UNIVERSAL CO-OPETITION: Nature’s Fusion of Cooperation and Competition . . . And how it can save our finances, our families, our future, and our world
Author: V. Frank Asaro
[ A corollary to the novel The Tortoise Shell Code , by the same author ]
Preface
In the late 1970s, I began writing essays concerning a theory I was developing on “co-opetition”—a universal principle that I believe unifies the apparently opposing forces of cooperation and competition. I circulated these essays and related notes in search of feedback, and in 1990, was flattered to receive the following comments from noted writer Spencer Johnson, coauthor of The One Minute Manager, who said in part:
Your extraordinary notes for your book . . . have given me some valuable insights. . . . I especially appreciate the way you have drawn an eclectic universe of knowledge from physics to anthropology and I expect many other appreciative readers will agree.
He urged me to expand the concept into a book, which I began to do while otherwise happily engaged in the practice of law. Over the years, I continued to send out manuscripts and discuss the theory with others; I even engaged university graduate students to test the idea. They all became enthusiastic about it. Others have since used the word co-opetition in their writings, especially in the business field, but the principle remains the same—the unification of cooperating and competing behaviors.
Now, twenty-five or so years after I first wrote about it, with the nation and world facing increasing economic and political turmoil and polarization, I believe it is more important than ever to get the word out on the general philosophy of co-opetition.
This book is the result.
Chapter 1: The Idea
The term “co-opetition” is, of course, a combination of “cooperation” and “competition.” But it’s more than just a contraction of two words; in fact, it embodies the very concept it describes: the synthesis of opposing principles into a single dynamic. It is an antidote for polarization.
Cooperation and competition. Giving and taking. Benevolence and self-interest. We all have within us the opposing impulses that comprise co-opetition. The problem is that if either trait becomes overly dominant, the result tends to be bad, or even disastrous. This work endeavors to help identify the natural fusion or synthesis point between cooperation and competition in various situations and explain why doing so is critically important.
Note that I said the natural fusion point. This work springs from the conviction that not only human beings, but animals and plants and art and music and politics and economics and geological formations and science and physics—in fact, everything in the universe—is inherently co-opetitive.
Why? Because the universe itself is inherently co-opetitive.
And we are all made from the stuff of stars.
Two Sluggers
Let’s illustrate the importance of locating the best point, or fulcrum, of synthesis for a situation by taking a look at two great baseball players of the past: Ted Williams and Barry Bonds. Professional sports in general and baseball in particular represent the epitome of competition, but they also depend very much on cooperation. Obviously, if you don’t have rules that are agreed upon and adhered to by everyone, you have no game—you have chaos.
Ted Williams grew up in the 1930s in San Diego, California, where he played unsupervised baseball as a kid under the lights of a small neighborhood community center. He had so much fun at the game, they regularly had to shut off the lights at nine p.m. to get him to go home. If you know baseball at all, you know the rest of the story: he became arguably the best hitter of all time, having the highest lifetime batting average ever at .344, with the highest single year average of .406. He attained that average despite the interruption of his sports career by WW II and later the Korean War, in which he became a jet fighter ace and war hero. He accomplished all this by virtue of his talent, hard work, and relentless practice; performance-enhancing drugs had not yet been invented.
Barry Bonds was born in Riverside, in southern California, and grew up in San Carlos, California, in the 1960s and 1970s. Bonds’s accomplishments put him among the greatest baseball players who ever lived. This accolade is backed up by his record-setting seven Most Valuable Player awards, including four consecutive record-setting MVPs, along with his fourteen All-Star awards, eight Golden Gloves, and his numerous Major League Baseball records. He has the all-time homerun record with 762 and is also the all-time career leader in both walks (2,558) and intentional walks (688). Barry Bonds holds numerous other baseball records, including the single-season 73 homerun Major League record, set in 2001.
But this is where the stories of the two players diverge. On April 13, 2011, a jury found Barry Bonds guilty on the felony charge of obstructing justice, stemming from an investigation into his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs. The rule-making bodies in virtually all professional sports forbid the use of these drugs, which provide the athletes who take them with advantages over athletes who rely strictly on training and their own physical and mental gifts. In other words, performance-enhancing drugs are considered “cheating”—stepping beyond the accepted, universal, cooperative rules of the game.
