Can someone explain the point of tolerance to me ?

[Virtual ghost]

Well since this forum seems to be have a very large number of people from free and democratic western countries I would really be greatful if you could explain the entire concept of tolerance to me.




To be honest I never trully grasped why tolerance is considered to be something so tightly related to wisdom.
As I said in some other threads "Growing up in a country that is being torn upart by war was not traumatic for me. It is just that it left deep phylosophical consequences". In other words I am comfortable with "Lets wipe out the other tribe from the face of the earth" logic.


I mean I am not saying that you should be antitolerant against everything but in alot of cases I simply don't see tolerance as something logical.
For example you can see in alot of political speeches and movies where something like "We have to stay tolerant or we will becomes just as the minority that wants to destroy the current order" is said.

On the other hand you have different logic. You wipe out that minority out of existance. What means that tolerant majority will be able to live in peace instead of having decades of political instability. Which often leads to economic instability. Not to mention that stable system is usually capable of supporting more people with a better quality of life. Which means that loses in population numbers can be solved with a little higher fertility rate (if needed). Which often happens if the system is stabile. Plus since the society can support more people some people will get the chance to live. What would be the case if you have decades of problems. On small scales that may not be the case but in larger ones it often is. (boom after WW2 is perhaps the most obvious example) Which is something no one is thinking about.


However I know that in reality things are often not that simple. But on the other hand people simply don't allow them to be this simple.
Also you can have a deep political disagreement with someone. So by tolerant logic you should just be democratic and try to find a way to get along with other person/group. What usually leads to creating some sort of status quo. Basicly the entire modern politics in developped world is like this. They are just arguing and debating for decades while they maintain pretty much everything as it is/was. The only thing that is changing is tech-level.
What means that entire global political wisdom will become obsolete with time. (If we overlook "the fact" that this is already the case)
I mean don't delude yourself, the thousands of years of technological progress will destroy the politics as we know it.


What opens the question of should we have simpathy for something that is failing and it probably will to do so even more in the future ?
Which then leads to radical conclusions. What is the point of finding a common ground with people who may have fundamentaly different view from yours ?



Also tolerance creates paradoxes. Since it tolerances the anti-tolerance for tolerance. Which isn't a problem if we are not talking about a mind-set that has antitolerance and provocation at its most fundamental level.
However if I persoanally do something against this person I am considered evil and/or psychotic. Seriously why not allow different groups to solves their issues once and for all ? Why delay something that is most likely inevitable outcome given enough time.


Most people seem to dislike any radical view of things but I have problem figuring out why? Since only radical (what is not the same as primitive) leads away from the status quo. By "status quo" I mean birocracy and no change or real progress (in any direction). What often leads to "total eruption" of all problems with time and at the same time. People may dislike the principle but sometimes you have to remove old ideas by force just to enable the creation of new ones.



Basicly I could go on and on about this so i will just stop here.
Seriously, is tolerance and mutual understanding always the best solution ?

 

[Chunes]

Tolerance holds questionable value. At the end of the day it is merely a copout for failing to live a life of legitimacy and passion. It is submission to a dreary hodgepodge of inefficacy and philosophical skepticism (i.e.—we can't know anything so let's tolerate everyone's theories). To be intolerant is to take a stand and claim that yes, my way is right, dammit, and I'll fight tooth and nail for my ideals. It is a matter of honor and virtue to live as if life means something. To be tolerant is to secretly concede that life doesn't really matter—that one's ideals are too unimportant to be lived, and rather belong on a dusty museum shelf with everybody else's. Intolerance is the elegance of the individual. Tolerance is the soullessness of the committee.

I could write an identically-structured dissertation extolling the virtues of tolerance.

Wrap your mind around that and get back to me.

 

[Craft]

Tolerance's usefulness is relative to the situation. There is no "always" in most things. You could find situations wherein the action of tolerance has improved the situation. There is a saying, "There's always a time for everything." The tolerance you define here, however, is general and therefore will be more likely to adapt things which you wouldn't call "tolerance" itself. It's just part of the process.

The point of tolerance is many.

No, it probably isn't the always the best solution, but what is? How do we define what's the best and how can we make sure it is the best?

