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Promotion of conscious and consistent application and optimization of the concept of Three Basic Synergies (physical, mental, spiritual) in healthy organizations

Development of collective morale and efficiency as functions of leadership

Organizations as embodiments and mechanisms of the members' individual and collective empowerment through synergy

Repudiation of personality-centered organizational practices with 'superman'-type, superstar, 'infallible' or dictatorial leaders, on the one hand, and nominal, fans-club-type or slave-type members, on the other.

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Healthy Discipline
Practiced by All for All*

By Conrado L. Baltazar

Founding Chair, Tubao Credit Cooperative Inc., and member, Advocates of Cooperative Education on Synergism (ACES

This is a slightly edited excerpt of the “Epilogue” chapter of Hungry No More, published in Tubao, La Union by the National Credit Cooperative in 2002.

SOME people might take this term, discipline, in the sense of its usual use, especially to authoritarian and regimented practice where righteous behavior is motivated mainly by fear of punishment to be meted out on offenders by authority figures and bodies. But that’s not the real sense of discipline; they actually mean obedience.

Is the effort to instill discipline of this sort compatible with The Cooperative Way, the way of synergism, the way of service orientation and volunteerism, the way of associative economics built upon the common interests of individual cooperators and individual cooperatives with the authority of leadership and management mandated ultimately by the membership?

Is it compatible with The Coop Way?
Not only is a deep comprehension of healthy discipline compatible with The Coop Way, it actually flows from its essence. There can be no healthy cooperatives without this sort of healthy discipline.

Apologists for authoritarian and command systems have unfortunately been allowed to monopolize or even own the term, and the others who use it in a healthier sense do not clarify their own sense for the education of their leadership constituencies and audiences.

Effective penal sanction systems – with heavy penalties, effective monitoring to flush out offenders, and effective prose-cutory/judicial systems – can indeed make for very effective discipline among a group of people. But under the principles of cooperativism, discipline in the cooperatives should emanate from within each person.

Each person should be developed to have enough personal maturity to comprehend the logic of the rules, and to connect their own individual interests inextricably with that of the cooperative.

Only the mature can see the imprudence of breaking the rules of a system that are placed for their own collective interests. Only the mature can grasp intellectually and practice in a living way the principle of synergism that has to operate if the cooperative is to fully serve them and to continue serving them.

Joining the cooperative is voluntary. All voluntary acts of matured persons are expected to be conscious voluntary acts. They join a coop be-cause they fully know that it is prudent to do so for their individual and collective interests.

And common sense would tell them that cooperatives can only work to serve these individual and collective interests if and only if all or even most of them make it work by going along fully with the system they have agreed, out of collective common sense, to adopt. It has been observed among many cooperatives that members are not conscious of this logic.

We don’t want to assume that they had joined the coop to “put one over the coop.”Inner and conscious sense of discipline is therefore not only one compatible with The Coop Way, it is The Coop way.

It’s something like no one committing any crime even if the policemen are nowhere in sight. It’s like having people who’d refrain from defecating in the middle of the community plaza not because somebody might see their private parts, someone might see their act and discredit them, or some policeman might see and arrest them.

They simply won’t do it because they don’t want to foul up their air being breathed by the entire community including themselves and their loved ones.

Mature cooperative members, who know the essence of cooperativism and not merely the intricacies of some cooperative activity or another, would refrain from participating in the slow slaughter of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

These assertions of mine, rooted in my decades of direct experiences, are shared for better practice of inner discipline within cooperatives. They are also true in all other types of formal and informal organizations that are basically rooted in the application of the synergism principle. It is the synergistic view of discipline, and as we know, synergism is a universal principle.

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