Wiki - The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased 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.
The paradox of the paradox: there wouldn’t be a paradox if the philosopher wouldn’t be stuck in the logic of a limited model and a distorted assumption about growth.
Only because there exists the possibility that a movement can grow doesn’t mean that it will grow.
Intolerance is also not real, like the war on hunger. There is no enemy, but instead there are people to feed.
This leads all to a simple answer that hides that ‘let’ s give them a chance’ was driven by intolerance for socialists and communists, which should ring a bell.
People are so proud that they are allowed to hate the right enemy that they don’t ask what those humans actually need to become friends. (Which doesn’t mean apeacement!)
*edit: could the downvoters please leave a note and state where they disagree, please?
Your point doesn’t come with an eloquent webcomic and I think having fantasies about punching Nazis is cool
I, too, think punching Nazis is cool.
When Nazis are gone, is there something you would punch next?
More Nazis, probably. You can never punch Nazis too many times.
Actually, I think it’s that a lot of people are aware of the Paradox of Tolerance as a fairly well-discuss philosophical point, and overhumanizing a group defined by its desire to extinguish an ethnicity is not the most constructive rebuttal to it.
It’s not even Godwinizing. Karl Popper coined the Paradox of Tolerance in full knowledge of Nazi atrocities.
I didn’t downvote him, but I’m thinking that’s why many people did.
If anything, the model of a paradox is too mind-boggling for people to grasp it intuitively. A simpler model for it is that of a peace treaty, or of a social contract. Picture this: a contract whereby we agree to uphold rights and protections for everyone, in exchange for receiving the rights and protections thereby upheld.
Tolerance by itself is too easily conflated with having no standards whatsoever, (eh? Nazis? I guess we have to tolerate them if tolerance is the rule of the day, right?) but when it’s a question of enforcing the terms of the contract, it becomes quickly clear that when they start working to break the contract they’re no longer covered by it.
It’s not a paradox when you’re enforcing a contract or a treaty. The protections of a treaty extend only to those abiding by its terms. When the outlaws rode into town to do their outlaw thing, were they entitled to the protections of the laws? No, that’s what the word outlaw means.
Of course, this framing-in-neutral-sounding-language suffers from the problem whereby in cases of oppression, neutrality aligns with the oppressor. Who gets to say what the contract is, and who enforces it? Should the organs of law and justice fall into the hands of people bent on oppressing others, that’s when this neutral-sounding-framing can be used as a tool of oppression. That’s how Jim Crow worked, it’s how white supremacy works, it’s how every colonial/settler nation functions.
There is one group of people intent on using the language of tolerance as a tool of oppression, and it’s high time there was a clause in the paradox/contract/treaty that explicitly calls out that fascists aren’t covered because their whole program is to subvert the contract such that they have rights and power but others do not.
Tolerance is a bad word to start with. We tolerate pain or drugs. It already frames the human relation.
What do people want who oppose tolerance? On a human level, what do they miss?
The thing is, the answer to this question may be “nothing”. Plenty of people with a lot of money and plentiful food are unrepentant bigots. Musk is unimaginably rich and still a transphobe. The rumor is that it’s because Grimes started dating someone trans after breaking it off with him.
What would we need to give him for him to spread his wealth around and become an advocate for trans rights?
Your ideal is admirable. And certainly, we should offer redemption and encourage people to change. But that should not come at the expense of the wronged nor vulnerable.
‘Officially’ Musk is afraid that civilization will collapse and he wants a second ‘home’. What good is his wealth if he lives in fear?
Like most, he wants to feel safe. Look in his past to figure out why he can’t.
The rumors that I heard was that his child is trans and that’s the cause for him buying and changing Twitter.
If he is transphobe to protect his child then you have to reach him there.
You’re just doing the “all language is nihilism” thing.
Really, the logical issue is that the comic is taking a descriptive premise (tolerance of intolerance can, or perhaps is likely to beget intolerance) and forming an unqualified prescriptive message from it.
The reality of the matter is that all philosophy is local. Obviously descriptive ethics define prescriptive ethics, but rarely at a universal scale. “Tolerance can be dangerous,” “radical tolerance can be dangerous,” and “asbestos tolerance can be dangerous,” all express very different propositions. The better you can qualify the danger, and the more you can constrain the object, the better you can act on the statement.
You can argue that here, the comic does qualify its “bar” for intolerance with the nazi example. The semantic way of reading this is that the author is defending intolerance of Nazis, or some related abstraction. I therefore don’t think it is semantically correct to say that the author seeks to apply this ethos broadly.