It’s not that easy. Social contact theory can work when there’s a relatively objective standard like “physical violence” but you’ll often believe that the people you disagree with are being intolerant, and they’ll believe that you’re being intolerant. If the general rule is “I’ll only tolerate people if I’m convinced that they’re tolerant” then very soon no one will be tolerating anyone else.
With that said, I don’t think there’s a “paradox of tolerance” simply because tolerance is hard. The people talking about a paradox want to get credit for “tolerating” just the people they don’t mind having around, but you have to tolerate the people you hate, the people you think are a threat to you. Otherwise you’re not tolerant.
We get muddy when we move from “physical violence” to “the threat of physical violence”. It runs us into the “I’m not touching you” game on one end and Nextdoor paranoia on the other.
Is someone tolerant if they come right up to the line of what defines tolerance and acts like an asshole within the strict bounds of the law? Is someone intolerant when they violate (often unwittingly) some local rule of decorum or social taboo? Is someone intolerant if they are startled into a panic? What if they conspire to sow panic without actually getting their hands dirty inflicting harm? If we’re the victim of violence from an unknown source, what then? If we’re the victim of violence that we falsely attribute, are we intolerant? Is the falsely accused subject now flagged as intolerant?
The people talking about a paradox want to get credit for “tolerating” just the people they don’t mind having around, but you have to tolerate the people you hate, the people you think are a threat to you. Otherwise you’re not tolerant.
More broadly, how do you tolerate someone or something you don’t know or understand? How do you deal with perception bias?
I’m reminded of growing up in the 90s and having people freak out over “loud rap music”. The media bias against young black men and their taste in music is very clearly an example of intolerance. But the dialogue of the era framed playing this music (particularly the edgy stuff like NWA or Biggy) as itself an act of intolerance.
How do you square that contradiction? Who gets to adjudicate the offender and the offended? What gets defined as tolerable?
OP’s image doesn’t really set that out.
This all makes sense when you remember that the underlying topic here is bigotry. Ergo, tolerance is defined in those terms. Not in the more general terms.
The right uses the “paradox of tolerance” to hide what this is ultimately about, a common tactic.
It isn’t about tolerating all ideas. It is about tolerating groups of people different from yourself.
Put another way, if society has a rule “don’t be a bigot” and then someone is a bigot and gets in trouble, is society bigoted against bigots? No. Of course not. Thinking that would be asinine. Society is enforcing rules against bigotry.
Bigotry is not a synonym for Racism. Bigotry is maintaining a personal opinion or prejudice even when holding that opinion or prejudice is unreasonable.
Can “Bigotry” include someones belief that a group of people are inferior because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual preference ? Yes it can but it’s so much broader than that.
Someone can also be a Bigot by holding the opinion that only Apple MacBooks should be allowed on Airplanes because they are the only ones with safe enough batteries and then refusing to change that opinion when presented with contrary evidence.
Bigotry isn’t about people, it’s about ideas, opinions, and prejudices all of which can be positive or negative on literally anything at all.
We have the “Paradox of Tolerance” because if we tolerate anything, including intolerance, then we have intolerance. If won’t tolerate intolerance then we also have intolerance. It’s that simple and it’s also vastly over blown.
What we need to do is reject the unspoken implication that we must have a perfectly tolerant Society. Some amount of intolerance needs to exist but only so far as it has a positive outcome. Intolerance of racism is a good example, intolerance of non-defensive violence is another.
So, where do we all stand on the “do unto others as you would have others do on to you” philosophy?
That sentiment is nice and all, but considering that a nontrivial percentage of conservatives literally want to murder me for my gender identity, I’m not going to treat those people the way I would want to be treated
That sentiment is nice and all,
That sentiment, if followed by everyone, would make for a really good and peaceful world to live in. It’s something we should all strive for.
conservatives literally want to murder me
I doubt the majority of conservatives would want to literally murder you.
There are always a few crazies on either end that we all have to deal with.
for my gender identity,
My suggestion would be to live somewhere where the majority of the people you live amongst don’t give a flying f about your gender identity and will not harass you about it.
And then work politically for change, maybe even running for office.
And if you can’t move, try to find others with the same circumstances as you and network with them, work together, and try to affect change as a group.
I’m not going to treat those people the way I would want to be treated
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Human beings are easy to ramp up into destruction, and hard to keep passive into peace.
