Stephen Hawking – we need to rethink our attitude toward wealth. ‘We will now have to learn to collaborate and to share.’
‘People are starting to question the value of pure wealth. Is knowledge or experience more important than money? Can possessions stand in the way of fulfilment? Can we truly own anything, or are we just transient custodians?
These questions are leading to a shift in behaviour which, in turn, is inspiring some groundbreaking new enterprises and ideas. These are termed “cathedral projects”, the modern equivalent of the grand church buildings, constructed as part of humanity’s attempt to bridge heaven and Earth. These ideas are started by one generation with the hope a future generation will take up these challenges.’
Can we truly own anything?
We need to move to a society where we value people because they “are” much, not because they “have” much. A society where “being” matters more than “having”. We need to get beyond conflictual and possessive relations and the endless haggling over the terms of on which exploitation – of earth, of others, of ourselves - take place.
Hawking underlines collaboration and cooperation within a shared vision.
‘Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours.’
Indeed. I'd just say it matters a great deal with whom we collaborate and to what ends - and that's a matter of social relations. At present, our cooperative instincts have been hi-jacked by free-riders and diverted to the ends of private gain. We need to devise mechanisms which marginalise or exclude free-riders, or encourage them into cooperation for ends of the social good.
The world needs integrated solutions. And these integrated solutions require a collaborative approach drawing together a range of actors working at a number of levels. The word ‘collaboration’ comes from the Latin laborare, meaning ‘to labour’, and co-, com-, or col-, meaning ‘with’ or ‘together’. To collaborate, then, is to work together with others. We labour together to reclaim our natural, ethical and political commons so as to constitute the relations and practices required to enable us to act for the common good.
But neither collaboration nor cooperation are virtues in themselves. It matters a great deal with whom we collaborate and why. At present, our cooperative instincts have been hi-jacked and diverted to private ends. In a sense, we are all working getting, complicit with a system driving economic inequality, social dislocation and ecological degradation. We come back to Jared Diamond’s pointed and poignant question in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, what was the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thinking when performing that act? I’d say much the same as we are thinking now as we witness the loss of habitats and extinction of species on a planet mired in ecological degradation and destruction. We now see clearly the consequences of the unintentional and the imperceptible, and therefore act in full awareness of the environmental damage caused by our actions. But my point is that there is no ‘we’ and no ‘our’, instead of collective mechanisms enabling choice, control and responsibility in an institutional, social, moral and psychological sense, there is a systemic force that embraces all agents, from global finance, the corporations, governments and the individuals composing the citizen body. The damage is ‘perversely wrought’ in full awareness of the consequences, systematically wrong in terms of the long-term consequences for all, but so individually right with respect to the options available to the particular agents in the short-run. Without new social relations bringing an identity that connects the individual and the social good, without an appropriate institutional infrastructure closing the gaps between knowledge, policy, will and action, without appropriate character-construction fostering responsiveness and creating the dispositions and capabilities to act, ‘we’ will cut down the last tree too, and ‘we’ will do so systematically, in full knowledge of the damaging, eco-suicidal consequences.
To be genuinely holistic, we need to address the possession of the Earth as such, not just the terms on which the Earth is possessed and its resources distributed. And that takes more than collaboration and cooperation as such, more than changing the title deeds on property. Uprooting the whole social metabolic order of control points to a much deeper transformation. Diamond is correct to call this damage ‘perverse’, but it is a perversion that is inherent in the system, not in human nature. That system compels actors in the short-run to make the wrong choices for long-term health. For better choices, we need a new system. And, at some point in that transformation, the question of enclosure and expropriation of the global commons as such, and not just of the creative labour of human beings creating the social world, comes to be addressed. We place the human world in respectful, reverential relation to the other beings and bodies of the More-than-Human World that enfolds and nourishes us. Isn’t that wealth enough? Enoughness and sufficiency – (ecologically) virtuous action within right relationships and a sufficiency of material goods.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/29/stephen-hawking-brexit-wealth-resources?CMP=fb_gu
Definitions.
Collaboration is working together to create something new in support of a shared vision. The key points are that it is not through individual effort, something new is created, and that the glue is the shared vision.
Coordination is sharing information and resources so that each party can accomplish their part in support of a mutual objective. It is about teamwork in implementation. Not creating something new.
Cooperation is important in networks where individuals exchange relevant information and resources in support of each other’s goals, rather than a shared goal. Something new may be achieved as a result, but it arises from the individual, not from a collective team effort.
All three of these are important. All three are aspects of teamwork. But they are not the same!
http://seapointcenter.com/cooperation-teamwork-and-collaboration/