Cooperation

Throughout the history, cooperation of people has proven to be the most effective mechanism of maximizing output for the purpose of achieving a common goal.

But don’t jump to conclusions. I haven’t lost my mind and turned socialist or, God forbid, communist. It is not any sort of cooperation I am talking about here. Two thousand years of imposed religious unity did not yield much benefit for the state of human affairs. Thousands of years of coerced cooperation through various forms of slavery did not yield much benefit for the state of human affairs either. Modern-day coercive states have either failed already or are finding themselves blessed with social and economical depression. Coercive cohesion fails on the long run.

It is not the cooperation where the interests of individuals are sacrificed for some common goal I am talking about. It is a cooperation of free individuals joining together at their free will that yields true success and prosperity for all. Emergence of free-thinking liberated from the claws of Inquisition gave us unprecedented advances in science. Emergence of free-trading enabled for further flow of people and ideas across the globe to everyone’s benefit. Emergence of capitalism produced unprecedented wealth for virtually everyone. Yes, there are many poor people on the Globe still, but you will find that this is mostly the case in those parts of the world where personal and economical freedoms are in short supply.

Jeremy Clarkson noted that in 20000 years of human existence we came up with only three important things: fire, wheel and the fact that wood floats. And then in two hundred years we invented everything else. And it was not a coercive cohesion that facilitated this unprecedented advance. It was freedom of people to think, act, trade and work together at their own will. It was the freedom of individuals to decide what is in their own best interest rather than having someone telling them what the ‘greater good’ was.

What was all that about? Well, the Freedom Institute honoured me with an invitation to contribute to their blog, which I accepted. I would like to thank my readers, both like-minded and opponents, and invite them to continue reading my posts on the Freedom Institute blog.