“To all efforts of men to cooperate, fate has attached a penalty. Whenever a common interest exists, an antagonism of interest springs out of it.
If forces are joined for a hunt, division of the bag must follow, and neither an equal division nor an unequal division will satisfy everybody. If they are joined for battle, the brunt must fall on some and not on others. If two till a field together, each becomes concerned that the other does not shirk or consume undue share of the yield. Labor needs capital, and capital can do nothing without labor, in the welfare of their common business their interests are identical. Yet the net income must be somehow divided, and, in this cooperation, what is more for the one is less for the other: at the point of distribution the appearance of harmony vanishes. No one whose mind refuses to face both the agreement and the divergence of these interests can be more than a blind guide for the present age.
Beside the discords of apportionment, there are the discords of dissent in the conduct of the common enterprise. For the most part, human beings are gifted in the capacity for falling in behind leadership; but it is a rare group in which there is no superfluity of planning intelligence, or the conceit of it. Hence human groups move habitually under the friction of divergent counsels. It is physically easier for men to live together than to live apart. It is morally easier for them to live apart than to maintain permanently a successful partnership or friendship.
Hence the word ‘cooperation,’ amiable of sound, flourished by many a reformer as the key to social problems, solves nothing. Every new cooperation or stage in cooperation is the beginning of new difficulty. Deliberate cooperation is of all human efforts the most liable to shipwreck. Experimental communities, socialistic or other, whose presumptive advantage is gained by increasing the existing burden of cooperation, must find a way of arbitrary relief from the added strain in enhanced authority, or else in heightened religion a way of replenishing their energy toward harmony: otherwise they must perish, as most such experiments have perished.
In sum, we may say that there is in the nature of human associations a law of decline–of decline, that is, in their energy of union, which subtly ushers every such enterprise toward death.”