There are different type of initiations and tolerance could be one those methods. Think about the African-American problem and the methods Martin Luther King Jr. used.

 

[FDG]

Because the net present value of waging a war does not exceed the net present value of tolerating the opposite "party". When the opposition becomes too stark, the inequality's reversed and war happens.

Net present value is usually mediated by some type of utility function, which doesn't need to be continuous/homogeneous. Thus you might have a breaking point for a given level of political/sociological distance (if dist>a -> f(dist)=e^dist; if dist<a->f(dist)=log(dist), for example) where the output of an epsilon additional distance greatly exceeds the input.

 

[Valiant]

Good point, Antisocial one.

I never put it into words; or rather I did not focus on tolerance.
I am and will always be in vehement opposition to democracy, because it does not work.
Furthermore, it is not only that tolerance/democracy does not work. It does, like you say, not lead anywhere but a status quo.
I believe human progress to be an ideal worth pursuing, which means that I am in opposition to stagnation; a state we have been in for quite some time now.
We don't need infighting and chaos; i.e democracy, capitalism, religions conflicting with the goal... Etc.


The main balancing factor and argument against intolerance is indeed that "intolerance" makes you make a decision which will sometimes be unpleasant in the short-term.
It does seem like a common denominator for a lot of people, that they refuse to do violence or act decisively when it is clearly needed.
I have always found it odd that some people just won't punch a guy in the face if he deserves it, and if said person can get away with it.

The question is where to draw the line? One cannot be completely without tolerance, that would lead to complete anarchy; which is entirely what at least I want to prevent at all costs.
Well, at least lasting anarchy.
Complete, short-term anarchy usually breeds dictatorship/kingdom, which I like.

 

[gromit]

I don't know about at a larger political scale, but on a person-to-person scale, I have found that approaching people with open-mindedness and warmth rather than judgment and arrogance sets a tone for the interaction which allows both people to come out having learned something. Or at least it allows me to come out of it having learned something. If you interact with others as though they have a valid perspective,they are generally more likely to be reasonable, to consider other ideas, to be open to you and your perspectives.

Obviously there are some people who will take advantage of this, and I haven't found a useful way to engage with them. I still try to understand where they're coming from, to some extent, but after a certain point, it does become a little futile. I guess the objective in that kind of situation would be different.

 

[Dark Razor]

The thing is, without "tolerance" it is always possible for yourself to end up among the minority that is "unworthy" and earmarked for extermination. Therefor it's in the rational self-interest of pretty much anyone (for some more, others less, depending on how many /which "minorities" or peer-groups you are part of) to promote a certain level of tolerance within society.

I would expect that generally the more you embody the "mainstream" of society, the less acceptance / need for tolerance you have.

If on the other hand you have expirienced discrimination / threats to your physical safety you will want to increase the "level of tolerance" of your society. Because you want to be treated with more respect and dignity yourself, and also because you don't want other people to experience what you have been subjected to, your level of empathy for marginalized groups increases.

So "tolerance" is the result of different groups trying to carve out a niche for themselves within society, see it like kind of uneasy truce between all the different factions of society to prevent all-out war. All out war (i.e. extermination, or exclusion / banishment) only makes sense, from the POV of the actors, if the majority, or the rulers of the group, are a very homogenous group. For those groups (example might be the country of Japan) it may make more sense to keep outsiders out from the beginning rather than trying to control their latent aggression towards each other by means of "tolerance", as more diverse societies would do.

 

[Valiant]

Good point razor.
This is indeed how it works for the most part.
If you look away from humanism, however...
What worth does tolerance have in the long term of things?
In the long term, it is a good thing that the weak does perish.
I might be one who has to do the dying bit, and I do not like it...
But... There is no other logical standpoint. Tolerance, among other things, is only making things slow down and it is retarding the natural process of evolution.

 

[Dark Razor]

What worth does tolerance have in the long term of things?
In the long term, it is a good thing that the weak does perish.
I might be one who has to do the dying bit, and I do not like it...
But... There is no other logical standpoint. Tolerance, among other things, is only making things slow down and it is retarding the natural process of evolution.

