Chapter 12: Cooperative - The Practice of Natural Movement

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”

 

—Bertrand Russell

 

Cooperation between the members of the same human group, clan, or tribe was a fundamental aspect of ancestral life until very recently. All individuals of a community had to work cooperatively to ensure both group survival and individual survival. Humans, often moved in packs. This had to do with hunting, gathering, building shelter, preparing food, harvesting firewood, and transporting water (as well as pretty much everything else required to sustain the group), and it obviously necessitated Natural Movement.

Just like today, mutual help, collaboration, and good communication created strong and positive bonds between individuals, and those positive bonds greatly facilitated cooperation. Collective sustenance, safety, well-being, or success in challenges wasn’t a result of internal competition within the group; primarily it resulted from collaboration within the group. Both cooperativeness and competitiveness are inherent to human nature, but cooperativeness has an equal, if not a greater, potential to make us stronger and more successful as a group than competition within a group does. Cooperativeness also makes us stronger and more successful as individuals who belong to the group which we serve. If systematic competition against each other was the rule of human existence, our lives would be miserable and short, whereas greater collaboration helps everyone who participates.

When we think of prehistoric times of mankind, we imagine outrageously selfish, typically male brutes fighting over everything, especially food. However, cultural anthropology shows that in our evolutionary past, cooperation was much more essential to survival than competition. The same thing can be observed in hunter-gatherer tribes that still survive in the world, as well as in every group that has remained faithful to its ancestral cultural heritage. Serving the group was serving oneself.

Today we are constantly bombarded with the idea of “survival of the fittest,” and we approach life as if it is a constant competition in which being the strongest—and most aggressive—is the key to prevailing in any situation. The image of the superhero prevailing on all villains and single-handedly rescuing everyone or of the lone wolf overcoming harsh conditions and surviving alone in the wild are omnipresent in literature, comics, cartoons, movies, and video games. They strongly influence our perception that life is mostly a competition in which the strongest reign on top of all the rest.

Through the evolutionary process, those who are able to engage in social cooperation of various sorts do better in survival and reproduction.”

—Robert Nozick

 

In our evolutionary past, surviving long term, alone, in wild environments while equipped with primitive technology was nearly impossible, and very few would have willingly chosen that lifestyle. Living alone would have resulted from someone being banished by the community, and it probably would have led to the person’s death.

The importance of competition in life is undeniable, but it is overestimated, and the importance of cooperation is underestimated. We often believe that only the most competitive people are successful, and we forget that the most cooperative people also are very successful. Cooperation has nothing to do with the loss of individuality. It is not a collectivist political idea but a part of our evolutionary psychology. When the individual participates in the collective effort, the benefit is both to the self and the group.

How often do tasks you have to handle in your life or physical training necessitate cooperation with others to achieve a task? By cooperation, I don’t mean only encouragement, moral support, or camaraderie—the modern equivalent of tribal bonding. By cooperation I mean performing tasks with others that you could not perform alone.

The way we live today makes it possible to completely avoid relying on any other person’s physical help if we want to. Mainstream fitness has always had a tendency toward individualistic fitness training and goals. Have you ever seen an exercise machine designed so people can work out together? How many times have you had to wait in line for your turn to bench press or use the leg-extension machine? Society has become increasingly individualistic, which is a fact that pervades how we approach physical training.

As a result, new forms of community have emerged around all sorts of activities or causes that bring people together. The same sense of community has developed in the fitness world, and it counterbalances the blatant ego-centered mindset that had been prevailing. However, training together and training cooperatively are not the same: You are always training together when you are training cooperatively, but you are not necessarily training cooperatively when you train together. Again, cooperative physical training or work is based on a real, tangible interaction, communication, and synchronicity to coordinate physical action and efforts between individuals.

Training together could simply mean going through the same workout, at the same time, in the same place, but the workout itself is basically something you could do just as well on your own. Although it can be very enjoyable and motivating to work out with others, it does not teach individuals to cooperate and achieve a task that they couldn’t do singly, either in the form of cooperation or mutual help.

A cooperative task could involve each person participating in carrying part of a load individually, but that could also mean lifting something collectively—something so heavy that a single person couldn’t lift and carry it or something heavy enough that a single person would spend an enormous amount of energy, go very slowly, and maybe injure him- or herself by transporting it alone. Throwing and catching are also movement tasks that require impeccable coordination and cooperation—for example, to pass valuable rescue equipment or food, medicine, weapons, or anything valuable. Another extreme example is someone jumping from a height to a group of people waiting to make the catch. Mutual help is another form of cooperation, as when one person helps another clear an obstacle, reach safety, or avoid drowning.

