Life & Wisdom Quote by Orison Swett Marden

The line reads like a pep talk for capital with its sharp edges sanded down. Marden, a turn-of-the-century self-help impresario for the managerial class, takes the rugged-individualist myth and quietly updates it for an economy that no longer rewards lone-wolf bravado. His key move is to flatter the employer ("ability or capital") while simultaneously stripping him of sovereignty: you may be talented, you may be rich, but you are not autonomous. Dependence is rebranded as modernity.

The intent is managerial persuasion. "Cooperation" sounds soft, almost civic, but in context it functions as a survival strategy for business amid consolidation, labor unrest, and the growing complexity of supply chains and finance in the late Gilded Age and Progressive Era. By declaring that "business today" has changed, Marden gives his reader a dignified off-ramp from old-school domination without admitting defeat. It's not that the boss is weakened; the world is simply more interconnected.

The subtext is also a preemptive moral argument. If employers are interdependent, then their obligations expand beyond the factory gate. Yet Marden keeps the frame safely employer-centric: cooperation is not pitched as justice, but as efficacy. The sentence makes a quiet bargain with power: treat other people as necessary partners, not because it's noble, but because the new economy punishes isolation. In that way, it’s both a concession to modern social reality and a PR-friendly way to domesticate it.