Cooperation

Who does this guy Rawls think he is, Karl Marx?

An equal society can't work because an equal society would be based on cooperation rather than competition. That's what the economists tells us and they are our prophets (the prophets of profit, hoho), capitalism (or consumerism, really), our religion.

More, that's what the paradigm tells us. The narrative that drives our culture. Our entire societal being is based on the idea that cooperation and equality leads to stagnation, that progress and advancement only results from competition--more than that, only from competition for monetary and/or material reward. This is the essence of "Family": beneath all the rhetoric, what is most sacred is property.

The capitalists look to nature and say, it is survival of the fittest. And yes, in the grand scheme of things, nature runs on competition, but they are exceptions. Bees and ants are the obvious intraspecial example, but there are even interspecial examples, the cleaner fish and similar symbiotic relationships that compete through cooperation. The fact remains, of course, that they compete; and perhaps that is a paradigm that cannot be escaped.

But society is not nature. We accept that society is not survival of the fittest in a literal sense--we cannot go around killing whoever we have the strength to, and raping what women we can (and hopefully we do not want to)--but the capitalists ask us to apply that model metaphorically. We have already broken the literal connection, what holds the metaphor? Why must we yet bow to the altar of competition?

Yes, the attempts have all failed. But when is that a reason to give up? The paradigm was not changed. There must be a way to change the paradigm, to motivate through cooperation, with different rewards: perhaps power, friendship, association, whatever. We must find a way, for the current system leads only to destruction. And while destruction is necessary ("parents must die in order for children to come into their own" said the Cylons) creation is needed, too, to replace that which is lost.

I'm not saying I know how. I'm saying we have to try, because the system is broken.

(Develop synergies?)