[jkarneges]

> could we maybe usher in an era of more calm, reasoned, cooperation between various parties who disagree on a few specific details, but largely agree [...] on the vast majority of issues [...] ?

Looking at US politics, there has been some suggestion by progressive libertarian politicians (such as Bill Weld) that the majority of americans are simultaneously tolerant of socially progressive and fiscally conservative principles.

I don't have any statistics around this, but it appears to be consistent with the people I know (mostly in California). My friends that are Democrats are likely to loudly fight for gay rights, but are less loud about government programs getting cut (they may still be vocal about that, just not as loud). My friends that are Republicans are typically worried about government waste and socialism. Sure, some may be pro-life, but that's not their top priority.

This isn't to say there aren't Democrats passionate about fiscal issues (Sanders wing), or Republicans passionate about social issues (religious right), simply that it is plausible these camps are <50% of each party, which could imply there is more agreement and/or tolerance between what the two parties stand for than disagreement.

[mistermann]

Agreed, singular instances of instances of calm, reasoned, cooperation can in fact be identified. Studying such instances and seeing if they have unique characteristics that could be incorporated into a model or practice that is reliable and scalable seems like a fine idea, anyone who undertook that task would have my full support.

However, I am interested in the opposite: scenarios where human beings cannot cooperate (reliably, consistently, and at scale), and more fundamentally: where it seems not possible to achieve this cooperation (even though it is in both party's best interests), why is it not possible? Is there an underlying cause, and if so, what is it?

I happen to subscribe to the theory that the problem is innate (in some manner), neurological/psychological in nature, and I think there is plenty of evidence to support this type of theory. As a thought experiment, imagine it like this....let's assume that there are certain things that the human mind simply can not do (the reasons are irrelevant for now), certain ideas that the human mind simply will not compute - full stop.

Now, imagine if one of these ideas was a pre-requisite for achieving reliable, consistent, at-scale cooperation (perhaps not in all instances, as your example demonstrates, but sometimes/often, which seems to be the case). Also imagine that there is another one of these "neurological cannot do's", and this one just so happens to be a pre-requisite for the cognitive processing required for identifying the first one. But because CannotDo #2 cannot execute, CannotDo #1 cannot be discovered.

If this was the case, you would then have yourself a situation where a fundamentally important problem can be identified, that all/most parties support fixing, there appear to be no impassible blocking barriers to fixing it, and yet it cannot ever be achieved. You are stuck in an unsolvable problem, blocked by something that you cannot see.

So now that you have this theory, is it possible to find some real world examples of unusual/illogical human behavior that plausibly matches this theory (which would represent a sanity check, not a proof)?