The Cooperative Competitor
Our politics has lost its balance
Picture two boys sitting next to one another in a classroom. Follow them after school to a soccer field. If they happen to be on the same team, they will cooperate intensely and skillfully. If they happen to be on opposite teams, they will compete intensely and skillfully.
No other species on earth combines strength in cooperation with strength in competition. If another species is high in cooperation, then it is low in competition. If it is high in competition, then it is low in cooperation.1
I believe that this combination of high cooperation and high competition is the key to understanding social psychology, and the human condition more generally. We cooperate in order to compete, and we compete in order to cooperate.
We cooperate in order to compete by forming teams, creating roles, and building loyalty. We do this in sports, business, war, politics, and other realms.
But it might also be said that we compete in order to cooperate. Businesses compete with one another, but in the end the economy is an enormous cooperative enterprise, enabling workers to contribute and consumers to benefit. Scientists compete with one another for status, but in the end the accumulation of knowledge is another enormous cooperative enterprise.
We have cultural tools that enable us to benefit from cooperation and competition. Legal systems, scientific methods, and political rivalry all serve this purpose.
Language is probably the oldest and most foundational cultural tool for managing cooperation and competition. We use language to coordinate with our teammates and to express animosity toward the other team.
The Languages of Political Teams
A dozen years ago, I wrote The Three Languages of Politics, when I was trying to understand how it is that political tribes talk past one another. For example, I suggested that progressives emphasize an oppressor/oppressed axis while conservatives emphasize a civilization/barbarism axis.2
The rhetoric concerning the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel illustrates these two languages. Someone who shouts “Free Palestine!” is claiming that Palestinians are an oppressed people, and Israel is their oppressors. Someone who shouts “Hamas commits murder, kidnaping, and rape!” is claiming that Hamas is barbaric and Israel is only trying to defend the values of civilization.
No one, progressive or conservative, is in favor of either oppression or barbarism. But people on the progressive team will insist that conservatives are on the side of the oppressors; and people on the conservative team will insist that progressives are on the side of the barbarians.
Thus, these political languages serve two purposes. One purpose is to enable people on one team to quickly signal to one another their shared tribal membership. The other purpose is to express animosity toward the other tribe.
What Should We Do?
In my opinion, our political life today seems out of balance. It reflects an overly intense spirit of competition, and this precludes cooperation. Both sides see politics as a zero-sum game, a perspective that becomes self-fulfilling.
I do not have a magic wand to wave to restore balance. What I can recommend is that as individuals we try to avoid using political language solely for the purpose of identifying friends and denouncing foes. If you hear language that stirs you emotions of tribal loyalty, try to talk yourself out of reacting with anger and self-righteousness.
Jonathan Haidt is noted for saying that humans are 90 percent chimp (highly competitive) and 10 percent bee (highly cooperative).
The third language that I described was libertarian, which stresses the liberty/coercion axis. Nowadays, perhaps one could describe another language called populism, which stresses the common sense/credentialed expert axis.
Enjoyed your book and this post is a laudable effort to encourage the self-restraint that's absent in so much of what we see. Individually, or person-to-person, your admonition has some possibility of success; collective settings, including social media of course, the chances are zero, unfortunately. That should not stop me, however, from tempering my language.
For me, Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions” and his analysis about how differences in constrained versus unconstrained visions/perspectives provides an overarching framework for describing our current political dysfunction. Put simply, far too people are not grounded in reality.