In this light, the history of record proves that the fusion point between cooperation and competition that Ted Williams chose was properly placed. Co-opetition prevailed.
But it appears that Barry Bonds placed his point of fusion or unification too far in the competition realm. Co-opetition failed, and Bonds’s career attainments will likely always be overshadowed by the allegations that he gained unfair advantage through the use of drugs.
Because competition compels people to seek advantage over their adversaries, it is a realm especially rich with examples of unperfected co-opetition. However, it is equally possible to place the point of synthesis too far on the side of cooperation.
Buried in Good Fortune
In 1324 AD, King Mansa Musa, ruler of the city state of Timbuktu—now one of the most remote and desolate areas in all of Africa—took a prodigious amount of gold with him on his pilgrimage to Mecca. From his home in Timbuktu, he traveled north to Tripoli with eighty gold-laden camels, sixty thousand men, and twelve thousand slaves, covering a distance of more than twelve hundred miles—like going from New Orleans to Lake Superior near Canada—before proceeding east through Cairo. Along the way, in the belief that he was cooperating with God for the benefit of his people, Musa freely handed out gold. The closer he came to civilization, the more lavish his giving became, until by the time he arrived at Mecca, he had entirely run out of gold.
The result? Musa distributed so much wealth that he destabilized the entire economy of the Egyptian region, and for the next ten years, people suffered the effects of super-inflation.
By fulfilling his noble goal of maximizing cooperation between himself and his people, Musa inadvertently destabilized and “competed” with the workings of the market, money-changers, and gold merchants, resulting in the unintended consequence of ruining the economy. The short-term benefit of great generosity turned out to be vastly overshadowed by the long-term damage it caused.
Co-opetition failed because of too much cooperation.
Finding the Fulcrum
What should Musa have done differently? Or Barry Bonds? How does one determine where the best point of synthesis lies?
As mentioned earlier, this work asserts that all of nature strives to locate that fulcrum—the point at which cooperation and competition are unified and appropriately distributed for a given situation—and when human beings fail to do so for either selfish or altruistic reasons, the results tend to be unfortunate. Theoretically, the highest possible operation of any system—be it economics or art or politics or music or anything else—can be achieved by adjusting the placement of the fulcrum in the right direction. But for optimum synthesis and the best results, the fulcrum must be properly placed for the particular system being considered.
Fortunately, the struggle to find the synthesis is intuitive and instinctive, a form of primal wisdom. We know the appropriate point when we find it; it becomes self-evident. Post hoc history will verify the accuracy of our choice.
When we achieve synthesis in any endeavor, we are able to closely associate with one another for our common good while remaining individually separate and free. We are able to preserve our personal liberty while also living as social human beings.
An important finding about co-opetition should be mentioned: the fulcrum is rarely set at the actual point of balance between cooperation and competition. As will be shown later in this work, the more successful operations give greater weight to the competition side of the scale.
By whose rules or definition is the proper mix found? Much of this work is devoted to answering that question. But let me preliminarily say that the synthesis is usually generated through the workings of nature itself with, as I’ve said, the fulcrum tending toward the side of competition. It is man’s interference with, and distortions of, nature that causes the greatest disruption of the synthesis—which is to say, the point of highest and best operation of any system.
This synthesis of cooperation and competition should be kept foremost in our minds to allow us to more clearly analyze our issues and promulgate our laws and rules, whether great or small, for the individual or for the collective.
Table of Contents
Preface..................................................................................page vii
Chapter
1..............................................................................page
1
The
Idea
Chapter
2..............................................................................page
7
Definitions
and Explanations
Chapter
3..............................................................................page
13
Codification
of the Rule
Chapter
4..............................................................................page
17
Biophysical
Inquiry
Chapter
5..............................................................................page
23
What
Did the Philosophers Say?
