I took Frothgar for a drive around the lanes today to try and keep his battery in good nick. The lanes are snow-covered and single track in most places. At one point I encountered another vehicle coming the other way and backed into a field gateway to let him through. A second vehicle was following the first, but he didn’t take the opportunity to come through as well. Instead, he backed into another field gateway further along the lane to give me my turn to drive on.
This is how human beings should behave.
This is why I so dislike Competitive Corporate Commercial Crap. Competitiveness might make a few people richer, but I’m quite convinced that life works better, and people are generally happier, if we employ Cooperation as the first principle instead.
True, we wouldn’t have as many gadgets and trinkets, but what’s more important in life? Being more content or having more gadgets and trinkets?
2 comments:
I remember reading an anthropology article about a man who spent a good while living with a tribe in Africa, an anthropologist. Some event of sorts was going on where members of the tribe would take turns bringing in a cattle to slaughter for the whole tribe. The anthropologist thought that it would be a sign of great thanks to bring in the biggest cow he could find. The entire tribe spent a week harassing him about how his giant cow was too thin and sick and wouldn't feed a single man-to the point where the anthropologist felt so frustrated and ashamed that he was ready to leave.
In the end he finally convinced one of the men in the tribe to tell him what was going on; they knew the cow was big and would feed the whole village and everyone would be full and happy, but the fact that he'd the nerve to bring in a giant cow was frowned upon as something that broke the egalitarian/equality that the tribe depended on, and so they felt it necessary to bring him back down to earth.
It was very interesting and enlightening. I deeply admire those tribes for their lack of competition and hierarchy.
I think this is a huge subject, Kaetlyn. My suspicion is that human beings are congenitally inclined to greed, so once they get away from simple community living and start to expand and innovate, competitiveness comes more to the fore. That results in increasing inequality, and inequality produces stress. On top of that, possessions start to become more important than people. Having more than the Joneses becomes more important than helping the Joneses - and so on. I wonder where it's all going.
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