have swallowed the propaganda of the collectivist that they are better off if the state is better off. The collectivist applauds the coercion of the police to enforce taxation & adherence to laws based on the superiority of the good of the collective over the individual. The collectivist mentality that is created by propaganda creates such lovely slogans as: “America, Love it or Leave it” or “If you don’t like America why don’t you leave?” or "If you don't want to be killed by the police, then submit to their demands." Now granted the individual can leave if they so choose, but the collectivist cannot accept much criticism of the state. Those who criticize eventually must be coerced into submission or relegated to the enemy status. Individuals can complain about the individual holding the authority at the time, if it isn’t a totalitarian state. That level of criticism boosts the argument of the collectivist that there is a democratic process & freedom of criticism. Still being able to complain because you don’t like George W. Bush or Barack Obama doesn’t exactly compare with critiquing the entire process. People become so caught up in the collectivist mentality that even elections become simply which collectivist to put in control. When I’ve admitted to voting for a third party candidate or a write in candidate (I used to vote for Bill the Cat every four years), I’ve been met with such expressions as “you’re just throwing your vote away” or “why even vote?”. This demonstrates the powerful ideology of collectivism at its worst: the winner-take-all mentality & the fallacy that one vote (yours) really matters. Elections in this country have a decidedly horse race mentality or for most Americans, a Superbowl mentality with playoffs (primaries) leading to the ultimate showdown between two collectivists who won’t significantly change the core system, just continue to infringe upon the individual rights of the people. 

Who is the worst president ever? The next one.

This is another layer of propaganda in collectivism, the cult of personality or the savior complex. Elections come down to one or two word slogans like: hope, change, dignity, progress. This is blather. This contradicts the idea of temporary authority in the cooperative process. Namely that any position of authority should not only be held temporarily, but that the whole position should be temporary to fit the current need. The cooperative mentality means that any authority position should eventually self-eliminate. A collectivist doesn't want the problem eliminated because that eliminates the need for the authority. The one thing that the collectivist needs to continue the collectivist project is a perpetuation of the problem. If the problem is solved, the need for the collective authority disappears. Take the case of what’s happened after September 11th, 2001. Americans had reached a disdain for the collectivist propaganda of intervention in the affairs of the rest of the world. Remember that George W. Bush claimed he wasn't interested in "nation-building" during his campaign. The old enemy of the Soviet Union & communist spread no longer frightened the masses. The collectivist needed a new justification for the continued intervention in the world to support the Military Industrial Collective. What a bonus that 19 hijackers flew planes into buildings & shifted Americans back to the interventionist mentality from their isolationist leanings. Since that horrific day, the collectivists have managed to pump people across the world full of fear. However the average individual is more likely to die from a car accident or disease than from a terrorist attack. The propaganda effort not only builds fear in the coerced membership of the various collectives, but it creates its own antithesis in a collective of those who have been labeled & declaimed as terrorists. I’m not making conspiracy theories here. I’m not claiming that the government or the state intentionally or deliberately created the ‘terrorists’. I’m saying that identifying an enemy, an antithesis to the collective will, is innate in collectivist thinking. It isn’t deliberate: its the ideology. The collectivist 'creates' the enemy by coercion to ideology. Those who reject or renounce the ideology become the 'facts on the ground' enemy. The collectivist goal is always to confront a physical or an ideological enemy. Note how our country is now inflamed in the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, & we even spent a decade on the War on Poverty, which some collectivists want to re-escalate. So a collectivist mentality, by those who adhere to the ideology of collectivism, finds justification for any and all collectivism.

Now cooperation can be seen as a collective action. Any time individuals get together & work for a common goal, it can be called a collective action. However cooperative process is not based on a collectivist mentality. Individuals can come together voluntarily to solve a particular dilemma without having to create a collectivist organization. Individuals who act cooperatively will not form a collectivist mentality that the good of the whole is more important than the good of the individual. The first difference between the two organizations is the voluntary vs. coercive nature of these organizations. A collectivist mentality requires membership of all. No one is exempted. While some collectivists will volunteer, the majority will be coerced. In a cooperative process, volunteers are free to join or leave at their volition. The cooperative process works through consensus to benefit the individuals in the cooperative. If an individual doesn’t see the benefit, that individual doesn’t have to participate.

