[pdwetz]

I'm not sure I follow his thought process on why "through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible." On a simple personal level, I'm for individualism and cooperation, so I'm not seeing the inherent conflict. Perhaps it's a matter of definitions?

[closeparen]

When we celebrate rather than punish differences, we a get a population where people are more self-actualized and less oppressed, but have little in common with each other. If we are to have any semblance of community, we need to build it through voluntary associations.

Trust, empathy, bonding, etc. are going to be a lot harder when someone's identity, life experiences, and circumstances are completely foreign to your own. I don't think it makes cooperation impossible, but as a practical matter it means we're more likely to need huge, complex institutions like the federal government to mediate cooperation. People also seem less likely to want to cooperate or sacrifice their resources for others who are nothing like them.

One way societies have historically dealt with this is to close their borders, beat the shit out of internal nonconformists and, if they remain unrepentant, torture them to death in the public square by lighting them on fire. Subtler variants persist; for example, the official government's indifference to vigilante enforcement actions ranging from bullying (Japan) to beheading (Saudi Arabia).

It seems clear to me that our culture of welcoming and celebrating differences is more just and causes better outcomes for more people, but it does mean that we aren't all in the same boat.

[ergothus]

The American culture values individualism...and also has a strong "you can't tell me what to do!" reaction to social pressure. If those points are connected, I can easily see too much individualism interfering with cooperation even if the base ideas are not in conflict.

Evidence: who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House, I could go on and on. We celebrate the idea of something we actively argue against in daily life.

There's also some weird connection between extremes of claiming to value individualism and idolizing authoritarianism that I won't claim to understand, so I could be completely wrong on all of this. I'm not positive that extremes of individualism are a death knell for cooperation...but I don't find the idea unlikely either.

[pdonis]

> who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House

All of these heroes cooperated with close friends, colleagues, and other people in order to solve problems and achieve goals.

The difference is not individualism vs. cooperation. The difference is cooperation based on the voluntary choices of individuals, as needed to accomplish goals, vs. cooperation dictated from the top by someone's ideology.

[ergothus]

I don't think we're talking about people that are utterly unwilling to cooperate with ANYONE. We're talking about whether they are willing to cooperate as a society.

[pdonis]

> We're talking about whether they are willing to cooperate as a society.

And what does "cooperate as a society" mean? If there is indeed a goal that every member of the society has in common, then yes, it makes sense for everyone in the society to cooperate to achieve that goal. But too often, "cooperate as a society" really means that some people get to choose the goal and force everyone else to cooperate to achieve it, whether they agree with the goal or not. That is the kind of "cooperation" that the American culture of individualism rejects.

[ergothus]

I feel like this is a bit of a straw man.

Does american culture resist coercion? Yes, excluding a few big bandwagon issues and incidents. But that's not really the point.

One might say when something needs to get decided or done, does the country get together and get it done or bicker and in-fight? Let's check some big "needs to get this taken care of issues":

* Slavery - Somehow, the "land of the free" was one of the last developed nations to condemn this practice. And while racism is a separate issue, even over a century later we're still having large public arguments about whether the slaves had it "easy" (?!)

* Climate Change - There is largely universal consensus that if current trends continue, there has been and will continue to be an accelerating increase in human suffering. Every developed nation on the planet agrees, almost every qualified scientist in the US agrees. We can accept that our scientists can predict the movements of celestial bodies across distances mind-bogglingly vast down to the minute, but trust our "guts" over them. Some might argue that the US is rejecting a goal chosen by everyone else, and doing so as a brave stand of individualism. I'd argue they are just demonstrating the issue.

Do I need to go on?

[pdonis]

> when something needs to get decided or done, does the country get together and get it done or bicker and in-fight?

You phrased this wrong. It should be: when some small group of people believe that something needs to get done, do they just go out and do it, or do they try to co-opt everyone else's resources using government power?

> Slavery - Somehow, the "land of the free" was one of the last developed nations to condemn this practice.

And somehow, the "something needs to get done, so let's get it done" methodology ended up killing somewhere between half a million and a million people and leading to a century or more of Jim Crow. If that's what "getting together to get it done" looks like, I'll take bickering and in-fighting.

By contrast, countries that were willing to countenance something less than "getting it done" the abolitionist way (such as Britain, which simply bought the slaves' freedom by paying off the slave owners) ended up ending slavery with no loss of life and a much smoother social transition.

Not to mention that, if the abolitionists had simply left the South alone, they probably would have ended slavery on their own, and probably sooner than 1865. In 1831, the Virginia State Legislature was considering a bill to abolish slavery in the state, and there was a good chance it was going to pass. If it had, the other slave states would probably have followed Virginia's lead. Then word came that William Lloyd Garrison in Boston had published an abolitionist pamphlet calling for no compromise and just forcing the South to end slavery, and the bill died.

> Climate Change - There is largely universal consensus that if current trends continue, there has been and will continue to be an accelerating increase in human suffering.

A consensus that is based on flawed climate models that do not make correct predictions, and economic numbers based on no predictive power whatsoever. Consensus is worthless if there is no predictive power to back it up.

> We can accept that our scientists can predict the movements of celestial bodies across distances mind-bogglingly vast down to the minute, but trust our "guts" over them.

That's because astronomers can back up their predictions of the movements of celestial bodies with a track record of accurate predictions to many decimal places, over a period of more than a century. Whereas climate scientists, as above, can back their predictions up with--nothing.

> Some might argue that the US is rejecting a goal chosen by everyone else, and doing so as a brave stand of individualism.

Yep. If everybody else has a consensus that we should all shoot ourselves in the foot, should the US follow it?

> Do I need to go on?

No, you've given quite enough background to see where you're coming from. Hopefully I've done the same.