Kumbaya and Tolerating Intolerance

[Parodite]

It becomes more complicated when, for instance, certain British elites who identify as "woke" genuinely believe that some native British populists—whom they label as “ultra-right-wing and racist”—pose a serious threat to a diverse and tolerant society.

The situation is further complicated when individuals like Tommy Robinson hold equally negative views about those politicians and commentators. In my opinion, this emerging "woke" thought-police in Britain represents a far greater threat than individuals like Tommy Robinson.

When two groups accuse each other of intolerance, the decisive factor often boils down to who can silence the other by force when given the opportunity.

In a truly tolerant society, an intolerant person must first act on their perceived intolerance before they can be punished, expelled, or have their organization banned as criminal.

This implies that civilized, tolerant societies may not endure for long. After all, everyone is considered innocent until proven guilty.

Religious institutions in the West, in particular, often enjoy metaphysical protection against various crimes they have committed or plan to commit, making them a perfect cover.

This suggests that if one wants to preserve true tolerance in the West and eliminate truly intolerant individuals and groups, a religious central command could serve that purpose best. Then brand it "Kumbaya Church," but with a strategic plan to infiltrate politics, big business, and media, while employing a final measure to eliminate the truly harmful elements.

Objections to the philosophy and practices of Kumbaya Church could be easily countered by pointing out that throughout history, not only have gangs and governments killed, but the gods worshipped and feared by humans have often been depicted as murderous, vengeful, hungry beasts that need sacrifices on their plates for dinner.

Even Jesus Christ, the ultimate prophet of peace, had a Father who would eventually purge the intolerant, casting those who failed the Kumbaya test into the eternal furnace.

Returning to basic biology: eliminate those who seek to eliminate you—or at least drive them away. Tolerating those who wish you harm won't get you very far. Perhaps there's an element of masochism at play here as well.

[Note: I had GPT do a spell grammar check and style revision. Yes, it sounds more decent and flawless. ]

[noddy]

my problem with that paradox is just the vagueness of the words, and the fact wordplay is really interesting to intellectuals, and not very interesting to angry mobs.

the disconnect between all that just leaves me bemused.

my whole life folks have been trying to stop the usage of words that represent concepts they dont like, yet those concepts always attach themselves to a new words.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

My gripe is genealogical. Popper comes right out of that german liberal tradition; his paradox is because he was a believer in kulturkampf or the son of believers.

The phrase "paradox of tolerance" was first articulated in Popper's sense (though borrowed from Locke) as a justification of stripping German Catholics of citizenship. Right out of the German Progress Party (later merging into the German Liberal Party) which was in strict opposition to Bismarck until the conflict of kulturkampf-- then that Bismarck, not such a bad guy.

Put back into context of his place and time, Karl Popper is an oddball fanatic looking to reestablish the German Empire but this time the 'ideal' version.

The ideal version of course being a very high abstraction of man. Popper was a man uncomfortable with any distinguishing, practical difference which couldn't be controlled by the life of the mind.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Tolerance was raised from an expediency to a virtue as a very hard learned lesson from the wars of religion. The long memory has faded from that and we're left with this virtue (promoted more and more as it becomes more meaningless) in the hands of people who once again view it as an expediency matter, until they can nullify whatever would be today's equivalent to the Edict of Nantes.

On the pragmatic side, what no one *should* want to do is create a situation where some group feels like it is facing an "unsurvivable evil". That is when the nastiest free radicals emerge. And these problems can be imported by the truck load. It isn't all homegrown--so to speak.

[Parodite]

The only thing I know about Karl P. are his musings about the scientific method, falsification, which all made good sense.

True enough for all abstract and very general deliberations; how apply these intellectual constructs in the world of complex chaotic action, of law and ordah, where the cultural and the legal mix and merge / not merge?

The concept of tolerance seems to me coming from purely selfish needs. I want tolerance embedded in a constitution to protect me from a- holes as much as possible. Other than that, I'm not really a tolerant person, more old school leave me alone or face a severe eye for an eye.

I have never met a deeply tolerant person ever, maybe except for altzheimer patients. Friendship, kumbaya love and peace, reproduction, sex and hormones especially oxytocin, any feel-good trigger, chemical or in the environment, will do.

