Habermas hopes at least that discourse will let us make the change from an adversarial approach to limited resources to cooperative distribution of limited resources. Since we have only one world to share that seems reasonable. The hard part is our seeming inability to learn to live with mutuality, with cooperative sharing. To the extent that we can get each other to try mutuality, as we have done in cross-country classes based on the Dear Habermas site, we have found that we take to mutuality quite happily. Students, once recognizing that their A is not meant to be at the expense of another's C, stop competing and begin to share in each others' success.
Students do cooperate, do share skills.
Nicolette pronounced openly that her skills on the Internet were limited. She had never tried to e-mail me. Instead she followed other pursuits and relied on her team mates for sending the e-mail. She realized rather consciously that this cooperative endeavor enabled her team to do more. And Martins and Jesse agreed with her.