Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance says something like “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.”

Some people use this paradox as a justification for bad behaviour against the people they deem to be intolerant.

This seems to present its own awful paradox that strikes at the heart of what most people would consider tolerant, because in many cases (not all, of course) western European and American white people practicing a weak form of Christianity or atheism are some of the most tolerant people in the world. To give an example, the attitudes towards tolerance and diversity in the middle east, China, Africa, and expats from those regions who migrate to places like America or Europe are typically considerably less tolerant. This isn’t a conjecture on my part – there’s a lot of anthropological literature on the subject, and white Americans for example exhibit some of the lowest in-group preference of any other group.

Tolerance as envisioned by Popper is a cultural thing that’s pushed further by white westerners than any other group according to consistent anthropological data. That sort of is a historical accident. It’s developed the way it has in part because of the liberalism of the west, combined with the Judeo-Christian concept that all people are created equal by god, but in particular it’s a result of a deep trauma caused by the horror of the world wars that showed westerners that within them laid the power and potentially the will to implement horrors like the Nazi party and the holocaust.

Tolerance isn’t monopolized by white westerners, many cultures have it to some degree. One of the reasons for the success of the early Persian empire was that they accepted people of all kinds of culture and bloodlines within their borders as relative equals, as well as Islamic Spain. What’s different is the degree to which white westerners embraced tolerance as a result of their deep cultural trauma. While the cause I’m stating is a hypothesis, the anthropological data is not – nobody has less in-group preference compared to outgroup preference than white westerners. The paradox of the paradox is that if we only accept the tolerant, then we will be more tolerant of the dominant culture of the west than of anything else.

The ideal would probably be to just make decisions about people on an individual basis, but using aggregate data to come up with probabilistic conclusions is something humans do in general as a heuristic to reduce the amount of effort required to understand and make useful predictions about a complex world.

The paradox of the paradox of tolerance being that if one uses the paradox of tolerance to define who ought to be tolerated, it means that as a bloc white westerners are generally more deserving of being tolerated than other people.

The concept of being intolerant of a person who has intolerant behaviors I think comes from the concept that people become the avatars for their beliefs. It comes from dehumanizing people who do things you don’t like. They aren’t people who do some things you don’t like, they become Nazis and bigots who are irredeemable, or trolls who are only there to make you feel uncomfortable. In this way. Once a person can be treated as an avatar for bad behavior, then a complex answer of how to deal with someone with many facets in a complicated world is reduced to a single answer: “Do not be tolerant to the intolerant people”.

A more appropriate solution to the paradox might instead be to say that rather than dooming any given individual for not being tolerant enough, you talk about tolerating behavior rather than people. If your racist grandpa is a great guy 99% of the time except when he starts spouting off about how he hates Italians, you go “grandpa, I love you, but I don’t care about Italians. Let’s talk about something else.”

I think this also protects against a major strategic blunder I see a lot these days: By focusing on rejecting the action and not the person, you provide a quick and easy path to redemption, try not to do the thing again.

Sun Tzu’s seminal art of war says many things, but two things that are relevant is that if your army massively outnumbers their surround them. Another thing he writes is that you need to make sure your enemy feels they can run away, because to rout an army is victory.

In this age where the progressive control nearly everything, it might appear that they should take the advice to encircle their enemy since they seem to massively overwhelm their numbers, but territories are not armies. We should remember that if people are trapped without escape or chance for surrender, they’ll fight bitterly to the last man.

It also reminds me of Sun Tzu’s advice to try to use the resources of the country you are invading rather than carrying supplies. Resources taken locally are worth far more than resources taken from home, but their cost is much less. To make an ally out of an enemy is almost the greatest victory.

Of course, the greatest victory is to win without fighting. It is said that the general who will fail seeks battle first and then tries to secure the victory. So a strategy and tactic intended to bring people into your fold rather than destroy all your enemies is going to be more likely to lead to victory.

I feel like this is how we used to do things, and it was working. Then a bunch of people came up who just wanted to “fight Nazis”, and since then we’ve seen things get way worse because it’s battle without victory.