Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally justified you think it is.
I think the necessary addition is "and they need to be stopped".
But to a second point, it should be clear that "exactly" isn't meant in a mathematical sense of "literally every single thought". I don't think the people shouting about social justice and similar morality or other hot political issues want to go to war over whether or not you like poppyseed muffins, there's no reason to take words to their extreme when there isn't a question if a reasonable person would mean something like that.
Finally though, I actually do mean exactly. Find me someone passionate about their political and social opinions who is doing the yelling driving this societal problem who does tolerate different opinions on topics they care about. Few and far between. The problem is explicitly that the median person in these yelling groups actually doesn't tolerate any differences of opinions on a wide array of topics.
1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and
2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)
Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.
You can be anywhere along that spectrum without it being some inevitable slide towards the government disappearing people. Freedom to associate is a form of expression.
If you want to police actions according to societal laws, that is moral. Policing speech you don't like IS fascist.
The article is (from my reading) quite clearly talking about states that are closing down freedom of expression, not society as a whole.
Like, I can say, “The American President is a disaster for the country, all his ideas a trash, he smells funny and should be voted out as soon as possible” and I don’t have to fear the the American Government is coming to get me. In places with reducing freedom of expression this is becoming more dangerous.
This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
People are begging for authoritarian solutions to what they view as moral problems in society. If they can't convince people to do "what's right" they want the state to do it by force. It then becomes easy for authoritarians to take power because it's literally what the people are asking for, and then when they are in power it is easy to shape public opinion to be whatever they want.
>This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
It really isn't. Corporations are taking the place of the state. If you say something controversial and can't get a job as a result and end up in a dire living situation, does it really matter if it was a few corporations or a dictator that made you unemployable?
What is your evidence for this statement? Could you provide an example?
> Corporations are taking the place of the state.
Yes. The state’s role is certainly smaller than it was in many western countries (e.g. in the UK) but I don’t know what that has to do with free speech.
Yes, it does matter. If I am an asshole who stirs shit up at a company, I probably won’t find work. If I am an asshole (not breaking the law) the state can’t deny me basic services it provides to its citizens just because I am an asshole.
Can I just ask though: what period would you consider the golden age of free speech? What is the peak from which we are descending?
We're losing the high ground and the argument that nobody else should do the same things we're doing.
To be clear the article is talking about States suppressing freedom of expression (not the ephemeral Twitter mob).
You could make a case that Snowden and Assange are examples of America suppressing freedom expression but I am not sure how helpful it is to conflate woke/anti-woke debates with erosions of press freedoms in states trending towards authoritarianism (e.g. Hungry and Poland as mentioned in TFA).
The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state. The people in power at the top usually don't actually care very much about the topics of intolerance, but they are a useful tool for building and maintaining power.
Intolerance in a population is a weakness exploited by people in power. Fan the flames of that passion and now and then nudge it in a direction which is useful to maintain that power. How do you think Trump got a mob to storm the capital building?
People in America are almost begging for authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems with morality. They want the government to force their opinions on everyone. This is true across the political spectrum, and there are plenty of examples of it.
Countries don't fall victim to authoritarianism, populations consent and encourage it (and then afterwards get upset with the result when it's too late).
Hitler achieved power through popular election, he took what some people wanted, turned it into what many people wanted, and directed it towards his personal goals.
I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.
Hitler for example exploited the absolutely dire economic situation of Weimar Germany, directed the hate against a clearly delineated social group who were perceived as wealthy.
Same thing in Uganda, Kosovo, Rwanda etc.
People switch from being tolerant to intolerant in an instant (with tragic consequences) but it is almost always driven from the top.
I think it’s a bit of both. Intuitively the comment you are responding to made sense to me. The thinking around it being, imagine literal nazis somehow taking over the US government and attempting to impose their authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t work. There is no appetite in the population for this.
I think it’s a bit of both in the sense governments do notice things for which the population has an appetite for. And they do grow this appetite and exploit it for authoritarian power grabs.
What makes this hard to see or hard to agree it’s happening is the people craving authoritarian measures and the politicians enacting them don’t see it as such. They simply see it as normal, moral, basic decency measures.
Would you consider America in that period to be an intolerant state?
To answer your question, we need a way to measure the level of intolerance, whatever this is.