Chapter
6..............................................................................page
29
Anthropological
and Historical Inquiry
Chapter
7..............................................................................page
33
Cultural
Examples
Chapter
8..............................................................................page
37
Crime,
Freedom, and Leadership
Chapter
9..............................................................................page
41
Religion
and Leadership
Chapter
10............................................................................page
45
Happiness
and Entertainment
Chapter
11............................................................................page
49
Economics
and Political Systems
Chapter
12............................................................................page
73
Examples
for Potential Application
of the Principle of This Work
Chapter
13............................................................................page
87
Synthesizing
Conservative and Liberal Extremes
Chapter14............................................................................page
115
A
Piece of the Capitalist Pie
Chapter
15...........................................................................page
125
Productive
Disparity and Maintaining
a Self-Executing Co-opetitive Synthesis
Summary..............................................................................page
133
Appendix..............................................................................page
137
Bibliography........................................................................page
139
About
the
Author..................................................................page
143
Other Books by Bettie Youngs Book
Publishers...................page 144
Copyright Information:
Copyright
© 2011 by V. Frank Asaro
All rights reserved, including the
right to
reproduce this work in any form whatsoever,
without
permission in writing from the publisher,
except for brief
passages in connection with a review.
Front cover design: Mark A.
Clements
Text design: Jane Hagaman
BETTIE YOUNGS BOOK
PUBLISHERS
www.BettieYoungsBooks.com
[email protected]
Bettie
Youngs Books are
distributed worldwide.
If you are unable to order this book from
your local
bookseller or online or Espresso, you may order
directly from
the publisher.
Library of Congress Control
Number: 2011913449
ISBN: 978-1-936332-08-3
ePub:
978-1-936332-09-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Printed in the United States
icons on the left to see existing comments.
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
Last year I took a Shakespeare course, and we talked about the concept of paradoxes. A paradox, we established, is a “whole” dynamic comprised of two opposing “halves,” or forces. At this point, the principle of universal co-opetition sounds like a paradox.
Naturally, discussing Shakespeare at the undergraduate level, we touched on weighty topics such as love and death. These aspects of human life, especially in Romeo and Juliet, seem to naturally balance each other no matter the social conditions. For example, death snuffs out love, yet love may transcend death (depending on your beliefs).
So, my question is, is this “whole” homogenous or heterogenous? Is it a solidly-colored circle, or just a yin-yang?
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
This kind of “unbalanced” practice is very common in academia as well. Whether by word of mouth or even in featured articles, we hear stories of students abusing adderall in order to perform well on exams or to complete all their work by the end of the term.
So, the same effects occur: a gap forms between those who follow the rules and those who selfishly want to get ahead, perhaps out of a sense of misplaced of competition.
This quality is not to mention the fact that such drugs cause the body harm. So, with examples like these, imbalance emerges not only on the societal level but also on the biological level.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
New Conversation
General Document Comments 0
So, perhaps you would say that co-opetition currently takes place in certain aspects of our day-to-day lives, but this book is a call for many more people to realize this universal principle’s effects and implications?
I’m not sure if it’s “normal” for students in my generation to believe that the world is slowly changing for the better. Maybe all young people feel, or hope for, this improvement in interpersonal communication. Certainly, with the advent of technology in the past few decades, as well as social networking in the last few years, we’re all connected in a way we never were before. It’s easier for us to be competitive, easier for us to be cooperative because our society is becoming slightly more collectivized.
So, after the preface, I get the sense that one of this book’s main purposes is to spark awareness of what it means to interact with each other on a very large scale, in the present.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
Co-opetition is an antidote to polarization. The aim is to get opponents in any field, especially in politics, to come to the realization that nature has provided us with the instinct for combining the conduct of competing, with the conduct of cooperating when we thrash out our differences. We find that the problem is more easily resolved if we understand that some of both these behaviors is in every equation for living. It isn’t a question of compromise, nor is it an either / or proposition. It is a question of finding the asymmetric balance between the two behaviors.
Examples of that instinct abound. We probably evolved to show a smile in part because we needed to work as a team, like in hunting. We needed to cooperate to survive. But at the same time we needed to compete for our share of the food for ourselves and our families. It was bad form, however, for us to compete too strongly against our team mates – let’s say by grabbing all the food – because the others might likely ostracize us from the team. So we had to synthesize the two behaviors of competing and cooperating. In short, we instinctively, non-consciously, practiced co-opetition in order to remain on the team.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment