https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=k9-VkODrP-c
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. What I’m like to talk to you about today is cooperation and competition. Now what I think is going on here is very interesting and it may be surprising to you. So hold on to your hats because as always these are my definitions. If you like them and you find them useful, now they’re yours. If you don’t like them you can throw them out or better yet modify them for your own use. Up until this point I’ve been trying to avoid some of the more contentious sorts of issues but now I have to go right at the throat of something that people are very attached to emotionally. This idea that competition and cooperation are at somehow at odds with one another or they’re loggerheads or they’re the opposite or something like that. I just want to state out front it’s a false dichotomy. It’s not true and I know I teased about this video in a previous video about the economy so let’s dive in and get to the bottom of why I’m using a different method of thinking about these two things and how I think it makes more sense to think about them in this way than using this false dichotomy and why that’s important. So to start out let’s look at cooperation. When we’re talking about cooperation what do we mean? What are we really after? I think the easiest way to think about cooperation is we do something with the expectation that that effort will be reciprocated by someone else or something else. That there’s some sort of way that in doing this and combining it with other work that something bigger will be done. So this is something like if you’ve got to go out and plant a bunch of seeds and maybe you need to plant them all pretty much at the same time. Maybe the field’s too big for one person to do that one day. So you get help that’s cooperation. You can also cooperate with yourself in the future. That’s where things get really weird but basically there’s an expectation and the problem with cooperation is how do you measure it? How do you know you’re cooperating? It’s like well that’s pretty easy because something bigger than what you could build by yourself or what somebody else could build by themselves if you’re cooperating with them arises. Fair enough. But we use cooperation as a form of exchange. As a form of participation and you don’t want to over participate and you don’t want to under participate and so you need some kind of scoring system. Like you just need a scoring system and it’s like whoa scoring whoa bad but no scoring is necessary. You can’t cooperate appropriately without a scoring system. It’s not gonna work. Because we don’t want to be taken advantage of and we don’t want to take advantage of others because when we do that bad things happen. Either to us or to them or both. It’s not healthy and in order to build a city people have to cooperate and your cooperation can’t be measured by the exact same amount of work somebody else does because in all cases because that might not work. Like my skills are different from your skills. My skills now are different from my skills in the future. So you can’t say well they did an hour of work I did an hour of work. If the hour of work for them is carrying sand and the hour of work for you is watching a kid play like that’s not equivalent and I’m not gonna say which one’s worse. I’m just saying it’s hard to get an equivalence there. So we need to use some sort of scoring system and a scoring system is and this goes back to economy. This is the way we measure participation. I think that’s what it is. So in order to cooperate we need a neutral way to measure participation and it’s not exact and like what’s the value of hauling sand versus watching a kid. What’s the value of my skill at fixing a computer really fast versus your skill at teaching music. Like I mean I don’t know. I don’t know but we do determine these things. Like we do it sort of in our head. Jordan Peterson talks about this. We keep track. We keep track somehow and we’re using some kind of measurement system. So if we want to jump to competition scoring is the primary way we do it and usually when we talk about competition we’re not talking about competition per se. We’re talking about a specific type of competition and then it’s not even a specific type of competition because as noted everywhere in the universe as far as I can tell healthy competition is good. There is such a thing as healthy competition. We know this. Your rival, your competitor makes you better because you’re striving and it’s the act of striving. It’s that whole idea that you’re striving, that you’re going for a score. Scoring is the primary way to keep track of competition. The difference is in the outcome. The outcome of competition is victory. The outcome of cooperation is community or something like it. Just because you cooperate doesn’t mean you aren’t in a hierarchy because you can do more for someone than they do for you. You’re still in a hierarchy and people hold that over people’s heads all the time. So you can complain that competition creates a hierarchy. So does cooperation. Scoring is everywhere. We have to score. Scoring is how we keep track. Scoring is how we determine value. I don’t know how valuable my skills are to you and my different skills are going to have different value. I just don’t know because that’s you. Value as we talked about in the economy video is all about the negotiation between two people. It’s the transjective result of the negotiation between two people. Value doesn’t exist outside of that negotiation. It doesn’t mean we can’t assign an arbitrary value and start from there for negotiation. It means that intrinsically things do not have value until negotiations begin between two parties, maybe more parties, but at least two parties. This is really important to understand. The hierarchy that you’re complaining about in a competitive environment still exists in a cooperative environment. There’s no difference there. What you’re complaining about is the end result. You’re complaining about what’s going on as the result of the cooperation or the competition. You’re complaining about personal behavior. It’s a false dichotomy. It just is. Scoring being the fundamental mechanism of both of these things. They aren’t in opposition to one another. They aren’t opposites. They aren’t competing. It’s not like you can just take competition and replace it with cooperation. They are mostly the same thing. You can look at it and you can say, well, they’re not really the same