Should we measure the laws in effect? Should we measure the number of tolerable behaviours? Should we weigh these behaviours in our metric? How do we deal with behaviours that are nominally considered immoral but in practice are accepted? How do we deal with regional differences?
I don’t know the answer to your question.
People on the left think "intolerance" is saying that gays shouldn't be able to marry, or that your biological sex is your gender. People on the right think that "intolerance" is saying that you shouldn't be able to own guns, or that you shouldn't be allowed to say the stuff that the left thinks is intolerant. That is, both sides want to define "intolerance" as being anti-parallel to their own political axis.
But that's not right. Either both of those are intolerance, or neither.
So we need a definition (worse, a definition that is agreed-upon, even if only loosely) that isn't tilted one way or the other politically. Between cognitive bias and bad faith, that's hard to get.
The thing is, this sort of truism seems so flat and weak. I'd even say it's the symptom of something worse and increasingly prevalent – skin-deep, black-and-white thinking that ignores the complexity of any interesting issue. It's thought-terminating clichés all the way down.
Almost every single member of society draws a line at some point between things they think are acceptable and should be tolerated, and things they think are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. The interesting questions are in figuring out how we build a shared, messy consensus that most of us can live with – one that protects the right of people to speak freely and without fear while protecting the rights of others.
So we need to be tolerant of different ways of thinking - EXCEPT - for those ways of thinking that seek to take power to oppress others.
And that, of course, is where things can get sticky. Because we often differ on what constitutes oppression. There are those who believe that any form of taxation is oppression, while most would agree it is necessary for society to function.
There are certain things that we really should all be able to agree constitute oppression however - and top among them is wanting to kill, enslave, or restrict people for nothing more than being who they were born as.
Today, many people seem to equate those who are being intolerant of intolerance with those who are actually being intolerant.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
This is a technically correct point that is always used to justify declaring people you dislike "intolerant" to justify being intolerant.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out of even the slightest deviation from their moral code is tolerated these days.
We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
The fundamental truth is that you are intolerant, because speech leads to action. People like to think of themselves as tolerant and not sensitive, and maybe some people are tolerant to speech which doesn’t lead to action and can take insults for days. But when a majority may hold an opinion you don’t like (e.g. cancel your favorite TV show, or food, or just flat-out kill you and harvest your organs), you want to censor this opinion. You may also want to censor speech when it affects those who aren’t so thick-skinned, like your mom or 5-year-old daughter or the other 75% of the population whose mental health is affected by words.
If your laws tolerate enough speech, the bad guys may team together, take over your government and change them - hence, the Paradox of Tolerance. But they may not, and they may also manage to take over your government without tolerance or speech or even teaming up. In an ideal world we’d allow all speech but have no “bad” speech, but in practice we have tape and plywood to prevent speech when the alternative would very clearly, very significantly hurt more people than censoring.
I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months. However, covid mandates once we realized covid would become endemic, those are debatable, because a) the emergency is no longer universally agreed, and b) some of those mandates could be argued indefinite.
But the other fundamental truth is there’s no right answer. There’s no “do policy X and everything will work out”, hindsight 20/20 but we have no idea the “bad” speech (speech which causes real suffering) of the future will be. There’s no “objectively moral” answer. Ultimately it comes down to, well, your opinion or the opinion of those in power.
It doesn't work. Whenever someone wants to say an opinion in the black area, they'll say the closest thing on the boundary of the grey area, instead. Their followers, who do the same thing themselves, understand this as if it was the original opinion in the black area (or something close to it).
A current topical example: "<Person> should be allowed to sell lists of spies to enemy states" is in the black area, but "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is in the grey area.
"<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is a completely valid argument. But when you realize the person is the unstable former US president, he was presumably searched out of genuine suspicion (I wouldn't consider it just "politics"), and then it contained a list of foreign spies and other documents it wasn't supposed to - now it's no longer reasonable. But I would also say you're no longer really arguing "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons".
The two are barely connected. Yeah they are connected, but no rational person would jump from "home search for political reasons is unjustified" to "leaking spies to enemy states is justified". An extremist would understand, but extremists can figure out codes to communicate with each other as long as any speech is allowed.
