Working Together

There’s something very sensible, magical, and confusing about working together. Sensible because you get more done that way and you learn from others; and magical because it makes work into a recreational activity: you get to feel part of a group in a comfortable rather than conformist way. The confusing thing is that, although it makes sense, it doesn’t happen so often.

Despite needing other people in order to get born, fed, educated, sustained, nursed and even buried, one of the most difficult things for people to do is to co-operate without domination, infantilism or resentment. In fact human history and organisation is mostly about people not co-operating but either being coerced, or coercing others, into submission, or seeking self-centred ends.

Cooperation means we give up our individual opinions voluntarily because we notice that it makes us more grounded and empathic (and that feels sane). But by and large, even relatively peaceful societies operate on the ‘trade-off’ principle. That is the person gives up his/her preferences and negotiation rights in order to have security, wages and convenience. And however much he or she continues to dislike and feel frustrated by the boss or the government, that corporate power retains control. Moreover, membership of the corporate state is not a voluntary matter.

…The magical part of cooperation (rather than coercion) is that through everyone voluntarily adding their individual bit to the mix, a wider empathic sense arises. This allows us to drop our self-conscious anxieties and self-centred views because shared sanity feels better than inflation and the shadow of deflation that it dreads.

Cooperation tames the dragon of egocentricity, that energy that arises in us that favours individual perspectives and tends towards righteousness and grandiosity. And it does so without cutting each other down. So to do that taming is another of the motivations behind entering a co-operative. It’s not just about efficiency or conformity but based on wisely reflecting how the egocentric dragon is a part of our psyche, and it needs to be carefully harnessed for our own well-being.

Tamed that is, but not slain.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the Ajahn Sucitto Reflections blog post “Cooperation—Taming the Dragon,” Friday, 6 January 2012.