Cooperation is mutually beneficial; you give and take, and anyone involved gets a share of the outcome that was produced regardless of how much they were able to contribute to the collective effort. Cooperation empowers everyone and leaves everyone happy—never frustrated. It makes the present more viable and the future more sustainable, both for the individuals and for the community they belong to.

This principle does not dismiss in any way the importance of individuality, nor does it discard the potential value of competition. As with principle 6, “Unspecialized,” elite athletes driven by competition have achieved both personal greatness and pushed the—recorded—limits of human physical performance to new heights. Competitiveness—the desire to win or to rank the highest possible—can be a powerful drive for improvement and achievement.

However, it’s essential to acknowledge that not all human prowess or achievements are born from competition. Swimming across an ocean or running across a continent are phenomenal achievements, but they might not take place within a competitive setting. Observers are quick to say that the person who achieved such feats competed against nature or against themselves, but this is a personal view. True competition is an intention that requires at least two people. Nature is not a person; it doesn’t have the intention to defeat you or prevail over you. It stays the same regardless of anyone being there, of what they’re doing, and of what their intention is. You also cannot “compete against yourself.” You are not two people, and you cannot win or lose over yourself. There may not be an ounce of competitiveness in the mind of those great achievers, yet they achieve something great because they have extraordinary determination and discipline. In many cases, people who achieve things individually have an impeccable support system behind them.

Similar achievements are made by pairs or groups who plan, organize, and finally realize achievements together. In this case, competitiveness between the members of the group is a very counterproductive factor that can endanger the team.

Cooperative Competition

 

Interestingly, when competition takes place between groups at a team level, cooperation within each of the groups is an absolute must. One of the primary concerns of all team coaches is to detect and address individualism and to maintain the greatest, most authentic levels of cooperativeness possible in the mind of all players. Team coaches seek great individuals who have little individualism. Although fans may be entirely focused on the aggressiveness of their team, which is necessary to secure the win, the fans often fail to realize that such aggression is totally channeled and organized into cooperative work from start to end. Individual aggressiveness alone does not win team games.

Remember that there is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.”

—W. L. Sheldon

 

Individual competition within a group can to some degree help motivate every individual to improve, and making each member of a group better contributes to the success of the collective. But such competitiveness has more to do with the concern of giving one’s best, or at least with keeping up with a baseline level of aptitude the group expects from you, rather than the desire to be on top and better than everyone else. In every group there will be always individuals who are better, stronger, tougher, smarter, kinder, wiser, more skilled, more creative, or more attractive (whether they’re that way naturally or as a result of some effort they make). We’re all different. What matters to everyone in any group is the intention that each individual displays and the efforts each individual is willing to produce. In a nutshell, authentic, generous cooperativeness is what is expected from you to be recognized and accepted in the group as useful, reliable, and important. In competitive sports, most of the time preceding competition events is spent in pursuit of improving each individual’s progress and preparation, and the support system provided by the coach, sensei, and other students is really what attracts people to the team.

Even in martial arts, training is not primarily designed to determine who prevails; it’s an arrangement in which one person tries to expose the other’s weaknesses and accepts that one’s weaknesses might be exposed by another person; that philosophy is the key to mutual improvement. Opponents are not real opponents: They are partners within a group dedicated to everyone’s betterment and continuous empowerment. They respect their partner’s weaknesses as much as their fortes and enjoy seeing them evolve and make progress. They bow, hug, fist bump, and high-five, before and after sparring, and they smile and nod in appreciation during it. Cooperation, as much as competition, is omnipresent. The desire to self-improve most of the time prevails over the desire to dominate opponents. Trying to prevail is not always a finality; it is a means to the end of improving one’s own capability.

Chronic competitiveness is a sign that you have no other way of being motivated. If you absolutely need competition to find motivation to perform at your highest, you are driven only by ego. In real life, people who always want to be better than all the rest are usually not so popular, whereas people who are always trying to support or benefit others, ensure everyone’s fun and safety, or act as peacemakers when conflicts arise are most often quite popular; there is an evolutionary psychology reason for this.

