So much for the tolerant left
ID: A scene from Legally Blonde of a conversation between Warner and Elle in the corridor at Harvard, in 4 panels:
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Generally I like to frame it as first order vs second order intolerance. First order intolerance is where a person is intolerant of someone else because of some inherent characteristic like race/ethnicity/nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. Second order intolerance is a reaction to first order intolerance. First order intolerance is unjustified, but second order intolerance is just a restoration to maximized tolerance.
I like this but I'm not even sure it's such a paradox - if you are tolerating people who do not follow that social contract then can you call yourself a part of the tolerant group yourself? It is a necessary part of being tolerant to reject the intolerant.
It's not a paradox because nobody says that absolutely anything anyone does is fine. There are always rules to acceptable behavior in society. The "paradox of tolerance" is a strawman.
I once heard a professor of physics tell us that paradoxes were just questions posed incorrectly (paraphrasing since we weren't speaking English, sorry if I wrote it in a confusing way) and I've never stopped thinking about it that way
The liar's paradox would beg to differ!
If one tolerates all actions other than those causing harm to non-consenting others (basically "adults can do whatever they want with themselves and with other consenting adults") which is sort of the traditional maximum tolerance boundary, one will tolerate many practices which, whilst not amounting to causing harm to non-consenting others, do spread intolerance.
From where rises the Paradox that such choice of putting one's boundary of Tolerance at the maximum level possible actually ends up in aggregate reducing Tolerance.
Making it a social contract reduces the boundaries of tolerance by the minimum amount possible that's needed to just stop Tolerance from allowing the very tools of its destruction to work.
Under "social contract rules", at a personal level those who are NOT tolerant of intolerance are, very strictly speaking, being less tolerant, but at a Systemic Level they are actually making there be more Tolerance in aggregate than if they had tolerated the intolerant.
PS: I actually work in Systems Design (amongst other things) and it's actually quite common for certain ways of doing things which are perfect at the individual level will in aggregate cause systemic problems making the whole function worse, so the optimal choice for the whole is actually to use a less optimal individual choice. Thinking about it, I would say that pretty much all Tragedy Of The Commons situations are good examples of that kind of thing.
Mind you the actual tragedy that happened at the commons is that the rich fucking stole them.
Any "solution" to "protect" the Commons that involves private ownership of it is always meant to make somebody very wealthy from it.
The original Commons (things like pasture spaces with no owners and shared use by the community) were all stolen from the community and given owners already way back in Monarchic times (for example, via Inclosure Acts in England) and Capitalism is just a continuation of Monarchy were the reduction of choices for the riff-raff is a bit more disguised so that people think they are free and hence are more productive for the Owner Class.
I think there's a subvariety of "paradox" which aren't actually paradoxes, but we call them that because at some point, the name stuck
This doesn't eliminate the paradox. Why does the contract exist in the first place?
It's a moral standard. If moral people didn't decide that tolerance was a good thing for society, the contract wouldn't exist.
So yes, thinking about it as a contract sidesteps the paradox, but the paradox still exists.
So Karl Popper was still right and society shouldn't tolerate the intolerant.
There's no paradox. Although, Karl Popper's words are as good as any.
My point is, no one said "the left have to tolerate everything." In fact, not tolerating capitalism is the defining feature of all left leaning ideologies. More so, where you are on the scale of leftism is based almost entirely on the extent to which you won't tolerate capitalism. Rhetorically, for what possible reason would the left ever have to tolerate nazis, in the first place? Who said they did? Where are they? Of course, no one said they did.
I found it's best to, rightly, just reject the false premise of it being a paradox out of hand. The type who use it know its BS too.
Basically, I want my various types of weirdness tolerated by others. Others want their weirdness tolerated. We mutually agree that it's beneficial to each of us to tolerate each other. This gets expanded to other forms of weirdness. So long as it doesn't significantly impinge on others who dont want it, we have no reason not to be tolerant of others. This is the social contract.
Intolerance inherently impinges on others. While it might not impinge on my personal weirdness, I will still fight against it. I know it could be me next, and I would hope others would stand with me then. In turn, I will do that for others, both because it is right (in my mind) and because I don't want to be targeted next.
I will default to assuming people are happy with the contract. If they demonstrate disagreement, or contempt for the contract, then I withdraw its protections.
You just need to tolerate their life and continued living, don’t need to give them anything more.
Nah let's fuck em up fam.
Sounds exactly like how someone might justify things like internment camps, forced sterilization, and segregation.
"Hey, they're alive and continuing to live, so what's the problem?"
Well, no the argument would be to remove them otherwise. It’s AGAINST that stuff.
Life is sacred, even filth deserve to live. Dont support their business, dont serve them, eventually they will be off on their own and “segregate” themselves. If it’s their own doing and choice so they can survive, well they can be their own “remote tribe” and be with their own kind.
They’re free to change their views and rejoin society, nothing is being forced on them or anything.
We incarcerate people in jail when they’ve done something we’ve deemed wrong as a society and they are supposed to be changed and put back into society. How would this be any different? Why are going to eugenics lmfao, that’s a wild stretch dude.