Even generating philosophical-religious constructs is like creating an imaginary nest that is (feels like) your home where you feel safe enough, mate and reproduce. A little house on the prairie.

Threats, personal and impersonal in the environment that challenge my needs, trigger a natural response that is quite the opposite of tolerance. The reflex is to diminish threats by attacking them (which includes all modern forms of "problem solving" and competition) or to run away from them to stay out of trouble.

One can be tolerant of threats only if forced not to act on reflexive instincts. In a worst case scenario one can try love the predator who needs you for dinner and has its teeth already in your neck. But that is more like a surrender by force when your game is over. When also your ability to be "tolerant" is rendered meaningless.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

If someone is at your throat, whatever tolerance is is not really at play; we're at a different level on that hierarchy of needs.

Tolerance, as a slogan, is used top-down to stifle freedom of association and agency.

The real manipulation occurs from boxing people into ascribed social expectations of reasonableness. That every character one meets is of good faith and reasonable. That gentleman smoking crack on the subway car between attempts at lighting people on fire on the subway is just as reasonable as you or I; to say or think otherwise breaks the social contract.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

There is a heartbroken utopian about to strike back when the limits of kumbaya or tolerance are raised.

[Parodite]

Wah is inevitable.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Wah is inevitable.

Yes, conflict or violence. The gloom which hangs over the head of every utopian; those dreadful minutes marring the perpetual idyll.

The late Panagiotis Kondylis was convinced that the mere potentiality of conflict was enough to dismiss any utopian schema on this plane of existence.

--

Though count me out on the world being one constant conflict. It's a germ passed around in right-wing humanism and always leads into the same ditches. Nature isn't an agonist.

[noddy]

This the fake paradox.

the real paradox is if I have to tolerate thee or thee has to tolerate mee

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Or it raises the question of how often is there actual conflict?

If we start from different premises, is there any disagreement going on?

I can only badly paraphrase it but Hume, when talking about 'clashes of ideas', points out how often people imagine their ideas as corporeal objects being driven by cart across a narrow pass on the side of a cliff. Of course they are going to then treat every idea & its habits as a do-or-die situation.

That doesn't mean it's anything goes. It's just that the solutions to the vast majority of these conflicts are going to be, if all is going well, much more circumscribed than what fanatics hope for-- going back to what I said earlier, "don't let people get to point where they perceive a fatal evil against them."

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

There is the (philosophical) razor to kumbaya:

the spread and uplift of "tolerance" was followed in conceptual history with "civilization" which was used as a big giant escape clause in contradistinction to how precious and elevated 'tolerance' became. And the deconstruction and of civilization as the 'fence around the torah' has injured any ability to talk about tolerance.

It's debatable about how to divide the good and bad to that.

It took less than 10, 20 years in print from the popular concept to emerge- civilization- as a means of expressing an economic relation to becoming a status of what one was in some essential way. While it wasn't fullproof of course between 'civilized' people, who would take the chance of how much tolerance one would receive under the header of savage? That's a luck of the draw upon which 'civilized' person you'd be dealing with.

My hypothesis is that the growing importance of one made space for the other. I'd speculate that it's really not a direct relation; and while there is hypocrisy involved, I don't think that was the purpose.

The one created the space for the other to economize everything- both a disaster and something everyone one of us with a keyboard has seen benefits from with an alternative being what? Mass death and destruction on one hand and whatever magic formula of how to handle business based on cultural superiority that someone with BRIC-sympathies was advocating for on this very forum not too long ago.

[noddy]

Im a tad jaded for all this, I think its all just corporate mission statement stuff

on a personal level and cultural level - some wisdom is recent and hard learnt, eg: not starting fights over how the other is rasing their kids.

the furthur we get from that cultural memory, the more the righteous on both sides think the moral win is worth the fight.

their is no final solution, just the luck of when you are born in the cycle.

(what, is that 2 black pills today sir?)

[noddy]

more simply, I dont think tolerance means much, except as a lesson hard learnt about the consequences of not knowing.

cultural wisdom seems fleeting, and even if it wasnt, right now in the west, cultural innoculation is at an all time low anyway.

do I save the babies from abortion and perverts ? or do i save them from school shootings and lack of medical attention ?