I dont think that view is nuanced enough. What does "weak" mean in this context? Basically it just means "not the majority / mainstream".

I am suprised that you claim to be an opponent of "Democracy" yet you would allow the majority faction within society to impose their will on all the rest.

Also would eliminating "undesirables" promote "evolution"? That would only be so if humans could determine, in advance how a certain trait will be advantageous in the evolutionary process. However evolution is the very essence of trial and error, meaning you only know if something works after it has been tested against reality. That means it is vital to test as many combinations as possible, and never stop.

Evolution happens because a lot of traits / individuals are both competing and cooperating with each other, often "the weak" find ways to cooperate and synergize their traits to overwhelm "the strong".

Evolution of human societies is somewhat different from biological evolution because conscious thought enters the picture. However it still makes sense to let various factions /ways of living exist side by side to test many different traits and ways of doing things, and if some part of some group's behaviour looks like it could offer an advantage to the greater whole of society, the mainstream can adopt it.

So in essence, by allowing tolerance, society has the ability to run many different ways of doing things, each only by a few people in kind of a laboratory environment, all parallel to each other. This greatly enhances the number of combinations that can be checked against reality within a fixed timeframe. If you had mainstream society set all the rules and supress individual expression you would instead stiffle the evolutionary process, leading to stagnation, loss of dynamism and eventually, extinction.

You can think of a tolerant society as a multi-threaded, multi-user OS of humankind, while an intolerant one represents a single-user, single-threaded one. See, you are DOS, I am Unix. You succumbed to evolution in ca. 1988, and I am still alive and thriving, simply because I can process so much more information within the same time.

 

[gromit]

Good point razor.
This is indeed how it works for the most part.
If you look away from humanism, however...
What worth does tolerance have in the long term of things?
In the long term, it is a good thing that the weak does perish.
I might be one who has to do the dying bit, and I do not like it...
But... There is no other logical standpoint. Tolerance, among other things, is only making things slow down and it is retarding the natural process of evolution.

Do you think because it is natural it is ideal?

 

[disregard]

Tolerance is an exercise in letting go of the desire to control that which you cannot.

It's being in complete control of yourself and your responses to negative stigma.

 

[Litvyak]

To be honest I never trully grasped why tolerance is considered to be something so tightly related to wisdom.
As I said in some other threads "Growing up in a country that is being torn upart by war was not traumatic for me. It is just that it left deep phylosophical consequences". In other words I am comfortable with "Lets wipe out the other tribe from the face of the earth" logic.

Growing up in a country with a history of 500 years of oppression, wars and tragedies, dictatoships, tartars, turks, austrians, germans and commies, holocaust, diversification, underdevelopment, corruption, premature welfare state and a philosophy of constant pessimism had no significant consequences on my mental health.
The croatian part of the balkan wars is long over, you have a beautiful mediterranean coast and a decent economy, especially compared to others in the region. I suggest you stop blaming others - you seem to have a Si-like fixation on the past for no apparent reason. If you have problems, solve them.

On the other hand you have different logic. You wipe out that minority out of existance. What means that tolerant majority will be able to live in peace instead of having decades of political instability. Which often leads to economic instability. Not to mention that stable system is usually capable of supporting more people with a better quality of life. Which means that loses in population numbers can be solved with a little higher fertility rate (if needed). Which often happens if the system is stabile. Plus since the society can support more people some people will get the chance to live. What would be the case if you have decades of problems. On small scales that may not be the case but in larger ones it often is. (boom after WW2 is perhaps the most obvious example) Which is something no one is thinking about.

This is not a 'logical' approach, it is one-dimensional and shortsighted. You can't just "destroy" a minority even if we disregard the current international regulations which you deem "unnecessary". It is physically impossible, and sets up a chain reaction of vendettas and unnecessary social ruptures tearing your society apart. The most "efficient" systematic approach to destroy a minority was the Endlösung. Did they succeed? Don't think so. On the other hand, Israel was formed three years later by a new and energetic generation desperate to overcome the disaster.

What usually leads to creating some sort of status quo. Basicly the entire modern politics in developped world is like this. They are just arguing and debating for decades while they maintain pretty much everything as it is/was. The only thing that is changing is tech-level.

