Cooperation is the Greatest Value

This is my first attempt at a format of essay inspired by my long-gone glory days as a high-school speech contestant. "X is the greatest value" is the pattern by which all Lincoln-Douglas debates argued for and against some line of moral judgment about society. I recall "the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral" was one topic. I don't have any particular topic to frame my writing here, I just want to express my appreciation for cooperation as a concept.

Being a the greatest value is clearly hyperbole, even before I write more than one article using the superlative. True greatestness was never the idiom, but rather a way to express that this value should be used as an ethical rubric. When another quality or virtue suggests a different decision, the titular value should be chosen instead. It's a thing that should be pursued along a general course of behavior. It's just intrinsically a good thing. That's what I'm going for here.

That's all. It's something very, very valuable. Priceless, even. My dialect of English has an idiom for that.

Worth its weight in gold

This is an antique fire extinguisher. I was fortunate enough to encounter it in my daily life, recognize it for what it was, and be granted it as a gift from its rightful owner. I informed them to the best of my ability what it was and why I wanted it. I even included that it was valuable purely as an old trinket, a historical artifact. They merely told me that if I sold it, I could share the proceeds.

It turns out I didn't know how valuable it was.

This device contains carbon tetrachloride. It's a simple molecule, and very similar structurally to another very common chemical, methane. One carbon atom with each of its four electron pairs occupied by one other atom. In CH4's case, those four atoms are hydrogen. For carbon-tet, CCl4, the four are chlorine.

It's non-polar, it's liquid, it's volatile. Its complete lack of hydrogen and oxygen mean it doesn't burn in normal conditions, hence the usage as a thing to be sprayed onto flames in order to snuff them out. It's a useful solvent for some acts of chemistry. Anecdotally it's good at cleaning things. I don't know if it is useful to synthesize illegal substances, and I'm not very interested in finding out. I knew all that ahead of time and spotted it because I had seen a couple interesting bits of media on the subject of acquiring the chemical in exactly this form.

Those media also taught me that it was difficult to obtain otherwise. When I say difficult, I mean it is almost impossible to find in any form other than inside forgotten, reconstruction-era fire extinguishers. Some very special chemists, or modern day monarchs, might be able to acquire it, but only at great cost (relative to a non-monarch). This fluid has been systematically banned and all usage ceased. With some minor regional variation, it ranges between only available to the elite few, and being 100% illegal to acquire, sell, transport, or manufacture. So if you want to buy some and you happen to live in a place where that's not prison-worthy, at best you'll be paying out the nose for it.

Pretty clear why it's so expensive. Why was it banned at all?

World Peak Cooperation

Yeah this stuff is bad for more than just fires and mice livers. It also wrecks havoc on the ozone layer. This is one of those chemicals that only the most ancient millennial will remember as being a chloro-floro-carbon, a.k.a. a "CFC". This one just happens to have zero floros. So it was banned to fix the hole in the ozone layer. Everybody (cooperatively) played by the rules; disaster averted. Hurrah!

Hold up; why would only a specific generation remember that? Aren't generations a bullshit way to characterize cultural differences as some kind of socially acceptable ageism? Why yes, that is what generation labels do, but in this case I think the generation might actually be universal across the entire world.

The Montreal Protocol was a conference of every country collectively agreeing that we needed to stop the production of chemicals that would inevitably cause a very real, very bad problem for every living thing on planet Earth. Pretty awesome treaty, good job cooperation, you literally saved the planet. Greatest value indeed.

OK but the generation question again...wouldn't older generations also remember that we saved the planet? They certainly talk a lot about other stuff that happened so long ago nobody remembers any more, and they love to lord their sacrifices over the younger folks on the downstream end of decades of wage stagnation. Why don't they remember and brag about this achievement?

Let's get back to that further down. First, an interlude for my personal investment in this greatest value.

My quest for cooperation

I've spent most of the last year of my life telling anyone who would listen, and a fair number of folks who didn't, that I needed a supportive team. I did not feel heard.

I had been hired to an explicitly leadership-centric engineering position. I did it the best I could, and I genuinely think I did a decent job teaching a bunch of folks how to work better and accomplish more. And I got many venues to pitch ideas about how we could all work together better. I just didn't get those chances within my own team. If the chances happened, they were invisible or unusable for me. I did not feel supported.

At one point a leader told me (I had complained) that they would expect me to not be stopped by a teammate's lack of support. I found it wild that I should have to overcome the barriers put up by a teammate. If teammate wasn't meant to help me achieve my goals, what the hell were they supposed to do? That complainee was a big fan of unilateral decisions; consequences be damned. I guess my leader thought that was correct. It was tough to feel respected by someone who apparently thinks telling people exactly what to do is the correct MO.