Radicalizing sensible people is absolutely a real phenomenon which is happening right now in the US, and has happened many times before. But it's not free speech which has caused this. It's actually poverty and other societal flaws which make people upset, and when the "good guys" don't fix those flaws, people start listening to the bad guys. Sensible people can listen to garbage, but they can also listen to your side, and if they're still reasonable they can make rational judgement.
I'm sorry, but this is just a bizarre argument. I don't see how the outbreak of a disease with a 1% death rate [1], or even the initial 3.4% estimate given at the start of the pandemic, could ever justify executing people for going outside. Even China never went that far, is this really something you believe "logical people" would agree upon?
Is it just a public sphere that needs to observe tolerance or is tolerance something demanded of companies, associations, churches, families, internal thoughts, etc
As your demands for tolerance become more pervasive, you invite authoritarian tendrils into increasingly private spaces.
For anyone who'd like a deeper dive into the logic behind this, Bertrand Russell's Barber Paradox[1] is a fun one (not to be confused with Lewis Carroll's "Barbershop Paradox.")
Like magic, anyone who doesn’t agree with you then instantly becomes “intolerant” and dangerous so we shouldn’t allow them to have a voice or power.
That line of thinking is nothing but BS mental gymnastics to justify oppressing and silencing the other side.
edit: and arguably intolerance of tolerance of tolerance of intolerance.
No, here's his line:
> we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal
That's before fists and guns, at an earlier stage. It's before the nazis invaded Poland, not after.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance, the Discussion section)
Apparently he knew that after, can be too late
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
OK. So he's clearly including advocating for violence as across the line.
I think maybe Libya war cheerleaders like B-HL must not have read that last sentence in the quote too carefully.
If the only exception to a policy of tolerance are positions of intolerance, then it works pretty ok. Because it isn’t a matter of “free speech,” it is a matter of rejecting intolerance. Intolerant free speech must not be tolerated (with this one exception!)
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).
I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Did you actually read the the comment posted or simply scan it once for the word "speech?"
"tolerance of viewpoints requires reciprocity of tolerance from those viewpoints"
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
So long as whomever you are speaking to is willing to engage in rational argument then Poppler would have you tolerate them, and to be intolerant of those who reject argument and advocate violence.
I can't remember ever seeing anyone other than you mention the limit, and that includes quite a few people quoting Popper to justify their intolerance.
I'd argue that Popper left his wheelhouse when he formulated this. It was at the moment when WW2 was ending and the Cold War was beginning. Philosophers, like most other people, hardly ever think clearly when their emotions are inflamed by current events. They are best when they stay away from the topical.
FWIW, I am aware of the full quote because I've seen it elsewhere; but then, I used to spend quite a lot of time arguing on the intarwebs.
The nuance is in the limit. If a person, in their intolerance, is resorting to violence towards those that are not doing likewise, then they are in the wrong. Even if they believe that they are abiding by the limit when doing so. Rational argument should always be the preferred course of action, and intolerance and violence only as a bitter last resort.
How this typically works out in the real world is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black though - ideologues and casuals on both sides (yes, I said it!) can be easily observed in massive quantities refusing to address valid points of disagreement, often via clever rhetorical techniques (memes, thought terminating cliches, etc) like JAQing Off, SeaLioning, "bad faith", "irrelevant/word salad/meaningless", etc - if you don't believe me, try searching HN for some of these terms and examine the surrounding context.
I would say that this is the important line to be drawn.
But that's different from a zeitgeist of individuals who believe in falsehoods and argue for what they believe to be true; any single one of which may be acting rationally and arguing in good faith.
It's ridiculous to extend his thinking to our modern and relatively mild transgressions.
You don't need to drape a swastika around you to be a fascist, you can get by just as well with any other flag.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
The thing he wants suppressed here is the act of 'denouncing all argument' and of 'forbidding their followers to listen to rational argument' and of 'teaching them to answer arguments by the use of (force)'. Any of these Quips remind you of anything in modern discourse? They should.
Because he's not interested in seeing if their grab for power is actually going to work or not, before suppressing it.
To continue quoting Popper:
> We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
And a lot of the shit on Twitter today is ranges from skirting those lines to stepping right over them. He views this behavior on a spectrum of borderline-to-actual criminal.
