The paradox of tolerance was a favorite canard of the Left back when they were still pretending to be moral relativists. You still hear it sometimes from Gen Xers who didn’t get the updated Woke Cult rubrics.
According to philosopher Karl Popper, the paradox goes that a total commitment to tolerance would end up destroying tolerance since intolerant people would eventually take over through coercion or threats. Therefore, the tolerant are justified in making an exception for the intolerant.
The fault in Popper’s reasoning is his assumption that tolerance has absolute value which reasoned thought will inevitably discern. Therein lies the real paradox. If tolerance were an absolute good, justifying the suppression of intolerance wouldn’t require appeals to greater goods. Yet Popper does just that:
Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] 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.
Note that Popper’s argument hinges on a fear of the intolerant resorting to violence. Asserting the right to suppress the intolerant “in the name of tolerance” is a fig leaf. His real justification rests on an appeal to public safety and order.
Just as making an idol of freedom is the fatal flaw of Liberalism, trying to absolutize tolerance is the error at the heart of Popper’s argument. Both freedom and tolerance are conditional goods. They are worth no more or less than the inherent value of the goods they grant access to. One can always ask, “Freedom to do what? Tolerance of what?”
Frequent readers of this blog know that the political Left has curdled into fanatical cult. Their quest for the license to indulge their personal preferences unmoored from any reference to the good succeeded, but at the cost of stripping all meaning from their lives.
It’s the Death Cultists who are destroying public order in the name of tolerance. This should surprise no one, since another way to think of absolutizing conditional goods is removing their limiting principles. Popper’s philosophy has led us to a place where failing to celebrate even the most dyscivic forms of personal expression is seen as tyrannical intolerance.
Just as worshiping the market has concentrated unimaginable wealth in a few hands, making idols of freedom and tolerance has vested the power to dictate which behavior should be celebrated and which suppressed in the Death Cult’s high priests. They wield this power through a number of still-emerging public rituals.
One of the Cult’s favorite rites was ginning up hate crime hoaxes. Every sacrament requires the proper form and matter, and the Death Cult’s rituals are no different. In this case, the form consisted of whipping the media into a frenzy over the matter–usually a noose or a backwards swastika left in a convenient spot.
Such liturgies define the Death Cult since they a) demonstrate that the Cultists know nothing about the normal people they despise and b) epitomize the kind of Charlotte’s Web thinking that drives most Cultists. They project as a rule, and since they delight in shoving their symbols in our faces, they solipsistically assume their enemies desire to do the same to them. Their delusion that all non-Cultists are KKK Nazis explains their choice of symbols. Note that they never plant crucifixes or icons at fake crime scenes.
Still, the Woke Cult’s public liturgies seemed insufficient to numb the pain of living lives devoid of meaning. You could tell by the way they popped antidepressants like candy and burned down cities.
A fascinating development in Death Cult doctrine and liturgy has unfolded over the past couple of years. Whereas before they relied on projecting their collective sins onto imaginary scapegoats in elaborate media morality plays and immolating their neighborhoods as burnt offerings to Diversity, a new Death Cult sacrament has been instituted by the high priests in white coats.
MacIntyre likens the vaccine to Leftist baptism, but in form and matter it’s closer to another sacrament of initiation–Holy Communion.
We see it in the vaccines’ relationship to another Death Cult sacrament, abortion. Previously, that highest of infernal rites could only be performed rarely, only by female cultists, and at relatively high cost in time, effort, and resources.
Now, everyone can partake in the fetid fruit of child sacrifice, easily, often, and for free.
As the Death Cult is a warped mirror image of Christianity, its rituals now reflect the similar shift from the Old Testament, whose sacraments were many, difficult, and exclusive, to those of the New Covenant, which are relatively few, simple, and open to all in full communion with the Church.
This aping of Christian practice has also facilitated Woke Cultists’ infiltration of the institutional Church. Like the cuckoo, prior generations of Cultists secreted their spawn within the Church, where they have hatched and grown into insatiable monsters that seek to push the true children of God out.
As is the besetting vice of their generation, the Boomers in charge of the hierarchy are blissfully unaware that the seemingly nice folks who’ve caused a sacramental crisis with appeals to charity and the greater good are in fact adherents of a parallel, hostile religion. Historically, it’s fallen to the laity to offer charitable correction to corrupt prelates.
Put another way, the USCCB gets 40 percent of its funding from the government. That seems like a lot until you consider that the faithful contribute the other 60 percent. The time is rapidly approaching, and may have arrived in some locales, when Catholics of good conscience must inform their bishops that they’ll not put one more cent in the collection basket till the shepherds give up serving Caesar and return to serving Christ.
Put yet another way, don’t give money to robbers in shepherds’ clothing who violate canon law and the Magisterium to deny innocent Christians access to the sacraments.