Is "The Paradox of Tolerance" an actual paradox?

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

The idea that science should be evidence based was known well before Popper was alive. And his ideal of the scientific method was developed by Peirce, Karl just put his name on it.

Alright, fair enough, I'm just familiar with Popper as a codifier. How about this: it's fucking stupid to just go "He's a leftie Jew, therefore everything he says is wrong"? (Popper isn't even a Marxist, his political ideologies are a huge fucking grab-bag of influences from all over the place).

 

[ICametoLurk]

The decaying quality of life in England, the Netherlands and much of the rest of Europe is evidence enough of what happens when your tolerant society tolerates intolerant people.

A problem is that Progressives in their journey to make Progress tend to support people who don't value Progress.

 

[Slap47]

no
there were no "hate speech" laws in weimar gemany
the nazi party was suppressed (outright banned for a while) because it had recently attempted a violent coup in bavaria, and there were separate bans against the SA and SS because they had been involved in large scale political violence on a regular basis

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422017748821

No, it did. Journals treat this as common knowledge.

 

[Marco Fucko]

This could easily devolve into "reee dumb people on social media" but I'm more interested in the logical consistency of the concept. It comes from Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and the gist of it is "Tolerating intolerant people will lead to the destruction of tolerance therefore it is essential to be intolerant towards the intolerant". Now Popper doesn't support silencing the intolerant and suggests rational debate and public opinion keeping them in check, unlike some who quote him, but I'm confused on where the paradox is. I only see a contradiction if you assume "We tolerate EVERYONE" as opposed to a more accurate "We tolerate anyone who does not force their beliefs onto others".

Am I missing something here or is Popper's paradox not an actual paradox?

The only way to protect democracy is to round up communists and fascists into cattlecars and send them to work. I see no paradox here.

 

[RG 448]

I thought Popper had penguins, not paradoxes. Did I get my historical figures mixed up again?

 

[God of Nothing]

I am intolerant to unreasonable intolerance and intolerant of unreasonable tolerance.

I'd post the South Park scene where Garrison gives a speech on tolerance after being a massive fag to everyone under the excuse of being gay but it's not on youtube for some reason.

 

[Lemmingwise]

He's a leftie Jew, therefore everything he says is wrong

I can't speak for others, but I'm always glad to hear whether someone is either a communist, marxist or jew, with somewhat of a milder view of any that were communist/marxist prior to 1950 when the deadly results were thoroughly seen in soviet union and communist china. As for knowing someone is jewish is as good to know as when someone is russian. It informs allegiance to specific tribal concerns.

Judging from your other posts, this might lead you to think that I am hateful towards jews (or perhaps, judging by my other posts, in for example the jewish conspiracy thread). I know in my heart this not to be the case and I know there are no ways lack of hatred or prejudice can be proven. I will just state emphatically, I am not.

As for Popper, I only ever knew him for the intolerance quote.

He apparently was one of the teachers of George Soros and who impressed upon him the importance of an Open Society (which has then resulted into mass immigration into Europe. For me the most memorable part of what open society did was spreading booklets into Turkey and Greece and I remember watching interviews with people that had fled Syria, and found a job in Turkey, but the booklets said how much free stuff they could get in germany, sweden etcetera (with some lies, as promising mansions) had convinced many of his new friends to start the trek into europe, and despite having settled with a job, he too was considering to leave for western europe.

Back then open society still had it on their own site, so I could read the details, including the tips how to evade immigration checkpoints, what answers to give, and the advice to throw away passport.

Sky Finds 'Handbook' For EU-Bound Migrants

The "rough guide" contains maps, tips and phone numbers of organisations which might help refugees making the perilous crossing.

news.sky.com

 

[Lemmingwise]

As for the paradox of intolerance, or as karl popper worded it (according to wikipedia): ""In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."


It strikes me that this will typically be read as an excuse to punch nazi's (or commies, etc), which might have been fine, if only the detection was perfect, but in practice it leads to girls with "make bitcoin great again" baseball caps being assaulted.

Somehow the phrase looks like a big red button of a joystick, waiting to be pressed and fire a missile with.

And what is the result? The result is two factions, intolerant of each other, having a justification in Popper's words to be intolerant to each other. You just arrive at competition over power.

I think perhaps the question itself is a red herring to begin with. "Maintain a tolerant society" is posed as goal. But why should that be a goal in the first place? I mean furries and troons are fun to laugh at, but I think a good case can be made for having taboo's on certain subjects as a morally positive trait of a society.

A tolerant society? Tolerant of what? Blanket tolerance can't possibly be morally virtuous. Tolerance of pedophilia, tolerance of murder, there are many forms of tolerance that are universally morally bankrupt. It is not even the second part of the sentence that seems inconsistent, it's the first part that is very unclear in itself.




ps: this is the popular (and poor) online way that the idea is presented:

 

[ICametoLurk]

Once Adorno & crew pathologized rejection of the "open society" in The Authoritarian Personality, 1950. that was the end of the enlightenment dream of "debate."

Though strongly criticized for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."

 

[Slap47]

As for the paradox of intolerance, or as karl popper worded it (according to wikipedia): ""In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."


It strikes me that this will typically be read as an excuse to punch nazi's (or commies, etc), which might have been fine, if only the detection was perfect, but in practice it leads to girls with "make bitcoin great again" baseball caps being assaulted.

Somehow the phrase looks like a big red button of a joystick, waiting to be pressed and fire a missile with.