Well, no. You just seem to be incapable of seeing through the whole process since it is not developing rapidly enough. The Lisboa Treaty, for example, is a huge step in the development of the European Union. I was skeptical before, but now I think political integration is achievable through hard work, opt-outs and constant debates. There are many things hindering the process, but your claim is ridiculous on many levels. The NATO is working efficiently, and other supranational entities are about to fully emerge in world politics, like the African Union.

I mean don't delude yourself, the thousands of years of technological progress will destroy the politics as we know it.

O___o

It will change the status quo, yes. Destroy it? WTH?

What opens the question of should we have simpathy for something that is failing and it probably will to do so even more in the future ?

Your question is based on wrong premises.

Which then leads to radical conclusions. What is the point of finding a common ground with people who may have fundamentaly different view from yours ?

There are no 100% different views, which can be derived from human nature. Saying there's nothing common in our thinking is false simply because different views are based on the thought processes of the same species, even in a worst-case scenario in which our core values differ, we can still find common grounds hidden deeply in human psyche.

If peace and stability with 100 million people is achievable, why would you want to destroy 30 million for an easier yet less desirable solution?
Give a little more time to humanity. We're still so young and stupid.

Also tolerance creates paradoxes. Since it tolerances the anti-tolerance for tolerance. Which isn't a problem if we are not talking about a mind-set that has antitolerance and provocation at its most fundamental level.

Mental masturbation. Get over it, life is based on paradoxes. Make your choices.

Seriously why not allow different groups to solves their issues once and for all ? Why delay something that is most likely inevitable outcome given enough time.

Who are you to decide what is and what is not inevitable? There is not a single "logical" path, as it is shown above.
A technological singularity might also solve your problems, among others.

Most people seem to dislike any radical view of things but I have problem figuring out why?

Stop deluding yourself, you're not half as logical as you think you are. Radical is desirable if it is purposeful, it wouldn't be a problem at all.
If it is unnecessary, stupid and immature, it's not.

Btw I don't see an ounce of Ni in you, which is pretty strange for a Ni-dom type. You should consider being a Si or Ti-dom.

Seriously, is tolerance and mutual understanding always the best solution ?

Yes, it is always the best solution. Other solutions are only acceptable if there is no place for mutual understanding.

 

[Craft]

^

I disagree in that perhaps one can find outright murder and brutality without diplomacy an effective way to conquer. Is this another matter of preference?

 

[Litvyak]

I disagree in that perhaps one can find outright murder and brutality without diplomacy an effective way to conquer.

Why would you want to conquer anything? Even the greatest empires crumble. Integration and peace is desirable to achieve a long-lasting status quo in which research and development is easier and more efficient, which leads us closer to the greatest quest of humanity, exploring life as it is.

 

[FDG]

Why would you want to conquer anything? Even the greatest empires crumble. Integration and peace is desirable to achieve a long-lasting status quo in which research and development is easier and more efficient, which leads us closer to the greatest quest of humanity, exploring life as it is.

Yeah. The Roman Empire (I have to be biased, I'm sorry ) basically let its provinces do what the hell they wanted, provided they paid taxes to fund eating & orgies in Rome. That's the spirit.

 

[FDG]

I dont think that view is nuanced enough. What does "weak" mean in this context? Basically it just means "not the majority / mainstream".

I am suprised that you claim to be an opponent of "Democracy" yet you would allow the majority faction within society to impose their will on all the rest.

Also would eliminating "undesirables" promote "evolution"? That would only be so if humans could determine, in advance how a certain trait will be advantageous in the evolutionary process. However evolution is the very essence of trial and error, meaning you only know if something works after it has been tested against reality. That means it is vital to test as many combinations as possible, and never stop.

Evolution happens because a lot of traits / individuals are both competing and cooperating with each other, often "the weak" find ways to cooperate and synergize their traits to overwhelm "the strong".

Evolution of human societies is somewhat different from biological evolution because conscious thought enters the picture. However it still makes sense to let various factions /ways of living exist side by side to test many different traits and ways of doing things, and if some part of some group's behaviour looks like it could offer an advantage to the greater whole of society, the mainstream can adopt it.

