The Common Good – Cooperation versus Competition

In today’s world we seem to have adopted the competition model for nearly all our social inter-relations.  We honor the competitive athlete, the competitive salesman and the competitive student.  Men and women even compete for the affections of each other.  Men compete for the prettiest woman on their arm, while women compete with clothes and makeup, so that they become that prettiest one on the handsomest man’s arm.  What happens here is that love, a cooperative activity, becomes transformed into such a competition, that one can scarcely think, in these competitive personal relationships, there is any love at all.  While competition certainly has its place especially in sport, but in the family and the extensions of the family, tribe, city and nation, competition is destructive of the very purpose and historical impetus to these institutions. 

In a family or marriage where the members compete for dominance, chaos and troubles naturally follow.  A competitive marriage is a failed marriage.  If the members of a family compete with one another for the affections of a parent and the parents compete for the affections of their children, the family is split and troubled, because at bottom a family is a cooperative.  Likewise with the tribe and the city, and by extension the nation, competition can, if excessive, become destructive of its very purpose.

Guilds, Unions as well as academic, business and trade associations have as their model and their raison d’être the cooperation between members.  While our nation began as separate colonies of the British Empire becoming independent states, we did not become a true nation until we adopted a constitution “to form a more perfect union….”  Cooperation, ought to be our model and not competition.  We begin our Constitution with “We the people…”, emphasis on ‘we’ as a indicator of cooperation.   After all, we aspire to be the beacon of democracy and the city set on the hill whose lamp of liberty and whose bell “proclaims Liberty throughout the land.”  But Liberty does not entail necessarily competition.  We are an association of free people who through a cooperative effort form a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Since we have become in recent times much wiser than we once were, we now rightfully include women in our notion of ‘all men’.   Recognizing the nurturing and caring nature of the female, we now have become no longer male dominant, but equal. We ought to become a cooperative among mankind.  The common good cannot be served without cooperation as our social and political model, this cooperation and the cooperative effort to realize our “more perfect union” is our very raison d’être.