Purpose of co-operation

I had always been in a kind of shell, that I am self sufficient and I don’t need any body to help me. Several times had come when I was required to seek help from others, but demanding help from other was against my principles. I don’t know whether that was my self confidence or my arrogance. I was sceptical that why people takes help and what is the need of taking help from outside when we are often told, we are the supreme creatures and we have the power of thinking that other living organism lacks. The Big words like mutual help and co-operation were just jumbled alphabets for me, but the time since I started reading ‘Collective Action Component’ as a paper in the second term, my opinion has changed and now I have other questions hammering me all the time. Now I have the questions like what will happen if I refuse to help others and what will I feel if I demand help from others and they refuse me to help? The only answer comes to my mind that it will create a distance between me and others, in other words the social or personal relation between individuals may get deteriorated. Is the motive of maintaining harmonious relationship, the root cause of co-operation or help? If the answer is yes, than isn’t is our selfishness. And if the answer is no, than it implies that we need co-operation in each and every sphere of life. Then my question is what the importance of an individual in the society, when s/he is not able to survive without others. We are being taught that each and every individual is special and has some unique features, than what’s the use of that individuality if we are interdependent for our survival.
In my opinion, co-operation comes, when an individual recognise his inability to overcome any problem. He then seeks others help to solve his problem and again it a self motive of the agent that is going to be served by the other agents in the system. So it is the selfish nature of mankind that creates the co-operation and the process keeps on going.
I may be wrong about the understanding of the concept of co-operation but I have never witnessed any co-operation that excludes profit motive or better to say deriving profit for self. We say that we should work as a team and must co-operate with each other but my question is, by co-operation aren’t we limiting our capabilities and increasing interdependency?
I am not denying the importance of co-operation, as we are man and not God, we need others help and co-operation. But the prime objective of co-operation should be CO-EXISTENCE and not merely existence.