There was a point where Europeans were massacring and torturing each other over religious differences, for centuries. Protestants and Catholics considered each other literal heretics, and mortal enemies.
Then they developed this idea of tolerance, and decided that your religious beliefs were your own business. And that worked amazingly well! We can all just get on getting on. This was a huge deal, protestants tolerating catholics and vice versa was every bit as hard as trans people tolerating transphobic people. But it worked, and eventually the differences faded into irrelevance.
And it turned out that the same attitude was great for progress in general: who you love and who you sleep with is your business, and after a decade or two: you know, we’ve all got pretty used to the idea of people being gay. They wanna get married? Sure, I don’t see why not. Tolerance was the basis of most progress in the past few centuries.
And now Gen-Z (or probably just terminally-online people, but as a ratio that’s more of Gen-Z than any earlier group) wants to flip the table. Tolerating ‘intolerance’ is practically a crime! Intolerance, BTW, is when you don’t have the correct set of opinions. People who don’t have the right opinions are monsters, and must be harassed, deplatformed, fired, etc. The wrong opinions are violence.
I’ve seen reactions to ‘bad’ opinions that I would call hysterical.
Sure, it’s supposed to be major things.
There was a point where Europeans were massacring and torturing each other over religious differences, for centuries. Protestants and Catholics considered each other literal heretics, and mortal enemies.
Then they developed this idea of tolerance, and decided that your religious beliefs were your own business. And that worked amazingly well! We can all just get on getting on. This was a huge deal, protestants tolerating catholics and vice versa was every bit as hard as trans people tolerating transphobic people. But it worked, and eventually the differences faded into irrelevance.
And it turned out that the same attitude was great for progress in general: who you love and who you sleep with is your business, and after a decade or two: you know, we’ve all got pretty used to the idea of people being gay. They wanna get married? Sure, I don’t see why not. Tolerance was the basis of most progress in the past few centuries.
And now Gen-Z (or probably just terminally-online people, but as a ratio that’s more of Gen-Z than any earlier group) wants to flip the table. Tolerating ‘intolerance’ is practically a crime! Intolerance, BTW, is when you don’t have the correct set of opinions. People who don’t have the right opinions are monsters, and must be harassed, deplatformed, fired, etc. The wrong opinions are violence.
I’ve seen reactions to ‘bad’ opinions that I would call hysterical.