The Fall of Cooperatopia: A Parable

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org--Imagine. A group of explorers finds an island no one has ever settled.They share a peculiar passion. They love a certain kind of game. They call it Cooperation—the art of working together, as effectively as possible, for mutual gain. So they plant a flag on the island. They name the place Coopertopia. And they send out a call: Come build with us.Others like them answer.Thirty years pass. A million souls now call the island home. The civilization hums. The people are happy. By every measure that matters, it works.Then the world notices.And the world starts moving in, arriving on boats.Who’s arriving? Migrants from the developing world—places poorer, harsher, less free. And they bring a different game. It’s not Cooperation. It’s Domination.So, call them the Dominators. But understand—they aren’t all the same. Some are Economic Dominators. To them, private property is unjust. Every resource should be seized and divided equally, by force if necessary.Others are Religious Dominators. To them, peace arrives only when every human submits to the One True Faith. Theirs. Without exception.So, different dominator doctrines, but the same instinct: Rule, or be ruled.Now, the Cooperators are a liberal people. Tolerant. Open-minded and willing to extend a hand. But here’s the bitter irony: the Dominators are fleeing the very lands their own cultures built. Destitute lands. Failed lands. It’s why they left.And far too many of them didn’t leave their culture or values behind. They packed their domination games and brought them on board.The Cooperators could have said no, but they didn’t. They wanted to be tolerant and accepting, after all. “Let them settle. Let them stay. Surely they’ll see what we built. Surely they’ll want to play our game, too,” they thought.Fast forward.The Dominators have more babies. And more arrive—through trafficking syndicates, through chain migration, families sent for, then their families’ families.Until one day the arithmetic flips. The Dominators outnumber the Cooperators.Coopertopia never guarded its border. So, Coopertopia got dominated.The civilization they dreamed of—then labored a lifetime to raise—falls. Crime increased. Prosperity cratered. The political system got subverted from within by a coalition of Economic Dominators and Religious Dominators. Today, the cooperation games are over.The Economic Dominators want the Cooperators’ stuff. The Religious Dominators want their souls.And the Cooperators?They sit in the detritus and ask the only question left: “Where did we go wrong? How could anyone not see it? Didn’t they understand that peaceful cooperation was the whole point—the thing that made this place worth coming to in the first place?”Apparently not.A Dominator sees the world as a fixed pie—a zero-sum game. The only way up is to push someone else down. And from the hour they stepped ashore, that was the game they played—patiently, quietly, all the way to the top. The Cooperators kept waiting for them to come around.They never did.Now the Cooperators stare out at the horizon and wonder: “Is there another island out there? Undiscovered. Unsettled. A place to begin again?”Maybe there is. And maybe, this time, they’ll put something important first. Because they’ll finally understand what it was for.In any case… It’s too late for Coopertopia.But it doesn’t have to be too late for us.So what about now? What about the West?Western countries are not exactly Coopertopia. They’re mixed, and so pretty mixed up. And currently, they are culturally and politically divided along fault lines that promise to fracture us even more.Too many Americans are oikophobic, which means they hate their country and its story. Couple that fact with the deep, deep debts, and we have to consider the real possibility that we are in the process of breaking up.Of course, we should endeavor to preserve our free polities. But if we were to divide into more separate and independent states, we would have to consider just what that would mean.For example, if some US states were to organize into free polities while others organized into socialist societies, we would have to rethink and clarify our notions of borders, allegiances, and shared values.We might even want to revive the idea of a social contract—only this time, it couldn’t be theoretical. It would be something you would sign or not. And each of us would have to adopt or reject the rights and responsibilities not just of citizenship, but of membership. Because you see, the Zohran Mamdanis of the world should never be permitted to hold that much power inside a free polity.Indeed, if a polity is truly free, no one should be permitted to hold that much power. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe