Competitors & Co-operators

I think I've figured it out… somewhat.

I previously said people are divided into basically four groups:

The Organizers

– planners, builders, investors, generals

The Organized – soldiers, drones, workers, taxpayers

The Disorganizers – anarchists, rebels, the envious, the malicious

The Disorganized – the lazy, the dimwitted, the dispirited, the oblivious

..and I said at the time none of us resides solely and only in one group. At different moments of our lives we reside in two or more groups at the same time.

Now I have decided that we also fall into two different groups who might well replace the idea of Conservative and Liberal, or Republican and Democrat.

The Competitors & The Co-operators

Competitors believe that competition and self-interest are the best motivators for progress and prosperity.

Co-operators believe that you can get just as far if not farther by co-operation.

Competitors love sports, soldiers, wars, flags, uniforms, bold moves, no regrets, go-team-go and screw the opposition. The Competitors are only interested in providing spoils, victory, prosperity, happiness for their own teams and tribes. Often times they enjoy and mock the backwardness and misery of others.

Co-operators love meetings and voting and voting whether to have a vote. It’s said the camel looks as if it was designed by a committee of co-operators – while the Hummer looks as if it was designed by a competitor from the Herman Goring School of Aesthetics.

Competitors feel that life is about Us against Them… or more correctly Me against Everyone Else.

Co-operators, too, may fear that life is about Me against Everyone Else.. but believe the best and perhaps the only way to survive merciless competition is by careful and thoughtful co-operating with those many others who also hate the cold and corrosive effects of self interest gone wild. Co-operators nourish and cherish. Competitors bulldoze, plunder and ravage, build steel mills and power plants.

Obviously we need both kinds of people, both attitudes, at different times and for different circumstances. But for either side to triumph totally would have great drawbacks.

The Co-operators may often be slow, ineffectual, timid.. but a world inhabited or operated solely by them would be a much more pleasant place in which to reside than the dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest triumphing bull male battleground that a pure Competitors’ society would be.

Some might say the Competitors’ world is by nature a male one, while the Co-operators’ is a female one.

Fine by me.

Let women rule the world for a while. It might take the ladies quite a bit longer to drill for oil on National Park grounds or build Nuclear reactors if it indeed proves necessary – but at least we’ll be spared the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Venezuela’s Chavez, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh – and all the other manipulating Mussolini-clone Competitors who are having so much fun exercising their egos.

As the Africans say, “When elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled.”

Lastly, Competitors are exclusive – Co-operators are inclusive.

Competitors love secret societies, country clubs, gated communities, anything that assembles an elite. They eat in exclusive restaurants. They buy exclusive luxury goods. They hate anything from the outside, anything foreign or different – unless it is expensive. They want monoculture and lock step thought. The jack boot is the sound they dance to. The military band.

(A glowing example of their monomania and exclusive Us against Them is the high incidence of birth defects among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Polygamous Mormons, and isolated pockets of Moslems residing in plural societies. They fear and reject foreign ideas and foreign sperm! Inbreeding results.)

Co-operators, on the other hand, are inclusive, inviting. They welcome the foreign, the spicy, the exotic, the different, new ideas, new philosophies, new impulses, new religions, other skin colors. The opinions of those who have no money or power but having warm feelings and ideas. The music of the Co-operators is the music of the third world, jazz, reggae, blues.

Co-operators want everyone to be happy, as the more the merrier.

Competitors want their side to win and thrive and the other side to lose.. and they still love to make sissies cry.

(..yes… I was always picked last in dodgeball games..)