Whether it is a myth or a reality, the shared cooperative activity of barn building on the prairie is an example of cooperative action. Each family recognized the difficulty of building a barn alone, & so the families voluntarily came together to build each others barns. Once the barns were build the cooperative organization disappeared. Families could choose not to participate, but they didn’t benefit from the cooperative effort. The cooperative organization didn’t force the membership to build barns for people who didn’t want one or didn’t participate in the cooperative. For that matter, the individual family probably might have left the cooperative effort after their barn was built & not helped with other barns without being coerced to participate. They would have been denounced & probably wouldn’t have been popular. I don’t think this happened often because most people recognize innately the benefit of cooperation & choose to participate rather than take advantage. There will always be some individuals who seek advantage without toil, but they will be ostracized by self-reliant individuals & will probably not be asked to participate in future cooperative efforts. According to the mythology of the pioneering era, the barn raising was a social event with celebration & camaraderie, yet another motivation for individuals to participate. While the men built the barn, the women prepared a huge meal (I acknowledge the patriarchal hierarchy & don’t wish to perpetuate it, just describing the mythology’s plot). Why do I continue to describe this as a mythology? For the most part, I get this imagery from various movies, TV series & literature where these activities are portrayed. I don’t have primary documentation that they ever occurred, but whether they did or didn’t, the behavior is consistent with what I’m describing as cooperative action rather than collectivism. Self-reliant individuals cooperating to achieve what is difficult to achieve as individuals alone isn’t the same as an authority deciding that everyone must come together & build barns for the ‘good of all’.

If I think back to my experience with PAUSE (Palestine Action, Union Square East), I can see the cooperative model working consistently. A completely anarchistic operation from the beginning, the group never had leadership, never coerced people to belong or leave, never established any hierarchy. The only guidelines that received consensus were the times we agreed to meet on Saturdays. No one held any positions of authority, & no one was coerced into participating in a certain way. When there were disagreements about the materials or the speech that some individuals used, the group as a whole got together & developed a consensus that all agreed to follow. Violations were met by other members speaking to the infractions. We decided what was acceptable to discuss & what wasn’t pertinent to the cause. Once we had agreed that the cause was informing the public on the Israeli occupation & American financial, military & diplomatic support for that occupation, the determination of what language or presentation was acceptable was always based on these goals. If the particular language or presentation didn’t promote the goal, then the language wasn’t used at least at that setting by consensus. For years, we were held together by the violent, hateful responses to our weekly protests by Zionists, Israeli apologists, uninformed Americans who believed otherwise, & religious zealots who couldn’t see beyond their religion. It often drove them nuts when they asked to speak with the leadership that didn't exist. We had to provide security for each other, but the main way this was flexed was by massing around the individual being aggressive & not allowing them to continue. Rarely did we have to use defensive force, but on those occasions, we stood together. Individuals who didn’t take action were shunned & shamed by the rest of the members. They weren’t coerced into leaving, but they weren’t made to feel as welcome (ignoring them was the common demonstration of disapproval). As we gained a stronger foothold & a better presentation, the strength of the protest began to make the opposition from the aforementioned groups less prevalent & less distracting. Slowly we overcame any opposition except for what we began to refer to as ‘drive-bys’, a snarky comment shouted as they walked by. Fewer and fewer antagonists stopped to argue or agress. We reached a point where the protest became what Saul Alinsky calls a “drag”. It became a ritual & not a productive use of our time. On top of that, bigoted individuals within the cooperative began to spew ridiculous statements & refused to agree that these statements were not in service to the goal, bringing an end to the cooperative consensus. Their continued obstinacy in the face of objection from the rest of the group led most people to stop participating, demonstrating again the voluntary quality of the cooperative organization. When it no longer matched individual goals & values, individuals voluntarily left rather than participate or be attached to the changes in the group. It came apart just as organically as it formed. Many of the individuals have stayed in contact but no longer attempt to protest for a Free Palestine together at Union Square. The best part of being involved in this action was learning about anarchic methods & process, meeting some of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met, & interesting me in more cooperative, anarchic organization & process.

In summary, the collectivist adheres to an ideology, the ideology that the good of the whole supersedes the good of the individual. Coercion & brute force demand the acceptance & participation of the collectivist community. A process of cooperation is not an ideology & doesn't use coercion. Rather cooperation is a process, a process that has few defining elements other than individual volition & consensus. When these two elements work together, a cooperative process starts. Where it leads is up to the volition & consensus of the self-reliant individuals who work together. I'm not claiming that cooperative process will replace the state with a new form of governance. Rather, cooperation is process that works at local levels. Cooperation is grassroots action that doesn't get usurped by collectivist leadership who only want to establish a new hierarchy under their 'leadership'.

Rotational Process in Cooperative Organizations

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.