Of course, cooperation does not typically refer to people working ‘together’ simply in the sense of sharing the same physical space. If I’m working at cleaning the house and my children are working at making a mess inside that same house, then we are not really ‘cooperating.’ So the ‘togetherness’ aspect of cooperation refers to something else: the sharing of projects and goals. And yet, adding that criterion still isn’t enough to define what we mean when we use the word ‘cooperation.’ For example, a group of students might all be given the same assignment – say, write a paper about the causes of World War II – so they have that project in common and probably the same goal (complete the project on time, get a good grade, etc.) And yet, they aren’t necessarily ‘cooperating’ on it. In fact, cooperation may be specifically discouraged: each student is meant to do his own research and write her own paper, and each student gets an individual grade for what they have done.
But say that the students are placed in groups, as they often are for lab work in science classes. There, cooperation and collaboration (which means almost the same thing) are not only encouraged but expected. Each person in the group is meant to be working on the same project towards shared goals, and the resulting product of the work and its evaluation is shared as well. The group turns in one lab report and the group (i.e., all individual members of the group) get the same grade.
What are the reasons that make cooperation necessary or desirable? First and foremost, there’s the old saw that ‘many hands make the work light.’ To achieve certain types of goals on a consistent basis, you almost need to have multiple actors on a single team simply because no individual can be in multiple places at the same time. As a prime example, early human social groups that relied on hunting (and even herding) for meat needed teams of hunters occupying different positions – some flushing out prey, others surrounding it and standing in its possible lines of flight. Certainly, a single hunter could potentially take down an animal sufficient to feed either the group or just his own family. However, he would need to be not only a competent but an excellent hunter in order to do so on a regular basis – and people need to eat on a pretty regular basis. Therefore, hunting was more reliable as a way of feeding a greater number of people when practiced by teams.
This brings us to the second reason that cooperation is important: the combination of the facts that most complex tasks require the use of a multiplicity of different skills and that skills gaps naturally occur among human populations. That is to say, all of the members of early social groups were never equally good at all of the skills required for a successful hunt. If so, then each could have been responsible for hunting his own prey individually, and then each would have had enough to eat, but this is not the case.
What happens if each hunter is individually responsible for providing his own meat is that many – the majority of hunters who are not ‘superstar-hunters’ – would only rarely (if ever) be able to procure meat for themselves. Obviously, this would breed a level of resentment that could prove quite dangerous for the better hunters who more frequently had meat to eat. It would also conduce to a level of malnutrition or even starvation among the less competent hunters which then would affect and deplete the social group as a whole. In other words, it might seem as if it would be a satisfactory situation for the superstar-hunter who is more often able to eat meat, but that simply isn’t true. Being part of a disintegrating social group or being the target of envy and resentment within one’s social group are never stable or satisfactory situations. The solution to these problems comes about through cooperation.
Cooperation permits divisions of labor that allow a larger number of people to participate in and contribute positively to the achievement of shared goals. That, in turn, creates an increase in the overall frequency of achieving those goals and hence in the probability of success: when they work together, the hunters catch more antelopes relative to number of attempts they make to catch antelopes. This then creates stability for social groups that depend upon the successful attainment of those goals: the group can expect to have antelope to eat on a fairly regular basis and so doesn’t need to be as anxious about the possibilities of hunger or starvation.
Furthermore, cooperation – including division of labour and training in cooperative endeavours – helps to ‘neutralize’ the negative effects of those participants who are relatively less skilled than others. Group dynamics can help to incentivize the cultivation and manifestation of traits that conduce to success (e.g., standing your ground when the large animal being hunted charges in your direction in an attempt to escape brings you social approval for courage) and to teach skills (how to hold a spear or adopt a stance in ways that increase success.) Division of labour allows individuals who lack some skills to contribute others to the joint endeavour. For instance, maybe you’re too small to spear a charging antelope without being knocked over, but you’re good at spotting the trail of antelopes to locate the prey; maybe you’re terribly uncoordinated and cognitively slow when it comes to the actual movements required to spear an antelope, but you can help carry back the carcass; maybe you’re too old and frail to go hunting anymore, but you can tell the hunters some stories of the great hunts of your day that inspire the group and increase their motivation and morale; and so forth and so on.
Many of the factors involved in making cooperation desirable are not simply logistical but also deeply social. While preference for working together with others directly may vary among individuals (some being more introverted ‘loners’ and others more gregarious), almost all of us have a distinct preference for working together indirectly. That is to say, even if you like having your own discrete task to do – one you complete on your own and in solitude, without having to be around or interface with others – you will still want that work to ‘connect’ you in some indirect way to others. You’ll want their approbation and recognition for it, or for them to reward you for it in a value-exchange, or for that work to provide some benefit to them within a ‘bigger picture’ of human relations. Imagine the ‘superstar hunter’ described earlier. He could certainly go off by himself and do a decent enough job of hunting to feed himself and survive; perhaps he’d also have time to fetch water, make and maintain a shelter, create his hunting implements and fix them when they broke, and cook his meat. But that’s about all he would be able to do in life and that’s all he would get out of it if he did not have even indirect relations with other humans.
