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07/07/2005.
The famous philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand
Russell, once wrote, “The
only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”
Russell was not exaggerating. Without cooperation,
we can hardly exist. Our daily lives almost entirely
depend on the coordinated actions of many other
people. Consider the following. A few months ago I
bought a laptop through the Internet from a US
company, Dell, Inc. and got it a few
days later from Texas. Some of its components were
made in Malaysia and some in China. The whole
process—from making its components, assembling them
and sending the computer to me—involves various
institutions at differences places. They are done by
individuals who are members of cooperative
organizations which, in turn, use materials and
services produced by other cooperative
organizations, and so on. Everything is the product
of an immense network of cooperation.
Like the goods and services, which their production
depend on cooperation, so too our body. Each of us
is an organization of about a billion of cells which
are specialized into many different types that
cooperate to form organs such as the heart, stomach,
and bones. Moreover, the digestion of food, the
transport of food to cells, the transport of oxygen
to cells and the use of thought to solve problems
are all the product of extensive cooperative amongst
highly specialized and differentiated organs and
cells. If this cooperation breaks down, our bodies
will be malfunction or we die. We are survived
because of the cooperative actions of cells and
organs in our body. In and out, our lives are
greatly determined by cooperative actions.
About sixty years ago, Bung Hatta, one of the
nation’s founding fathers, was very convinced that
only through a cooperation of its people, could
Indonesia realize her independence and greatness in
the future. The former president Soekarno once
summarized Pancasila, the philosophical basis of
Indonesia, into one principle: gotong royong
(cooperation). And the former US President, Woodrow
Wilson said, “Power consists in one's capacity to
link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by
reason and a gift of cooperation.”
Those leaders are right.
Evidence increasingly shows that social capital is critical
for societies to prosper economically and for
development to be sustainable. As Francis
Fukuyama in Trust: The
Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity
argues that one of the most important form of social
capital is the myriad forms of cooperative in which
members of a social community engage, that enhance
collective well-being and further the attainment of
collective goals. It is about cooperative spirit.
However, for decades the development of cooperation
in Indonesia has been wrongly centered on
institutional and ceremonial aspects rather than on
substance and spirit. Through out the 1970s and
1990s, the New Order regime established thousands of
cooperation institutions across the countries, yet
the role of cooperation, institutionally, is still
marginal. For most Indonesians cooperation often
means weak organization. The decades of the wrong
paradigm have led to a misunderstanding of
cooperation from acting together to enacting
symbols; from working together voluntarily to
working together by order. We develop cooperative
institutions, but fail to enhance the cooperative
spirit even within the cooperative institutions
themselves. This violates the basic principle of
cooperation
One of the principles underlying any cooperation is
the respect for diversity. In cooperative
organizations, things can be done better if there is
a specialization and division of labor. There is
hardly any entity or individual that can survive
without diversity. Every individual does not have to
do everything needed for survival. The scarcity of
resources compels us to specialize in certain jobs
and others specialize in different jobs. And we also
find specialization within our bodies, within our
social systems, and between nations. It
may seem paradoxical: we cooperate because we
are diverse.
The second core principle of cooperation is unity.
Cooperation provides advantages through the
principle of unity because it is able to exploit the
fact that combinations often have new features that
their components do not. Take for instance a
chemical element called Hydrogen (H), the most
abundant of all elements in the universe.
It is “the fuel of life” because it is so essential
to most biological processes in its atomic form,
positive proton form or negative ion form. No
electron moves in the living system unless it is
accompanied by hydrogen. Human body stores hydrogen
in its tissues, and in the absence of an adequate
supply of negative hydrogen ions, our health
deteriorates. An interesting part is, a combination of two atoms of hydrogen produces
one atom of helium, the
next-lightest element—and releases an
incredibly massive amount of energy. This is called
a fusion reaction where
two atoms of hydrogen fuse to create one atom of
helium. Unity creates massive energy.
As a nation, we are constantly being challenged with
new situations, new ideas, and new developments.
Our survival depends on the cohesive cooperation
among all elements in our society: people from
all backgrounds that to conduct scientific inquiry,
knowledge exploration, as well as social and
economic developments for a better living standard
of our people.
We live in a world of “both and” rather than a
world of “either or.” We have a thread of unity that
connects us to other aspects of existence.
It is about time to develop cooperation with the
right paradigm. The institution must come after the
cooperative spirit, not the other way around. The
next logical question, of course, is how to enhance
cooperative spirit. That is a question for each
Indonesian needs to ponder. At least, we start with
the right question.
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