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.
Popper also sets the limit fairly clearly in his description of the paradox, and it's:
> 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.
The thing Popper misses is that once you rationalize your own intolerance, others will rationalize theirs, missing the nuance of his limit. And, indeed, that has happened.
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.
He's not advocating for a world free of intolerance; in fact, he advocates for the use of intolerance when necessary, and describes when it is necessary. Intolerance can be rational, after all; and intolerance can be moral.
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.
He advocates to be intolerant of those who refuse engage in rational argument and those who opt for violence.
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.
Also in the Wikipedia page, it mentions the very similar thoughts of Jefferson:
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.
Even that line is blurry. A lot of people who reject rational argument will give the appearance of accepting it, but then after a little while you realize they're not even listening to your rational arguments and they're just spouting more and more irrational nonsense each time.
> 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
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.
Super important....but I prefer my optimization to be more fine-grained. Yes, this is much more complicated, and prone to conflict, but I think it's better for humanity to develop these skills before developing the means to damage things with extreme efficiency (industrial & IT technologies, etc). So we've screwed that up big time, but if you find yourself in a hole, best stop digging.
I don't think the limit is as clear as you seem to think, especially in the age of modern social media and their effect on discourse - filter bubbles, using outrage for engagement, amplification of otherwise-marginal beliefs, etc. Is an organized disinformation campaign (even if not state sponsored) "willingness to engage"? It rather seems like an attempt to prevent or disrupt rational argument, even though it doesn't involve physical violence. The line for "engaging in rational discourse" needs to be as clear as the one for when suppression might be justified, because they're inextricably linked. Popper's ideas are very useful as a framing device, but sorely need update and elaboration to become applicable in the real modern world.
An organized disinformation campaign is what I would consider to be irrational argument and deserving of regulation; we already accept limits on deceptive and harmful expression by way of regulation and criminal legislation. Ie, one can't simply sell strychnine and claim it's a panacea, or defraud investors with cooked financials.
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.
I don't think Popper was so daft as to believe that only Soviets and Nazis are capable of the kind of intolerance that should not be tolerated. I'd daresay that democracies happily carrying out repressions, summary executions, lynchings, concentration camps, institutionalized slavery, etc, etc would meet that bar as well.
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.
The point is that he wasn't talking about people saying dumb shit on twitter. He's talking about people using intolerance to justify physical violence against people.
When the dumb shit on twitter is justifying physical violence, does it count?
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?
You are wrong. That's exactly the point he is making. That we have to take action against intolerance before it gets to the point of physical violence.
> 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.
I've often considered that his paradox lays in the fact that he advocates for intolerance towards those who advocate intolerance.
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.
I'd like to point out that the US had people with literally Nazi flags walking through the streets attacking people who looked different, supported by a significant portion of the establishment (including a president). I would not call that minor transgressions. How do you think Hitler got into power?
I never said that Trump was Hitler. That's a completely irrelevant statement. Obviously no leader in a western country is going to say I will become the next Hitler, even Putin does not glorify him. That doesn't take away from the fact that he had/has extremely strong totalitarian tendencies, is continuing to undermine the democratic processes and sympathises with open white supremacists.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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?
I feel like this idea is taken as gospel. I am not sure I buy it. Especially when applied to speech.
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.
I wish people would do more than read the name of that paradox.
>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.
In short, "you can't set the settor." It's a bit like saying "everything is subjective". By asserting such, you're proclaiming subjectivity as objective, breaking the whole statement.
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.")
Tolerance is not acceptance. To tolerate, is to allow something that you do not like. While tolerance is needed, what's really needed is truth and acceptance. I'd rather have someone tell me they don't like me and what for than to be merely tolerated while simultaneously treated like a second rate citizen or talked down upon by simply being just "tolerated." Anyway, I know it's a bit tangent-like here, but tolerance is really not acceptance but to allow something begrudgingly, and so it shouldn't be used as the positive side to intolerance. Not directly replying to you but the entire chain.
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.
We must be intolerant of intolerance — even when the intolerant are vulnerable, minority, underprivileged, non-WEIRD, reasonable, articulate, high-status, academic, or whatever.
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!)
Surely Popper wasn't so sloppy as that? There is an obvious difference between toleration of expression, which "society" certainly should practice, and toleration of more physical actions that in theory could be up for a vote. Somehow I grow suspicious of attempts to obscure that obvious difference...
In fact, if you read the context, that's exactly where Popper drew the line. When a side replies with fists or guns, then you quit being tolerant. Not before. (I'm not sure that he mentioned direct calls for violence one way or the other, so I won't dogmatically claim he put that on either side of the line. But he did not accept ideas - any ideas - as "intolerant".)
> 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.
My reading of that is that some such advocacy is "across the line". Which is which, is a purely practical judgment. A youtube rando with no IRL power would not concern Popper no matter what she said, while someone like Hitler leading a party of fascists obviously would even if he spoke mostly in dog whistles. Drawing the line requires judgment, not an attitude of "it is society's right to crush those it deems intolerant and society will always exercise that right especially if it makes a military contractor a bit more profit". As we see ITT, Popper was wrong, because authoritarians will often demand that the state exercise such "rights" to the fullest extent.
I think maybe Libya war cheerleaders like B-HL must not have read that last sentence in the quote too carefully.
This gets thrown around frequently as though it's some ironclad rule of nature, but hasn't actually been corroborated by any empirical evidence. In fact, the way that it's phrased, it's essentially unfalsifiable. What is the limiting principle? If I find "backsliding of free expression" a form of intolerance, should we be tolerant of the Paradox of Tolerance?
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.
Most of the time when I see people reference this principle it’s because they’d like a convenient way to hate Christians or republicans while still considering themselves a good person.
...almost no one who does can even attempt 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?
>You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"?
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."
For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society:
"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.)"
I can almost guarantee that Karl Popper (the person who wrote a book on the reductive tendencies of proto-totalitarian societies) would fundamentally disagree with this summary of his 750 page work. He might point to the next five decades of his life as evidence for a repudiation.
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.
What form would the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" take, which can be countered by "rational argument" and kept in check by "public opinion?"
Did you actually read the the comment posted or simply scan it once for the word "speech?"
You are conflating free speech and tolerance. Free speech is only a specific form of tolerance dedicated to speech and is not a tolerance of the subject of the speech.
It gets tricky because "society" is an ambiguous word.
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.
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.