Cooperation Among Friends & Enemies

Cooperation – a word often misunderstood in today’s day. So many people think cooperation is where two parties, be they friends or adversaries, find a method to achieve a desired outcome so that both parties don’t feel entirely ripped off. Basically, it’s how to get something without losing too much face.

But that is the incorrect interpretation of the term cooperation. If you look at the word construct, you can see it consists of two parts:

Coop and Ration – the ‘e’ is just in there because the language police liked how it sounded at parties, and it was also a way for the global cabal of  printers to goose their ‘per-letter’ profit margins when they printed all those dictionaries that no one uses anymore. Why do you think the words laugh, thought, philosophy, colleague, wrought and knock have all those extra letters?You’re telling me laf, thawt, filosofee, coleeg, rot and nok wouldn’t suffice?? It’s a scam, I tells ya.

But I digress.

Can’t Fly the Coop

Taking a deeper look at so called cooperation, we can dissect the part of it that involves a coop. A coop is where whickens or rabbits or ducks are kept, fed and treated like machines in man-made structures until we need them for a meal. Human life is not too far off from the life of chickens, what with all our time spent cooped up looking at screens, watching Game of Thrones, or surfing to buy something on Amazon you just have to have, stopping only for a snack or bathroom break. Oh, we are all cooped up all right.

The only major difference is that we mostly feed and bathe ourselves, whereas the chickens are fed. Then again, with Uber Eats, we are becoming more like chickens, just with credit cards. (Good thing we don’t lay eggs. What a mess that would be.)

Furthermore, the more time we spend in our respective coops staring at the proverbial heating lamp known as a screen, the easier it is for whoever owns our data (it’s not you, trust me) to snoop on us and then let us know what we should buy, read, eat, object to, and be visibly offended by.

K-Ration

Now that we are wilfully cooped up, we can look at the rations we have left to survive on.  Let’s call them K-rations, for knowledge rations. First of all, it prints well on a baseball cap or a t-shirt, and secondly, I am not that smart or creative to come up with something better on the spur of the moment. I write these rants extemporaneously, and sadly without the aid of a trusty, gooey, sticky chocolate danish to fuel the fires of creativity and early onset diabetes.

As we all know, knowledge is generally rationed out by a) income and b) education. The more you have of a, the more you can get of b, and then become rich and have a coop somewhere in the Bahamas or Switzerland with servants who don’t have much of either a or b.

So with knowledge being rationed and most of us being cooped up somewhere, then it’s easy to see how cooperation functions. Just stay where you are, eat some feed, and wait to be told what to do by either your phone, spouse, secret government snooping agency, or your stomach/bladder/bowels. My recommendation: listen to your stomach/bladder/bowels before you listen to your phone. Unless the government has your tax returns and asks you to come for a polite chat.

Just cooperate. Unless they try to take away your danish. Then rebellion shall ensue.

Affectedly effective,
Santiago Schopenhauer Druker