What Are Ways of Encouraging Cooperation in Society as Opposed to Competition?

First, as a society, we can learn from the relatively harmonious functioning of cells and organs in a human body. The various body parts, which hold varying levels of importance, cooperate in mutual complementarity for the whole body’s benefit. Cooperation in our body’s systems is due to the body’s natural trajectory to a future state.

In human society, however, no one feels the overriding calculation. Everyone is blocked by a narrow perception of considering what each person thinks is best for themselves, not seeing the whole wide world that exists when we switch to prioritizing the benefit of others. When we make the latter transition, we then gain a broader vision of the world through others’ eyes.

In order for every person in society to accept others equally, understanding that every person has a unique role that humanity needs, we need to feel the collective desire that exists outside of our much smaller egoistic desires. Feeling the collective desire means feeling the innermost lacks and needs of others as our own.

Therefore, in order for cooperation to emerge in society, an integral feeling needs to breed among its members. People will then start feeling more like a single family unit, and a feeling of a certain responsibility toward their fellows will surface.

Cooperation in society is then in the mutual investment that its members apply to its construction. This also sets the conditions for the blossoming of social equality.

There is no equality at the level of people’s desires because we are given differently-sized desires by nature. Social equality is in how much each member of society invests in building the society above their nature-given conditions.

In such a cooperative society, the sense of mutual consideration, responsibility and complementarity will awaken a feeling in its members that they each have a unique role to give of themselves—according to their abilities—for the benefit of others and society as a whole.

Each member of society will then have an equal opportunity to serve everyone, and the mutual serving will in turn add fuel for everyone to fully realize themselves in that cooperative society.