I’ve read several explanations, but I think I need it really dumbed down to grasp it.
In: 7
If you permit the intolerant to do whatever they want, they will be intolerant to others, thereby paradoxically raising the general level of intolerance by being too tolerant.
So, first, the paradox: if you want to create a space (a community, a society, a subreddit, whatever) that is tolerant of other viewpoints, then you absolutely **cannot** tolerate views that are racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant of others.
Why?
Because bigots will do their best to dominate the discourse with their views, and bigots will actively work to drive away people with whom they disagree. Intolerant people will do their best to destroy spaces where other viewpoints are tolerated, so allowing them into a space ensures that space will be full of conflicts until either the bigots are banned, or everyone else leaves for a less conflicted space.
We saw this happen in real time with various social media platforms like Digg, Voat, and others that were dedicated to “we allow all viewpoints here and no one is excluded!” Each of those platforms became flooded with intolerant people, who proceeded to drive out everyone who didn’t share their views.
It essentially means that a completely tolerant society will be destroyed by the intolerant. In other words, a tolerant society needs to be intolerant of intolerance.
This was formulated around 1940 so there were some very strong emotions around intolerance (WW2).
But it’s also raised discussion and philosophy around the practicality of complete tolerance and how we need to be careful when it comes to tolerance or intolerance of intolerant people.
It’s pretty easy to get in the weeds with it. Pretty much we should only be intolerant of intolerance but it’s easy to get carried away with that ideal and become intolerant of more than just intolerance.
Imagine you have a play date at your home with several friends. You are very tolerate, you don’t care whether your friends take their shoes off or not. Some kids do, some kids don’t. One friend tho is intolerant and wants everybody to take their shoes off. He gets very aggressive and tries to make kids take off their shoes. At this point you can no longer tolerate the intolerant behavior. Otherwise he would take over and make everyone very unhappy. Therefore tolerance can never tolerate intolerance.
To create a tolerant society the one thing that the society can’t tolerate is intolerance itself. So tolerance in society breaks down when you tolerate people to act in a racist or bigoted manner.
Think of tolerance like you would a contract, or a terms of service.
Tolerance is an agreement by those participating in society to allow others to live as they wish and express themselves without forcing anything or taking something away from anyone else. It’s part of what makes us civilized. This is the “agreement”, and is only granted to those that abide by it.
Now think about a phone plan, or buying an iPhone with a warranty. When you do this, you are prompted to agree to the company’s terms of service, or things that you can and cannot do while using their product or paying it off.
Some common things that could break this term of service would be jailbreaking your iPhone, or not making payments. You have stopped doing something that you agreed to, and now you cannot use the warranty anymore, or maybe even the phone itself or your carrier’s services.
Now, think of someone that comes up and says “that person shouldn’t exist” or “these people should die.” This is an obvious breach in the agreement to tolerate each other.
The first person or group of people to vocalize this initial intolerance have now broken the terms of service. By doing so, they have forfeited being tolerated by the rest of society, and the rest of society can choose to, well, not tolerate this anymore, because the agreement was broken.
There are no such things as complete tolerance, because that also means you have to tolerate intolerance.
Here is an example. Imagine you are the government, and you say “freedom of speech”, and starts allowing any speech whatsoever. Now, someone (let’s say X) makes a statement that some other people hate, so they start sending death threat and tracking X’s locations, while calling on TV for people to kill X. Since you allowed all speech, you do nothing.
Eventually, some psycho listening to all these speech above decided to act and kill X. Now other people, seeing what happened, are now afraid to speak anything that people might hate. Effectively, you just killed free speech by allowing all speeches.
So next, you ban death threat. People can now speak freely, right? Well no, these people starts making up false rumor instead. Their employers see these false rumor and start firing people based on rumor. People who is the target of those malicious rumor have trouble finding jobs. So once again, people are afraid to speak.
So now you also ban defamation. Anyone who criticize anyone else would be required to give undeniable proof of their wrongdoings. But now look at what you have done, you make it so that people are afraid to criticize anyone.
In effect, to uphold freedom of speech, you have to ban speeches. That’s an example of the paradox. The challenge to find the balance.
Not a paradox if you treat tolerance not as a virtue in an of itself but as more of a social contract or peace treaty as this article puts it
https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376
Which is more tolerant?
Being tolerant of intolerance.
or
Being intolerant of intolerance.
That’s the paradox. Some level of intolerance is always necessary and it isn’t even clear what “maximum tolerance” would look like
If you say you tolerate everyone, what do you do when someone comes along and refuses to tolerate others? Do you tolerate their behavior or not? If you don’t tolerate their behavior then you are intolerant and a hypocrite, if you tolerate their behavior then you may fail to “protect” those you are trying to protect by being tolerant.
Latest Answers