On Cooperation

This fellow’s beliefs, as presented here, were accepted by the majority of intellectuals at the turn of the 20th Century.  Marx and Engels, drawing on Hegel, had forwarded the idea of the dialectic, which, in political terms, means the never-ending clashing between socio-economic classes, which enable workers to force concessions from the rich.  Concurrently, we had the anarchists, those who believed that all valid government springs up spontaneously to deal with ad hoc events, and then evaporates.

Though you can still find people with ideas like these as we make our way through the 21st Century, they are considered radicals.

These are concepts that are built around the notion of interpersonal cooperation, which is not the way the vast majority of our modern civilization functions. Our lives today are governed largely by the broad principles of economics, especially now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that corporations have the same right to free speech under the First Amendment as people do.  Thus we have our lawmakers doing the bidding of business entities that are worth many millions of times that of the average voter.