Nevertheless, there are common pitfalls in cooperation. Some of the particulars of the hunting example used here may make it sound as if cooperation is a ‘charity operation’ or ‘jobs creation program’ that decreases excellence within groups and, accordingly, the likelihood of success. This is always a possibility, and it is one that has increased as human societies have become more complex. For example, back in the days of hunter-gatherer societies, members of hunting teams had some very obvious and strong incentives to do the best that they could as part of the team. They wanted the hunt to be successful (so that there would be food to eat) and they wanted to demonstrate that they had participated positively (so that they would receive social approbation and be allowed by the rest of the group to eat some of the food that they had putatively helped to obtain.)
Contrast this, however, with the case of students doing ‘group lab work’ in your local public high school. Not all members of a given lab group will have the same level of investment in the success of the venture. Some of them may not care much about what grade they receive either for reasons of survival (whether they’re allowed to eat or not probably won’t depend on their lab-work grade) or for reasons of social approbation (in many cases, getting good grades or even trying to do so garners less social approbation for the individual, not more.) And the number who will care about the less material outcomes of the endeavour – i.e., not the grade received but the cognitive products of the lab work – is even lower. More than this, if some members of the group know that others are capable of doing the work without their participation and are willing to do so rather than taking a failing grade, then they can receive the benefits of success (a good grade for the lab report) without having to contribute. They can even spend most of the time in the lab goofing off and even sabotaging the work itself – burning various objects in the flame of the Bunsen burner or trying to see what all the hydrochloric acid will eat through – and still end up with an ‘A’ for their efforts so long as they are partnered with someone who is capable of doing the work well and is committed to doing it.
In other words, the key problems facing cooperative ventures in the modern world are group members who are either (1) significantly less competent than others and/or (2) bad actors. Fortunately, the very multiplicity and complexity of joint ventures in the modern era make it possible to deal with these issues in creative ways that do not simply condemn those with lower abilities to unemployment, poverty, or starvation and that simultaneously can serve to disincentivize bad actors. In other words, some of the key principles of cooperation provide the solutions for the problems that inhibit cooperation, allowing us both to increase the likelihood and reliability of success in group endeavours and to maintain social stability.

but it is not in itself a bad thing. The problem is that there is no such thing as “power in itself” on a practical level; it is always power being held or used by someone or something. If it can be used, then it can also be misused or abused. Two facts are the chief causes of our love-hate relationship with power: first, that human history is full of examples of persons and groups misusing and abusing power, and second, that power differentials always exist within groups of social species.
Fundamentally, power is nothing more than the ability of an agent to accomplish what he, she, or it chooses and wills to do by taking action in the world. As such, power is a good thing and is necessary for our wellbeing, for our being active participatory agents in the whole business of life. Most of us have and exercise quite a lot of power on any given day, from the moment that we wake up in the morning until the moment that we go back to sleep. We choose to get up out of bed – and we do it. We might choose to make breakfast or coffee or take a shower – and then we do that. Putting on clothes, brushing our teeth, fixing our hair – all of these activities require us to exercise power over our own bodies and over a variety of objects and instruments in our environments.
It is the objects and instruments that humans develop and use that give us a level of power that lies exponentially beyond that of other animals. On a simply physical level, human beings aren’t all that powerful in the grand scheme of things. If, like other carnivorous animals, we had to get food by running down prey, catching and killing it with our teeth or bare hands, we’d probably be functionally vegetarian with only a rare meal of meat from a fairly small animal. But once we had invented tools like weapons, traps, and snares – not to mention methodologies like domestication – the entire species of relatively slow, awkward, and weak-bodied humans suddenly transformed into apex predators. In other words, humans became incredibly powerful by becoming incredibly good at objectification and instrumentalization.
The source of the problem we have with power is that living a human life is not simply a matter of manipulating tools and interacting with objects to carry out our individual wills in our environments; we are also a social species, and so we have to interact with other humans. This means that we are constantly having to reckon with a multiplicity of desires and wills and capabilities other than our own – and sometimes contrary to our own. That is, we must contend with the existence and presence of other active human agents in our environments and not simply with a range of more passive objects and instruments.
Now, all other mammalian species have to do this as well: many are highly social, like humans, but even members of ‘loner’ species still occasionally need to interact with other members of the species to mate and raise young, and to be raised in the first place when they are young. So intra-species and intra-group power differentials are features common to all mammals, including humans. The cause of this can be stated simply: if I want one thing and you want something completely opposed to that, then only one of us (at most) can get our way. Which of us will it be?