And what is the result? The result is two factions, intolerant of each other, having a justification in Popper's words to be intolerant to each other. You just arrive at competition over power.

I think perhaps the question itself is a red herring to begin with. "Maintain a tolerant society" is posed as goal. But why should that be a goal in the first place? I mean furries and troons are fun to laugh at, but I think a good case can be made for having taboo's on certain subjects as a morally positive trait of a society.

A tolerant society? Tolerant of what? Blanket tolerance can't possibly be morally virtuous. Tolerance of pedophilia, tolerance of murder, there are many forms of tolerance that are universally morally bankrupt. It is not even the second part of the sentence that seems inconsistent, it's the first part that is very unclear in itself.




ps: this is the popular (and poor) online way that the idea is presented:

View attachment 732240

Lefties don't see genociding class enemies as intolerant.

 

[ICametoLurk]

Lefties don't see genociding class enemies as intolerant.

The Bible went into detail about how killing children of people is good having examples of cases in which ONE PERSON survived and then caused a fuckton of trouble. Like after the part of King David there were some people from some tribes that survived and they rebuilt everything and caused troubles. And if the Israelites done what G-d said then they would've kept true to him. The logic behind all that is that you are killing so you don't have to kill.

Had the Muslims done a better job India wouldn't be Hindu but they spared women in the Southern part. There's a reason for the whole Jewish if your mom was, because women keep the tradition going.

If you really want long lasting change, no loose ends.

 

[millais]

DIdn't the Libertarians already resolve this moral dilemma by making up the "marketplace of ideas"? All ideas/ideologies are allowed, and the good ones will naturally rise to the top because they have more convincing argument or better results than the bad ones.

 

[QI 541]

The paradox is that any system that's libertarian enough and wants to maintain its own existence will need to take draconian measures in order to do so. The mistake was calling it the paradox of tolerance, because it also applies to any libertarian concept. Any unregulated free market will eventually become a monopoly that stifles competition. Completely unrestrained free speech creates a society where people who control the megaphone can effectively silence anyone with lies and slander. Basically what we currently have, but 100 times worse and the Covington kids + Vic aren't allowed to sue. In any anarcho-capitalist society, an entity will eventually rise to the top and exert enough power to create something resembling an oppressive government.

 

[Bum Driller]

It's no less or more paradoxical than nazi's saying they'e pro-freedom or communists saying they're pro-common man. Humans are paradoxical beings, and our ideologies are paradoxical constructs, logically consistent only to the blind and the dumb. It's all about power, about who gets to call the shots.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

It completely depends on what you mean by "tolerance".

In my mind, whether I tolerate a group has nothing to do with whether I agree with them or like them. It comes down the question, are they breaking the rules? KKK members that like to loudly proclaim their superiority? Stupid, annoying, but they're not hurting anyone, thus they should be tolerated. KKK members that want to go kill people? No, that's not allowed, so that isn't tolerated.

With that definition there's no paradox and it's easy as fuck. We must be tolerant of others just as they must be tolerant of us. Tolerance doesn't mean exceptions to rules, it means not making exceptions to the rules to get rid of something you don't like.

The moment you start talking about pre-emptively taking away freedoms for supposed future consequences, you are the group that must not be tolerated. Because now you're breaking the rules, the same rules everyone else has to follow.

There's a logic gap in the entire argument. Their argument is, if you let the intolerant have a platform, ??????, then the intolerant are in charge and nobody has freedom anymore. It's the stuff behind the ?????? that would be already against the rules or not. They're proposing extremely restrictive rules to prevent a nonexistent problem, and in the process, actually creating the problem that didn't exist.

 

[nonvir_1984]

As Corbin says, it depends, IMHO, on what you mean by "toleration (tolerant)" (and conversely, "intolerant") - and your moral and rational theory.
If the intolerant is morally obnoxious, according to objective (Kantian) morality, then there is, according to Kant, no imperative to tolerate it - a rational person cannot have a duty to tolerate that which is intolerant because it is immoral.
Moreover, the intolerant may also be irrational, and a rational person must reject the irrational. In other words a rational actor has a rational duty to tolerate the rational; the irrational is by definition irrational. Ergo, it must not be tolerated. There is no contradiction.
For a utilitarian, the intolerable reduces utility and so has bad consequences. So, a utilitarian must reject intolerance because it reduces overall utility.
For the Stoics and Aristotelians, decent chaps and chapesses would not tolerate the intolerable, because the intolerable is by definition a denial of human flourishing (eudaimonia). Therefore they must reject the intolerable, in order to flourish as human beings. Again, no contradiction.
Personally, I don't care. I like living on my mountain, in my cabin and having as little to do with people as possible. In my dreams.

DIdn't the Libertarians already resolve this moral dilemma by making up the "marketplace of ideas"? All ideas/ideologies are allowed, and the good ones will naturally rise to the top because they have more convincing argument or better results than the bad ones.

Yeah. and they will de-platform you - or lock you up if you disagree. In my experience, libertarians become totalitarians in a few steps. They love to force people to be free - and will be thugs towards anyone who disagrees. Like, by getting rid of national health systems and forcing them to take health insurance from their business cronies. Libertarians are ideological crazies like communists, fascists and whatever other -ists.

 

[AnOminous]

Am I missing something here or is Popper's paradox not an actual paradox?

The paradox is in not distinguishing between intolerant attitudes and their expression and actually forcibly silencing people.

So what you have to do is shoot people when they violate the Non Aggression Principle.