Cooperation

There is a lot we cannot do alone. Very often we need others to join forces. Humans are intelligent, so we know how to combine our efforts and build a comfortable and increasingly advanced way of life. Animals are less intelligent, so their cooperation stays simple. Judging a species' intelligence by how far it cooperates is entirely accurate. The smarter people are, the more they move toward working together. And the other way around: the fewer the signs of cooperation, the less intelligent those people are.

The basic human cooperation is the family: husband, wife and children. Working alone, a person always falls short somewhere. Having food, they lack clothes or a home. Busy finding materials for a house, they cannot find food. Once they have a family, they divide the tasks in a shared effort, and life improves many times over. With two or three people building a house, they can make a bigger one, with larger posts, a higher roof and wider walls. Alone, they could only manage a small hut.

Society advanced when tribes cooperated in hunting, farming, building homes, training and defending themselves. They were safer in a larger, more cooperative community.

Then, as society developed, the population grew and ruling power strengthened, people had to live cooperatively in a very large society, and human progress went far beyond the days of small tribes.

Today, directly or indirectly, people still cooperate to live in this wide, connected world community. Paying a single coin in tax already shows our cooperation with the whole country. And we have watched human progress go on until people began to build robots with minds of their own.

But let us return to direct cooperation in the work close to us. We already cooperate indirectly with the whole world, so now we talk about the spirit of cooperation in the matters close around us, because that shows morality and intelligence.

The smarter people are, the more they move toward working together. The more moral they are, the more they protect that cooperation with love and gratitude for each other.

One thing makes cooperation unsustainable: laziness. A lazy person pushes work onto others, destroys fairness and so ruins cooperation.

Another is wanting to stand out, to be the lone hero, to grab credit and boast of it.

Failing to see the strengths of teammates and instead picking at their faults also breaks cooperation apart.

Cooperation is both intelligent and moral. Morality makes cooperation a joy. Intelligence makes it effective. Whoever loves cooperation is intelligent and moral.