thing because in a competition there’s a winner. Well, sure, but that’s a designation after the fact. Do we really care if people win? I don’t think we do. What we care about is how the win is handled. How do you behave in the hierarchy when you’re at the top? That’s what we care about. And when you’re at the bottom. Peterson goes into this. Jordan Peterson goes into this. What does it mean to be a good sport? Why is that important? Why is it important that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but how you play the game? That’s cooperation. The individual competition doesn’t matter. It’s the cooperation that matters within the individual competition. The competition in many ways is always subservient to the cooperation anyway. It’s not the highest thing. Maybe the highest thing we look at in the moment, but it’s also important because you have to know who’s better and who’s worse. And you have to know who’s better so you know what you can do or might be able to do or what you have to strive for. You have to know. There’s no way around competition. It’s not gonna happen. We need that. But the behavior, the behavior, that’s interesting. If somebody lords it over you that they’ve cooperated more, they’ve put in more hours at a volunteer job, or they’ve helped you more than you’ve helped them, and this happens all the time. You don’t like that. Still cooperation. You haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just fooled yourself into thinking you’ve solved the problem. It’s just a deep misunderstanding. There’s no dichotomy between cooperation and competition. It doesn’t exist. Now the problem here, the reason why we’re trying to slip in this, well we can solve this problem by getting rid of competition, is because we don’t want to deal with a real problem. The problem is people. It’s the behavior and relationship of people, right? So we need less emphasis on what they’re doing, competing or cooperating, and more emphasis on how they’re handling that process. So why do we avoid this? Because keeping people accountable is tough. Who the hell wants to do that? It causes conflict by design. Keeping people accountable means some form of conflict. It doesn’t have to mean physical conflict or it doesn’t have to mean name calling, but it means some form, right? And like conflict sucks, especially with people, because we want to cooperate, right? We don’t want to have conflicts with them, but even in cooperation you have conflicts. And you need a sense of ethics to navigate that whole thing, right? There’s a pattern that you need to navigate inside of the process of holding people accountable. It’s very difficult. So now you need ethics and you need a conflict just to be able to make sure you have a right relationship with a person either in cooperation or in competition. It has to happen. Nobody likes somebody who lords their win over everyone else. Nobody likes that. Nobody likes it when people brag about how many volunteer hours they put in when you didn’t put in quite so many. Nobody likes that. I don’t blame them. You shouldn’t like that. They have a bad relationship with the hierarchy they’re involved in, but there’s a hierarchy there. Competition, cooperation, still a hierarchy. You’re not getting around it. Positive competition and cooperation, you strive to be better. Negative, you don’t strive to be better. That could be your fault, could be their fault. All kinds of complicated variables. Why can’t we just get rid of competition and solve the problem? Because it doesn’t solve the problem. Eliminate all competition is not a possible case in the world. That quick fix won’t work. You need ethics. Ethics is hard. You need conflict. Conflict is just no fun. But there are ways to manage conflict. We know this. Conflict resolution is a thing. You can do it. And when you do it, you make better people. So you can say, oh, conflict bad. No, conflict make better people. I like better people. I don’t care who you were yesterday or who you were a minute ago. If you’re being better, that’s awesome. Let’s do more of that. And then we can all cooperate in a positive way. We can all get along in a positive way. We can all compete in a way that makes us want to be better, in a way that makes us strive to be better, in an aspirational fashion. Right? That’s what we really need more of. Less of this equivocation over whether or not cooperation and competition is good or bad or indifferent. That’s ridiculous. We need to be better as people. And the only way to do that is to be better. And it’s hard work. And it’s a struggle. It’s a struggle because we’re struggling against ourselves, struggling against our past. We’re struggling into the future and we’re struggling with others. And we’re struggling with nature. We’re struggling with our own nature. It’s there’s a lot there. But you need to do that. We need to make the world a better place. And only you can make you a better person. But making you a better person automatically makes the world a better place. And that’s, I think, where we need to focus. So let’s get rid of these false dichotomies. Let’s stop thinking they’re easy answers. The answers are hard and they’re all around making ourselves better. Now, I know this is a contentious thing, this idea that, you know, we can just substitute cooperation for competition, but it just doesn’t work. You’re just misunderstanding the situation. This model that I’ve outlined, I think, is much better. When people understand it, they don’t seem to be able to come up with any real objections, even if they don’t like it. Fair enough. Not asking you to like it, but consider it as a model. Consider it carefully. Because if we can get to a point where we’re holding each other accountable, and we’re all trying to be better, and we’re all doing what we can and struggling with each other to become better, then the world will be a better place. I would like to thank you all for paying your time and attention to this topic, and I hope you’ll struggle with it and see maybe this can be improved. Maybe you’ve learned something. Maybe you have a better way of looking at the world that gives you insight into what’s really wrong with the world and how it can get better. Or maybe this will just help you to see new patterns and navigate them. So once more, I just really want to emphasize that I’m very grateful that people are watching these videos and some of you are getting something out of them. And I hope you’ll get more out of them as time goes on. So thank you very much for your time and your attention.