Sound Bite
Rugged individualism is great for legendary heroes, but does it really shape a society that can endure for the long term? A massive social transformation is underway, driven by technology; it requires and is pushing us toward a cooperative culture. Our American competitive, individualistic culture is outmoded and increasingly ineffective. This book presents a new model of cooperation for building a cooperative American and worldwide society.
About the Book
True cooperation is a stranger in America. The author, an expert on medical sociology, has conducted research on social stress and cooperative solutions, only to find that we call many things "cooperation" which are not. This includes mutual aid in pursuit of shared individual goals, democratic decision making, equal sharing, and compromising.
True cooperation is a cultural pattern used to organize cooperative social systems. Participants are group centered and work to achieve group goals. True cooperation produces rapidly adapting information processing social systems that benefit all of the participants. These cooperative organizations and societies become our primary, and very effective, adaptive tools for survival.
Gordon Mills fills a huge gap in our literature on and understanding of 'cooperation.' This book shows what true cooperation is and how to do it, while also showing how competition and individualism prevent us from truly cooperating and creating a cooperative American (and worldwide) society. The book is of great value to libraries, organizations, universities, a variety of specialties and professions, and concerned individuals.
The book is written at a more academic level because the material cannot be simplified further without loss of insights and information. It is a 'friendly' academic level with examples and explanations while a variety of more academic issues and analyses are excluded.
Algora Publishing –
Prof. Robin Fox, Rutgers University Dept. of Anthropology
“A fine and challenging book. It had many echoes for me. I studied Pueblo Indians of course, the source of much hopeful writing on cooperative societies and at least one utopia (Ursula Le Guin), where I found they achieved cooperation at a cost: they had to work at it (ref Chris Boehm’s work).…Many overlaps of interest. Your potential utopia, though, is based on the best of social science research and is practical in its endeavor, not just wishful thinking.
Do you know the work of Don Beck and the Spiral Dynamics people? The future they envision is much like yours I think. In my language I think the Old Adam is quite capable of your cooperative behavior. It is just that in the over large and over complex (and yes, over-competitive) modern societies these elements must struggle to emerge.
Also I wonder if we have not been conditioned to actually like competitive behavior, however destructive it may be. It is addictive, let’s face it.
Might we not find your utopia a bit dull? The problem with all utopias, of course. And would they be Open Societies? (Popper) I think they could be but we have come to suspect attempts at society-wide “communalism” that always seem to go wrong and turn nasty. The practical answer lies probably in getting rid of what we both see as “destructive competition” and keeping the fun.
A great read, great thinking.”