The Dawning Age of Cooperation: The End of Civilization as We Know It-- and Just in TimeRugged 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. 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. 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. This book fills a huge gap in our literature on and understanding of "cooperation." As such it 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. |
Contents
1 | |
7 | |
13 | |
15 | |
Chapter 2 Cooperatively Creating the Most Secret Weapon | 35 |
A Cooperative Hybrid | 43 |
Chapter 4 Natures Lessons On Cooperation | 61 |
Elements Of Cooperation | 81 |
Introduction to Part 2 | 163 |
Chapter 10 The Age of Culture | 165 |
Chapter 11 Social Systems As Games and Mastering the Process of Social Performance | 177 |
Turning Competition Into Cooperation | 189 |
Chapter 13 Powering Up Cooperative Societies | 195 |
Chapter 14 Identification Cohesion and Community Oneness | 207 |
The Physiology and Rhythms of Oneness | 223 |
Chapter 16 Is Business on the Brink? | 235 |
Chapter 6 Tocquevilles Prophecy | 99 |
Chapter 7 Individualism Run Riot | 107 |
Chapter 8 Competition Economic Stratification and BoomBust Cycles | 131 |
Chapter 9 Saturn and What Might Have Been | 147 |
Creating the SelfRenewing Society | 161 |
Chapter 17 Goodbye to Our Old Civilization And Not a Moment Too Soon | 261 |
Chapter 18 All One in a BreakOut SelfRenewing Cooperative Society | 275 |
297 | |
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Common terms and phrases
action adaptive adversarial American ants behavior Bellah changes Chapter chimpanzees cial cohesion colony common group goal competent competitive individualistic competitive mutual aid consensus consequence coop cooperative community cooperative culture cooperative groups cooperative organizations cooperative social systems cooperative society coordination create cultural communities division of labor dominance hierarchies E. O. Wilson economic effective efforts emerge enact environment ethnocentricity example experience group-centered human Hutterites individualistic mutual aid Japanese Kaizen Lawler Lester Thurow Likert living mutual aid myths O’Toole one’s operating systems OSRD other’s participants performance physiological positive feedback loops practices problems produce Rehfeld responsibility rewards roles Saturn Saturn Corporation self-centered self-image skills social evolution social insects social interactions social stress society’s sociocultural species success survival task areas teams things tion tive Tocqueville transformation true cooperation voluntary associations wealth whole Wilson workers