Saeed Al Mehairi

Economists and thinkers have been asking it from the dawn of time, like alchemists seeking the secret of making lead into gold. One of the greatest lessons of the last century — or all history is this: the secret to human prosperity.

the secret to human prosperity.

Cooperation outcompetes the competition. It’s a paradox, funnily. But it’s also profoundly beautiful. Remarkably improbable. And also surprisingly sensible. That cooperation — people just holding one another up when they fall — turned out to be history’s great secret to human prosperity.

All those millennia of war and violence? They never led anywhere because they were going the wrong way. The competition turned out to be the road to serfdom.

And yet one of the greatest tragedies and absurdities of this age is that we’ve finally discovered the formula for prosperity — only much of the world is regressing backwards into nationalism, tribalism, and fascism, willingly or blind to it. Cooperation, instead, turned out to be the path to prosperity.

Cooperation didn’t just outcompete competition economically — but in every imaginable way, socially, culturally, politically. Will the world ever learn?

Only time will tell.