The reality is we can’t all just go and do what we want, whenever we want, we have an ethical and social contract with each other that we all need to adhere to.
When that is not done, war and death happens.
Never said they all want to murder me, you just conveniently left that part out so you could argue against a position I didn’t take.
The ones that do want to murder me don’t deserve the same treatment as those who do. I’d recommend reading eg https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d637.
As for moving, I’m absolutely not about to allow right-wingers to control my life to that extent that I’d move to some other country.
Never said they all want to murder me
conservatives literally want to murder me
I’ve never seen anything of any substance in the (so-called) “Paradox Of Tolerance.”
“Tolerance” is of no use to me or anyone else - we don’t owe people “tolerance,” we owe each other mutual respect. If you are dead-set on proving yourself unwilling of giving mutual respect (such as, for instance, fascists or capitalists) you disqualify yourself from that paradigm - zero “paradoxes” required.
You just used different words to describe exactly the same thing as the OP.
No, actually. They rephrased it in a way that results in the opposite meaning. First they lowered the stakes from “we will not tolerate you in our society” to “mutual respect” which is very weak and vague language. Mutual respect is something fascists love both giving and receiving. Superficial civility is how they play the game. While they gain influence in a government they use police power to protect themselves from and later actively suppress protestors and activists while extolling the virtues of civility and the ‘marketplace of ideas’.
What @masquenox@lemmy.ml said is exactly what I would expect a fascist would.
there is no Paradox to disappear, nor there is a solution, a Paradox is a paradox, this is like trying to solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma with some clever workaround.
just no.
Let’s posit a society is totally tolerant, you have a tolerant society
if someone starts to act intolerant, you have to options:
-
If you tolerate it, then you now have intolerance in your society.
-
If you don’t tolerate it, or put it another way you are intolerant towards there intolerance and remove them from your society, then you now have still have intolerance in your society.
that’s it, that’s the paradox, it has no solution or clever workarounds it’s just what it is.
This also doesn’t mean that not tolerating nazis and someone not tolerating the existence of PoCs for example is the same thing.
it has no solution or clever workarounds it’s just what it is.
There is, and in mathematics we’d define it as Closure. We define a set such that operations on members of the set will always reproduce new members of the set. The problem with applying this logic to a sociological environment is that - in practice - what we’re doing is defining “personhood” as membership in the closed “tolerant” set. Dehumanizing anyone outside the tolerant group is not - I suspect - what the OP was hoping to achieve.
That gets us to the “trivial” solution to the paradox of tolerance, which is to kill everyone. Alternatively, to kill everyone except yourself or to kill everyone who isn’t in your tolerance set. Viola! Everyone can express perfect tolerance because the only people alive are the folks who share that same sense of perfect tolerance. We might call this a “Final Solution” to the problem of tolerance.
But like many strictly logical and mathematical approaches to resolving social contradictions, it isn’t in any way practical or particularly ethical. It is a brute force approach to solving what is, at its heart, a problem of interpersonal perception, accrued bias, and political manipulation.
The real problem of intolerance comes down to the old Dunbar’s Number, the upper limit that human brains can process additional individuals as people worthy of empathy. This is a biological limit, not a logical one. And it produces a whole host of knock-on effects that the simple logical paradox doesn’t engage with.
-
The origin of “outlaw” didn’t mean someone was a bandit.
It meant they had broken the social contract, and as such were no longer protected under any laws
An outlaw didn’t avoid civilization because they’d be arrested, it was because everyone else could steal from them or even kill them, and face zero consequences for it.
They didn’t abide by the social contract, so others didn’t have to either
Yea, all it took was not paying your taxes.
Don’t pay your share, no protection of the law, seems pretty simple.
I wish it were an option nowadays, honestly. I’d make that bet in a heartbeat. Statistically id be so much safer I could make a case for my life insurance rates to drop. Statistically I am at my highest chance of death in the presence of a police officer, whether they’re in the area because of me or not, so even as a bystander. If I could cut that cord, it’s a no brainer. Also my car is getting 20 extra batteries dropped in it wired up in series for parking and pumping 240vdc to every metal part of the chassis. And my property will have a dozen armed sentry’s that will fire on anything that moves unless you got the optics for it to sense friendly, which I’ll just have implanted inconspicuously into a tattoo.
Certainly one possible lifestyle, however you could just participate in society instead.