The answer to that will depend upon a number of different factors, and considering those factors is part of a conceptually different (but necessarily related) analysis. With respect to the present topic, what we will be able to say is that whichever of us ‘wins’ and gets his or her way manifestly has more power (by whatever means and on whatever grounds) than the other, who demonstrably has less power. This is simply definitional, because power is the ability to carry out and effect one’s will in the world.
We tend not to like power differentials unless we’re in the upper position, because we all want to effect our will, we want what we want. This is again true by definition: if we didn’t feel we wanted a thing, we wouldn’t want it and wouldn’t will it. And, again, having power and agency are, in fact, good things for human persons. Learning to exercise independent agency and build competence and power are key parts of human development, and in that process we learn to enjoy these things. That is, we like being able to will a thing and then effect that will through our actions; it feels good to us.
Typically, though, in our childhood development we also learn to accept limits to our power. Some of these limits are quite natural and intrinsic; although we might be capable pretty early on of willing a lot of things, we are not physically or mentally capable of carrying out most of what we will when we are small and weak and less developed. Other limits are socially enforced upon us by those with more power: our parents and other adults make rules that keep us from getting or doing what we want when we want it; we’re taught to take turns with others so that they will want to keep playing with us; and schools typically force us into structures and sequences and types of activities that we did not devise or choose for ourselves. Ideally, we would be taught that limits are normal – and often even good. For one thing, none of us has the ability – or even the time – to do absolutely everything that we could wish or will to do. Another problem is that many of the things we wish and will to do really aren’t so great. Plenty of things that seem good and desirable to us are, in fact, bad for us and should not be desired; still more are bad not only for us but also for others with whom we have to share the world.
Nevertheless, many of us are taught that limits upon our power are inherently bad things, that they are the negative entailment of a power-differential that we can and should ‘outgrow.’ Parents and other adults even tell us this explicitly when we question their authority: “Well, when you’re an adult and have your own house/family, you can do what you want, but right now….” As a result, many of us spend a good part of our childhoods ‘waiting to grow up’ precisely so that we will no longer be on the bottom of the power-differential, so that we can have and exercise more power, so that we can pursue the effecting of our own wills. When we find ourselves still and consistently on the ‘losing end’ of power differentials in adulthood, many of us then feel resentment and cry ‘foul’ – especially when we live in putatively free and equal and democratic societies.
The resentment of power differentials and limits upon our own power is only half of the problem, however; the other half is the fear that power will be abused by those who have more of it. There are demonstrably good reasons for this, as anyone with a knowledge of history or even a modicum of experience in the world can tell you. It is, of course, true that some people in positions of greater power might be actual psychopaths who are innately remorseless, have an inflated sense of their own importance, and are content to use, manipulate, and harm others to pursue their own wills as an end – and may even enjoy doing so. But such people are a very small minority of the population and tend not to be functional enough socially to advance to high levels of power or maintain it for long.
The problem is more commonly that being in positions of greater power has the potential to habituate even non-psychopathic people towards habits of psychopathy. This is because, as mentioned previously, human power has developed historically and evolutionarily through human aptitude for objectification and instrumentalization. These modalities are exactly right when it comes to dealing with objects and instruments; they go very quickly and often drastically wrong when used in dealings with other human persons. In other words, what we often call ‘abuses of power’ are almost inevitably also ‘abuses of persons’ either directly or indirectly (i.e., by destroying systems of rules that limit and condition the uses of power by those who have it in order to keep other human persons from being treated as objects or instruments.)
What do we need in order to make peace with power and to do what we can to ensure that it is used well?
1. More general education about the inevitability of power differentials and both natural and societal/political limits upon the power of individuals and groups, as well as about the potential goods that result from power differentials – even (and often especially) for those who are not on the ‘top’. [Much of this is to do with the core concepts of competition and cooperation.]
2. A robust and detailed understanding of mindsets and methods (those belonging to objectification and instrumentalization) that should not be applied in dealings with human persons – that is, a clear sense of what not to do, how to catch oneself beginning to do it, and then how to stop doing it and do something else instead.
3. A robust and detailed understanding of mindsets and methods that are ethical and appropriate for use in dealing with human persons – in other words, an explication of strategies of influence
4. A proposed set of rules that govern the following:
a. how to recognize when an individual or group in power has ‘gone too far’ and begun to abuse power; how to correct for this
b. when (if ever) and under what conditions (if any) we might find it necessary and acceptable to treat humans more as ‘objects’ and to what extent – e.g., what about war, incarceration, defense of self and others?
c. general ‘level-setting’ – given that humans are imperfect, just how objectifying or instrumentalizing must an action or pattern of actions be in order to warrant reprimand and/or discipline?