A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

—Dr. Seuss

 

Working with others in a spirit of cooperativeness and participation to contribute to a collective effort has helped countless individuals build the self-confidence and self-esteem they were lacking. It helps engender more humility, respect, tolerance, patience, and kindness for others, and it encourages people to be more positive, constructive, open, helpful, encouraging, and friendly in life. So, I want to state again that the importance of competition in life is undeniable, but it is overestimated, whereas the importance of cooperation is underestimated.

Practical Cooperation

 

As you begin your Natural Movement practice, find people you can primarily cooperate with and benefit from. Learn from, share with, and train with these people, both in the sense of training next to each other and working together to achieve tasks none of you could achieve alone. Physically participate and interact with one another and with the same goal in mind. It doesn’t matter who’s best; what matters is how good you can become individually and as a group and how the group can improve its collective performance. Even from a situational intelligence perspective, when positive synergy occurs, the constructive interaction of two or more people often produces solutions and improved strategies superior to what each individual could have come up with if they had been working alone.

Of course, you do not have to always train cooperatively every time you practice with others. The cooperative principle neither implies the dismissal of individuality nor minimizes the importance of self-empowerment in any way. Even within a group, the real source of self-confidence is within you, and only your rigorous self-discipline and personal will can make you stronger.

Yet practicing cooperatively definitely is rewarding and beneficial. You’ll learn from others as much as they might learn from you, and you might learn new things together. You’ll learn to trust others and find that you can rely on them as much as they will realize they can rely on you. That mutual reliance is the goal. We could call it reciprocal altruism.

Nothing is more empowering than when you become inspiring to yourself—except maybe knowing that you can be useful to others. We’re not more than others; we’re more with others. “Stronger together” is not a political and gimmicky motto; it’s a timeless reality that concerns us all. The pursuit of fitness without the spiritual drive to better yourself as a person and be able to help others in time of need may not be a meaningless endeavor, but it’s not as meaningful and noble as the alternative.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”

—Arthur Ashe

 

Friendly competition can be an effective additional source of motivation and fun from time to time. Competition can be the simulation of adverse circumstances that demand a physical response from you and that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

However, rivalry, or competition, is not the only way—or even the most effective way—to get motivated. One of my primary motivations has been thinking of how I want to develop and maintain an ability to physically help my loved ones, friends, or even strangers in time of need. As a matter of fact, I have put such real-world physical competency and preparedness to use by rescuing near-drowning people on three occasions. My response in those situations wasn’t anything special: I knew what to do, I knew what I was capable of doing, and I had trained for it with intention. Lives are saved every day by both professionals and regular people, and most often the rescues are successful thanks to the cooperation of several people who work with one another to achieve a result.

I believe everyone should be physically trained to help others. This type of training should be a mandatory part of authentic, healthy physical education programs in every school. As expressed in principle 5, “Vital,” there is no guarantee that you will ever be in a situation that demands your physical capability to such an extreme, but you should still be prepared in the event that you do need those physical skills.

Muscle size has never impressed me, but I certainly look up to those who possess useful physical capability, a strong mind, and a big heart, regardless of muscle mass. I won’t miss the opportunity to express my admiration and gratitude to all the people out there—firefighters, paramedics, rescuers, police officers, military—who at any point will put themselves in danger to save others’ lives. Even if some of them may be competitive by nature, they don’t behave like individualistic superheroes but as trained, cooperative team members.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

—William James

 

I also want to thank the mentor I have never met, Georges Hébert, whose writings inspired me to perpetuate this philosophy of cooperation. Hébert’s motto was “Be strong to be useful”—both to oneself and to others. He was referring to helpfulness through cooperation and mutual assistance. Utility is for objects like tools; helpfulness is for conscious beings. Helpfulness requires your intention.

ABOUT MOVNAT

 

MovNat is both a practice and a coaching method for Natural Movement that enables broad, fast, and safe progress. Following are the goals MovNat:

• To educate and build real-world physical capability in people so that in a time of need they will be able to help themselves and others

• To develop, restore and maintain health, vitality, and well-being through the consistent practice of Natural Movement

• To support self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect.

• To develop respect for and connectedness with nature

Visit movnat.com for certifications and workshops, online coaching, or information about a licensed gym or certified trainer near you. Visit naturalmovement.com for online courses and insights into the Natural Movement lifestyle.