If what he was preaching was 'wait for fascists to start beating people/doing the Beer Hall Putsch/invading Poland before doing anything about them', it wouldn't be called The Paradox of Tolerance. There's nothing paradoxical about stopping intolerant violent action after it starts. What's paradoxical is that you have to stop intolerant violent action before it starts, by stopping intolerant non-violent action.
But in practice it needn't be a paradox, in practice, would it? In the same way that we grant the state a monopoly on violence, we could grant the state a monopoly on intolerance. And we do, here in Canada, by way of hate speech laws and charter protections for various protected aspects of persons. The state is intolerant of intolerance, and it works pretty ok.
Even *that* line is blurry. If you forbid people from directly inciting violence, they'll jump to "Won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and then someone will, in fact, rid them of the meddlesome priest. Did they incite it? Who can say?
Trump isn't Hitler and Antifa burning down police stations is not the Warsaw Uprising.
I as someone from a country who knows a big deal about how the dangers of fascism am certainly worried if the world's most powerful man talks like that.
Thomas Jefferson had already addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilize the United States and its unity, saying, "let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
The empirical data is very mixed, to the extent that it's essentially impossible to draw any conclusions that fit into a pithy philosophy like Popper's.
At least in America, expression has gotten more free over time, with the overturning of Schenck v United States towards the far more permissive Brandenburg v Ohio and New York Times Co v Sullivan precedents — and American society has gotten more tolerant since the 1960s, not less. Yes, America has problems today, but they're nothing compared to the problems America faced back then.
Even comparing data points today, expression is far more restricted in countries like India relative to peer Western democracies (especially the US), and the former is far less tolerant and increasingly more authoritarian (under Modi) than the latter.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a really convenient way to shut down any kind of debate because nobody wants to be thought of as intolerant.
You can disagree with the Paradox of Tolerance but almost no one who does ever even attempts to do so in good faith.
This seems a bit overblown. You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"? What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
I'm sure they can, but most people don't seem to understand it well enough to formulate a coherent argument against it, they only know that they hate it because the politics of their tribe hates it. Like people who object to CRT who obviously have never engaged with the source material beyond a quote or two taken out of context.
The poster above it drivel and anyone who brings it up anti free-speech. That isn't an argument it's just shit-talking, and it conveniently ignores the fact that the parameters of "free speech" are very much up for debate here.
>What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
Mostly - because there's a reason none of this was an issue before 2016 - they want to ensure the spread of right-wing accelerationist propaganda without significant social or legal consequence for themselves. But of course they can't argue for this explicitly in most public spaces, so instead they couch their real politics in arguments like "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance" or "sunlight is the best disinfectant."
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
That people whose philosophy can be summed up as "call everything fascist and punch it" are using Popper as a way to cover their innate totalitarianism is beyond parody.
I feel like there are many unanswered questions or implied assumptions when saying “tolerant exact for the intolerant”.
1. Who decides what is “intolerant behaviour”?
2. What checks and balances do we have to ensure tolerable behaviour is not incorrectly labelled as intolerant.
3. Is intolerant behaviour on a slider or is it a binary? If so, what mechanism do we have in place to ensure the “intolerance of intolerance” is proportional?
I suppose going a step forward, we can also ask ourselves why is tolerance a good thing or a societal goal? Is it even a feasible goal?
To me it doesn’t seem like society is “tolerant except for the intolerant”. It just seems it’s changing it’s labels for what behaviours are acceptable and what are not.
I feel like if you’re really committed to “tolerant except for the intolerant” you need to draw the line at quantifiable harm, like violence or theft. If you don’t and include things like “psychological harm” or “systemic harm” or “hate speech” etc, you open up the system to abuse due to the grey area around labelling.
I’m not saying psychological harm doesn’t exist or hate speech doesn’t have a negative effect on people subjected to it. But they are impossible to quantify and even harder to agree on. And that makes for bad concepts to build morality or even worse, law around.
Otherwise on topic, I see and feel the chilling effects on speech from those big platforms being discussed across America as well. I do not see any of it coming from the US government, though. I see it all coming from citizens wishing to control others' speech all around them, else they will whip out a phone and think they're some sort of vigilante over others' speech or wrongthink. This is tiresome and old already but I'm not comparing this to government level, authoritarian free speech removal. Still, it's having a mass effect on societal attitude, conversation, politeness, and all else, as far as I can tell.