I don’t see it as a paradox, but as rational. But there are people who I think do hold tolerance as some sort of moral compulsion, and get offended by the notion that it might just emerge from people figuring out how and why to cooperate, without any high and mighty guiding morality.

These people will also object to using rational models to understand/describe human behaviours, because they can point to many examples of people acting irrationally. Many of these examples are psychology lab “experiments” so are irrelevant to the real world. But plenty of real examples of things like loss aversion and risk (mis)percepion, sunk costs, time-inconsistent decisions and so on where individuals clearly do behave “irrationally”.

I often come across people who believe that this undermines anything any “rational model” has to say. And so I do try to use such reasoning with those people, or even challenge those observations with examples where collective rationality does seem to emerge as a social (not individual) phenomenon, then I’ll be derided as some sort of neo-conservative capitalist fascist or whatever.

So I find that it’s generally good practice to chuck in some insult about one type of political zealot or other every so often, so as to quickly establish where I stand. I’d rather be vague than waste my breath with zealots.