328 deep freedom
which it inherits from the struggle with the world, if it abandons our
material life in society to practices and beliefs that weaken and deny
our power to resist and revise the context.
A fi rst feature of higher cooperation is that to the greatest extent pos-
sible the cooperative regime, and the nature and scope of the tasks that
each participant undertakes, should not be predetermined by any
ready- made script resulting from the structure of division and hierar-
chy in society, or from the translation of that structure into a system of
ste reo typed social roles. Everyone and every social situation have a his-
tory. However, cooperation is the more perfect the less the dead rule
over the living and the less the living have to follow, in their coopera-
tive activities, a set of formulas implicit in the present or ga ni za tion of
society and of culture.
Whether they are members of this or that social class (so long as
class society has not been destroyed) or of this or that community of
sentiment or of belief, their respective membership in any of the divi-
sions of humanity should count as least as possible when they meet to
cooperate. Th ey should meet, insofar as the reality of society and of
culture allows it, not as Robinson Crusoe met a subordinate Friday but
as he might have met an alter ego of himself.
As with any activity in the world, cooperation requires implicit and
therefore as well local knowledge. It matters, however, that this implicit
and local knowledge be dissociated from the role or class- specifi c in-
junctions that normally accompany it. How hard or easy such a result is
to achieve depends on the degree to which the institutionalized struc-
ture of society has moved toward the ideal of a structure- denying
structure: that is to say, an institutional framework that multiplies oc-
casions and instruments for its own revision and thereby weakens the
dependence of change on crisis and the infl uence of the past on the fu-
ture. Our experiments in cooperation can nevertheless run ahead of
such an institutional evolution, serving as its front line.
A second trait to be sought in the cooperative regime is that it be so ar-
ranged and understood as to moderate the tension between cooperation
and innovation. Other things being equal, the best regime of coopera-
tion is the one that is most favorable to collective learning and perma-
nent innovation.