The Uncooperative Society

Details

Author: Sharon Avraham
Category: Articles
Published: 2026
Source: ToGather on Substack
Source URL: https://jointogatherproject.substack.com/p/the-uncooperative-society
Access: public

Description

We were trained to be customers, not collaborators. On why cooperation feels so hard, and what relearning it inside intentional communities reveals about the rest of us.

Annotation

Cooperation is supposed to be natural to us, and yet for most people it has gone quietly unused, like a muscle that atrophied. This essay argues that a consumer society trains us from the start to be customers, to pay for services rather than to provide them for one another, and that this is why building anything together feels so unexpectedly hard.

Sharon traces where the energy goes when cooperation breaks down, and what it looks like to relearn it. Intentional communities are useful here because they run straight into the problem and have to work it out in public. What they relearn, slowly, is a capacity the wider society has let lapse.

Full text

## What this essay argues

On why cooperation feels so difficult in a society that trained us to be consumers, and what relearning it inside communities shows about everyone else.

> **From the field.** A reflective essay drawing on the broader field archive rather than a single community profile.

## The essay

*On relearning to collaborate in a society that trained us to be customers*

Years ago I started a community on my family's farm. I had every utopian idea you can have. We would learn to work together, carry the load between us, make decisions as equals, build something none of us could build alone.

I kept walking into the same wall, and the wall was me. It was my family's land. I was the one who could, in the end, decide who stayed and who left. I did not want that power and I held it anyway. Every time we sat down to decide something together, ownership was already in the room. People deferred to me, or they pushed against me, and only rarely did it feel like they were simply with me. The arrangement underneath us, one person owns the ground and the others live on it by his goodwill, shaped how we related before anyone opened their mouth.

I learned how hard it is to break that. You can believe in equality and still hold the deed. Good intentions do not flatten a power gradient. The thing that flattens it, if anything does, is structure you build on purpose, a way of governing that gives people a real hold on the decisions that touch their lives. That work is slow, and it keeps asking the person with the power to give more of it away. Hold on to that sentence. I am going to come back to it, because it is the part most of us would rather skip.

The farm taught me something I have spent the years since confirming in other people's communities. The hardest thing to unlearn is a reflex. Mine came from owning land. Yours might come from buying almost everything you need from strangers you will never see again. Ownership and consumption are two faces of the same training. One sorts people into who holds and who depends. The other turns every need into something you purchase and then walk away from. Both leave you out of practice at the one thing a community actually runs on, which is cooperating with people who are your equals and are not going anywhere.

We were raised fluent in exchange. You give, you get, and the relationship lasts as long as the transaction does. We got good at being customers and owners. We got out of practice at being neighbors. Then the numbers arrive and surprise everyone. People say they are lonelier than they have ever been, in the most connected years there have ever been. Jessica, the founder of Feytopia, put it more plainly than I can.

> "We have never been so connected, but we have never felt so lonely."
>
> — *Jessica, Feytopia*

## We never learned to cooperate

Think about everything a customer never has to do. A customer never repairs a relationship, because when the service disappoints you, you take your money elsewhere and never think about the person again. A customer never reaches a shared decision with anyone, because the whole point is that you choose and they provide. A customer never has to stay. The arrangement is built so you never have to work anything out with another human being. Convenience, in the end, means never having to cooperate.

So we reach adulthood having practiced leaving far more than mending, and choosing far more than agreeing. And the habit does not stay at the checkout. It follows us into the relationships that are supposed to be the opposite of a transaction. There is a word now for the customer's exit aimed at a person you were once close to. Ghosting. You stop replying and you go quiet, and you spare yourself the discomfort of a real ending. The research calls it conflict avoidance made easy by technology, the same throwaway reflex we learned with objects, now turned on each other. If this one is hard, there is another a swipe away.

Amy, who comes to Feytopia, said the thing I keep coming back to. When something goes wrong between people there, she told me, there is no formal structure for repair. People fall in love, it ends badly, and they still share the same small place. What she wishes for is simple and rare.

> "Instead of thinking, I do not feel comfortable, I will just leave, we could ask, how can we grow and learn through this?"
>
> — *Amy, Feytopia*

That sentence holds the whole difference. "I will just leave" is the customer in us. "How can we grow through this?" is the neighbor. Most of us were drilled in the first and never apprenticed in the second.

These communities have one thing the market spares us, the condition that forces the second. You cannot leave so easily. Anandeshvarii, at Ananda Kalyani in central Portugal, said you cannot close the door and never see the person again, so you have to face the problem and find your way back. But staying in one place does not, by itself, teach anyone how to cooperate. The communities that manage it know that. They give the work a form.

At Tamera they built one and have run it for many years. They call it [Forum](/library/tamera-forum). The group sits in a circle, and one person steps into the middle and shows what is actually moving in them, the thing they would normally keep hidden, sometimes by speaking it and sometimes by acting it out. The others do not rush to fix it or judge it. They reflect back what they saw. Uri told me it was the first place he ever felt at home, because the culture treated honesty between people as something you practice in the open, they made gossip into a social tool. The point is to bring what is between people into the light while it is still small enough to work with, instead of letting it harden in silence.

You do not need a stone circle in Portugal to borrow the bones of that. A regular time that is protected. A way to say the hard thing in front of the people it concerns. An agreement that the rest of the group helps hold it. The willingness to be seen is the core element. Eirune, at Spirala, described what it gives back when it works. They can have the difficult conversations, she said, and still come out of them feeling supported, even while the tension has not fully cleared.

## Where the energy goes

Here is the difference you start to feel in these places. It shows in where the energy goes.

In the world most of us were shaped by, your best hours belong to output. A job, a business, a personal brand, a feed that has to be fed. You build the thing that pays you or ranks you, and the people around you get whatever attention is left at the end of the day. In the communities I sit in, that order is turned over. The main work, the thing people pour themselves into, is how they decide together and how they treat each other while they do it. The cooperation is the real work, not the overhead around it.

The communities that last tend to write their agreements down. At the Traditional Dream Factory, Sam told me about what they call the game guide, a single document that lays out how the place actually works, from how decisions get made to how conflict gets handled to what happens when someone breaks consent or brings violence into the space. It is the thing people can point to when something goes wrong, a real working agreement rather than a mission statement on a wall, so that the hardest moments are not improvised by whoever happens to be angriest in the room, and "we will work it out" does not quietly rest on everyone being calm and generous on their worst day. This is the structure I never managed to build on the farm, the form that holds people together when goodwill alone runs thin.

I want to be careful not to romanticize this, because the same communities show its other edge. At the Traditional Dream Factory, when money got tight, people who had been doing real work stepped away because the project could not pay them. They were not less committed. Life cost money. It is easy to praise the ones who stayed without a salary or a title and quietly turn the ones who left into deserters, and that would be a lie. Relational work is still work. When a community runs on people showing up for free, the cost does not vanish. It lands on whoever can least afford to keep absorbing it, and it ends in burnout, or in a founder everyone slowly comes to resent. Cooperation that is not survivable is just exploitation with nicer values.

You can fail in this from either side, and my research shows both. Aida, also at Tamera, warned that you can move in together, share one washing machine, and change almost nothing, if you never change the way you relate. Some kibbutzim are the long proof of the opposite mistake. Uriel, at Kibbutz Samar, told me a kibbutz is first of all an economic partnership, and that partnership forces you to be connected to people in an uncompromising way. But they built the economic structure and never built the relational one, so you find places that have held for decades, where members are bound together by shared accounts and have not really spoken in years, old conflicts left to calcify because no one ever made conflict resolution tools that will hold the trust between its members. Economic structure without relational structure goes silent. Relational energy without economic structure burns out. You need both, and almost nobody is handed both.

Sabine, who has been at Tamera since the start, named the size of the task more honestly than I would dare to.

> "It is a relearning. We lost it."
>
> — *Sabine, Tamera*

Here is the objection I would raise if I were you, reading this. These are small communities. Most are self-selected, many are unusually privileged, and forty people choosing to sit in Forum is not a country of millions learning to govern itself. That is fair, and I am not going to pretend a few hundred experiments add up to a mended society. But I do not think the village is the unit that matters. The muscle these places rebuild, facing a conflict instead of fleeing it, making a decision with people instead of for them, staying when leaving is on the table, is the same muscle a street needs, or a workplace, or a marriage, or a town hall. They are practicing it on hard mode, out loud, intentionally. The rest of us are running the same negotiation with the lights off.

So here is the part that is actually yours, and it is not "be a bit nicer to people." Pick one relationship, or one group, that you want to outlast its next hard moment, and build it a little structure before you need it. Agree with a friend that neither of you gets to disappear, that you call instead. Set a standing time with the people you live near and protect it the way you protect work. In a group you already belong to, propose one plain agreement for how you will handle it the next time you disagree, and write it down while everyone is still calm. None of this is romantic. It is the unglamorous scaffolding that lets affection survive contact.

It will not be comfortable, and that is how you know it is the work. The skill comes back the way it left, one ordinary choice at a time, and it holds only when you give it a form. So pick one this week, in your own life, and watch what it asks of you.

That is the work no one pays you for. In my opinion it is also the work that puts us back together.

ToGather is a field research archive documenting how intentional communities govern themselves, coordinate resources, and navigate conflict. If you want to support the work, you can back ToGather on Artizen , and the open library lives at togatherproject.eu/library .

## Bringing this into your own community

Pick one relationship or group you want to outlast its next hard moment and give it a little structure before you need it. Agree with a friend that neither of you gets to disappear, that you call instead of going quiet. Set a standing time with the people you live near and protect it the way you protect work. Propose one plain agreement for how you will handle the next disagreement, and write it down while everyone is still calm.

## Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by [Sharon Avraham](https://togatherproject.eu). [Read it on Substack](https://jointogatherproject.substack.com/p/the-uncooperative-society).

## Related in the Living Library

- [The Craft of Cooperation](/library/sennett-craft-of-cooperation)
- [Emergent Strategy](/library/emergent-strategy)
- [The Ten Basic Principles of Mondragon](/library/mondragon-ten-principles)
- [The Rochdale Pioneers Rules (1844)](/library/rochdale-pioneers-1844)
- [Free, Fair and Alive](/library/free-fair-alive-bollier-helfrich)