So in essence, by allowing tolerance, society has the ability to run many different ways of doing things, each only by a few people in kind of a laboratory environment, all parallel to each other. This greatly enhances the number of combinations that can be checked against reality within a fixed timeframe. If you had mainstream society set all the rules and supress individual expression you would instead stiffle the evolutionary process, leading to stagnation, loss of dynamism and eventually, extinction.

You can think of a tolerant society as a multi-threaded, multi-user OS of humankind, while an intolerant one represents a single-user, single-threaded one. See, you are DOS, I am Unix. You succumbed to evolution in ca. 1988, and I am still alive and thriving, simply because I can process so much more information within the same time.

Great points, I agree 100%

 

[miss fortune]

Sure looking at the future seems like a fine and nice approach theoretically, but it's the present that we live in, the present that has to take place so that a future will occur... we live in a series of "the present"s, we never live in the future :rolli:

I agree with gromit on the individual basis- and society is made up of individuals, not of concrete "groups"... if we approach that which is different with an open mind and some warmth we often can learn things and grow, not just as individuals, but as a society in general as well.

There are racists in this country who would be happy to get rid of people from other races and make the US a white Christian's haven- but what would we miss out on if we took that intolerant approach? We'd lose a large portion of the workforce, we would lose a good number of the country's intellectuals, artists, musicians, athletes and the basic every day people who keep things running smoothly... we'd lose a good portion of the heart and soul of the country if we cut out those who were different. Sure, it might make things run more smoothly to some, from a theoretical viewpoint... we wouldn't have racial violence, for instance, or debates on affirmative action, but what sort of nut job would trade that for a society that didn't work?

When a country is at war against someone (and they tend to wage war against what the view as "different and undesirable") all of the country's resources, both financial and intellectual, tend to get tied up in that effort instead of the effort of making things better for those of us who actually live in the country- distractions of hating those who are "different" are just a good tool to make us forget that our country doesn't seem to care about our day to day lives Hating what is different is always a great way to distract people from what's going on at home... Intolerance has a high cost, both financially and societally

And there's always the point that to someone else YOU'RE the outsider who is different- and I'd rather live a life where I can pour my resources into making life more pleasant, advancing knowlege and loving my neighbors instead of going all Stone Age and fighting with everyone who's different from me! The plowshare approach- learning how to grow better food, build better houses, learn more things that can benefit me and everyone else seems much wiser than the sword approach of just fighting and pouring your energy into that- how does that make life worth living?

Tolerance is really the more evolved approach to humanity- appreciate that which is unlike you so that you can learn even more, and knowlege really IS a form of power!

 

[phoenix13]

Tolerance is about letting people live without trying to make them just like you. Its purpose is to make peaceful cohabitation with multiple cultures possible.

Tolerance is not the same as respect or acceptance. It doesn't mean we have to engage other people or approve of them... just that we let them be.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Well I was I waiting for more replys but I will bite.

Growing up in a country with a history of 500 years of oppression, wars and tragedies, dictatoships, tartars, turks, austrians, germans and commies, holocaust, diversification, underdevelopment, corruption, premature welfare state and a philosophy of constant pessimism had no significant consequences on my mental health.

Well it happens that yours and my history are technically the same history.
However far past has nothing to do with this. I am simply using this recent war as a example since this is where I leard that it is possible too kill large number of people and get away with it. Plus there is really not that much of a dirrerence on the long run if that happen somewhere. What is a logical problem in my eyes.

The croatian part of the balkan wars is long over, you have a beautiful mediterranean coast and a decent economy, especially compared to others in the region. I suggest you stop blaming others - you seem to have a Si-like fixation on the past for no apparent reason. If you have problems, solve them.

1. That is not really true. The shooting is over but you can't live a single day without hearing something about it. Especially if you watch TV. (what I stoped doing long ago) . Basicly the main thing that inspired me to make this thread is unability of my environment to get over the past. I mean the best way to slove my problems is to isolate myself or start choping heads off. So I choose isolation. But with time I got bored so I got out and now I have the same problem all over again.