I have zero interest in commanding people to do specific things that they don't want to do. As one excellent manager once told me, "if your goal in management is to have people obliged to do what you say, then you should never become a manager." Well, I do not want to become a manager at all, and I definitely don't want to ever have authority to make anyone do anything they don't think is correct.

I think leadership is a matter of informed-consent persuasion that my ideas are the best ideas. When I'm wrong, I expect people to be allowed to tell me. God I hope they would, anyway. I'm not guaranteed to succeed at persuading, and some folks will always operate in bad faith to block me even when I'm doing it the best I can. But I am not willing to fight fire with fire when it comes to dishonest folks who refuse to listen to others.

When it comes to teammates though, I do have a baseline expectation. And it's that they'll try to help me accomplish my goals, because we have the same goals. If that's not true, then we aren't really on a team at all. We're just some folks who get together to try to play some zero-sum game that everyone loses. I hate that.

I have failed interviews for lack of being able to say what "I" did. I always cite my team. I haven't accomplished anything without the help of other folks. I never want to claim I accomplished something entirely on my own. That feels lonely. I'm glad I didn't get those jobs that expect me to be an individual instead of someone who cooperates.

I'm doing better now on my current team. But it's been a long road getting to a point where I feel like I can accomplish anything. I'm still not sure my company respects the kind of leadership I want to express.

Who could disagree?

Ah, back to the generation that should be old enough to remember halting the death of the ozone (btw it blocks lethal radiation from space)...wouldn't they recall what a CFC was? And be very happy about it?

No, they won't mention it. Because somehow this event has been turned into a propaganda piece against cooperation. I wish I was joking.

I have been told, with 100% sincerity, that the ozone hole was a clear example of science making a mountain out of a mole-hill. "We all heard about how this big ozone problem was coming, and then it didn't arrive. So clearly," they claimed emphatically, "the problem never existed in the first place!" They further argued that in general a scientist's histrionics should be ignored. Of course this conversation was about their lack of belief in global warming.

This person took the absence of a terrible consequence, which happened due to unprecedented cooperation, as evidence that we should not cooperate to solve the next climate crisis. And God help us all, they aren't alone.

Just to be explicit, carbon dioxide can be categorically proven to be a greenhouse gas (so is methane), using exactly the same science as the CFC. That science being chemistry. All the same quantum mechanics (that's how chemistry works), other physics, and math, they are all undeniable. The source of CO2 atmospheric concentration changes are also clear, undeniably a result of human action over the last two centuries. And the impacts of increased temperatures...suffice to say those models are pretty scientific too, folks.

So what to say to that uncle of yours who thinks "weathermen can't even predict rain, so why listen to them about a little heat?" Tell him those weathermen already saved all our asses within the last generation. And they're begging to save it again, we only need to listen and cooperate. Let them lead us with honestly and facts, and not fight them with propaganda.

I think the reason older generations don't brag is because the world did it together. And losers who want to do things all by themselves can't respect folks who cooperate. Don't be a loser. Cooperate and save the world.

Future of Coop

As the world marches blindly strongly ahead (undecidedly between forward to World War 3 or backward to the Cold War), we need cooperation more than ever. And the hyper-capitalist nee communist country wants to piss off the still-pretty-capitalist nee slave-economy country, but no one wants to address the important problems. I sure hope that changes.

That whole other looming ecological disaster that can only be solved by cooperative action was also a debate topic. "The US should establish a policy to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels." Most of the conversation was about global warming, of course. Imagine a bunch of high-school freshman arguing with each other for sport, taking turns as the scientists pleading for reason, versus the oil company pitching exactly the same deception as the tobacco companies 30 years earlier. That was high-school debate. I'd much rather just pick a value and advocate for it.

By the way we were reading sources from 1992 that said there wasn't clear evidence about global warming yet. It was a lie, of course; again this is disinformation technique was invented by the tobacco industry. But that debate tactic worked pretty well; maybe we just need to sit and wait for a few (tens of) years. Well here we are three decades later, and we still haven't gathered enough evidence for these bad-faith non-cooperators. We never will convince them, because they don't want to be convinced. It's time to fire those bad teammates and get onto team save-the-world.

Update March 12 2022

Having just published this article a week prior, I already need to update it. This week was one of the best examples of cooperation by my team that I've ever been lucky enough to participate in. I had the same project I had attempted months earlier, in almost exactly the same state. But thanks to an outpouring of assistance from my teammates it finished earlier and even more smoothly than I could have hoped.

I very nearly overlooked this detail. I am ecstatic for my next chance to credit my team for their accomplishment.