2. With current rate of devastation that coast will be history by 2030. I mean if 10000 people builds their houses for weekend leasure on one location on that coast outside the law then all those bouldings are technically illegal.
So when the goverment tries to destroy those houses in hope of preserving the coast it is considered evil. While I tend think that the goverment should play its cards 100% antitolerent when it comes to this. Since that is the only way to preserve the coast on the long run. If nothing this should be done because tourism is the only thing profitable in the country. Seriously we have entire illegal settlement on our coast.


3. We don't have economy at all. Since only 20% of the population are working in private sector. (but this is irrelevant for the thread)

This is not a 'logical' approach, it is one-dimensional and shortsighted. You can't just "destroy" a minority even if we disregard the current international regulations which you deem "unnecessary". It is physically impossible, and sets up a chain reaction of vendettas and unnecessary social ruptures tearing your society apart. The most "efficient" systematic approach to destroy a minority was the Endlösung. Did they succeed? Don't think so. On the other hand, Israel was formed three years later by a new and energetic generation desperate to overcome the disaster.

Look the above. Beautiful example of how tolerance is causing a major problem on the long run. (just saying)
And yes something like this can tear a society apart that was never the question really. That is why I said in my first post that it is pointless to go complety antitolerant against everything. However this thread is about radical examples when common wisdom is useless of even dangerous.

Well, no. You just seem to be incapable of seeing through the whole process since it is not developing rapidly enough. The Lisboa Treaty, for example, is a huge step in the development of the European Union. I was skeptical before, but now I think political integration is achievable through hard work, opt-outs and constant debates. There are many things hindering the process, but your claim is ridiculous on many levels. The NATO is working efficiently, and other supranational entities are about to fully emerge in world politics, like the African Union.

All of this is true and I can see it quite well and I actually support it from the start. However to me nothing of this makes a real change. Basicly you still have almost identical concepts just on a greater scale.

O___o

It will change the status quo, yes. Destroy it? WTH?

Well I said more about this in another thread long ago. I mean there are good odds that once humanity startes to expand through out the galaxy that the current way of how we do politics will be obsolete. Same works if we merge with our technology. In my opinion tecnology > politics on the long run.
This is all I was saying.

There are no 100% different views, which can be derived from human nature. Saying there's nothing common in our thinking is false simply because different views are based on the thought processes of the same species, even in a worst-case scenario in which our core values differ, we can still find common grounds hidden deeply in human psyche.


If peace and stability with 100 million people is achievable, why would you want to destroy 30 million for an easier yet less desirable solution?
Give a little more time to humanity. We're still so young and stupid.

I haven't calculated in "we are all humans variable" since it is obvious this is the case. Anyway I don't consider 30 million people a minority in this case.
I am talking about scales of few thousand in a population of a 100 million.
That is why I said that it is possible to take them out without too big consequences.


If you wish I can explain to you why humanity and world as we know it probably don't have a long term future. It will take time but I am willing to do it. (what is basicly answer to the rest of your post)

 

[Virtual ghost]

Sure looking at the future seems like a fine and nice approach theoretically, but it's the present that we live in, the present that has to take place so that a future will occur... we live in a series of "the present"s, we never live in the future :rolli:

I agree with gromit on the individual basis- and society is made up of individuals, not of concrete "groups"... if we approach that which is different with an open mind and some warmth we often can learn things and grow, not just as individuals, but as a society in general as well.

There are racists in this country who would be happy to get rid of people from other races and make the US a white Christian's haven- but what would we miss out on if we took that intolerant approach? We'd lose a large portion of the workforce, we would lose a good number of the country's intellectuals, artists, musicians, athletes and the basic every day people who keep things running smoothly... we'd lose a good portion of the heart and soul of the country if we cut out those who were different. Sure, it might make things run more smoothly to some, from a theoretical viewpoint... we wouldn't have racial violence, for instance, or debates on affirmative action, but what sort of nut job would trade that for a society that didn't work?

When a country is at war against someone (and they tend to wage war against what the view as "different and undesirable") all of the country's resources, both financial and intellectual, tend to get tied up in that effort instead of the effort of making things better for those of us who actually live in the country- distractions of hating those who are "different" are just a good tool to make us forget that our country doesn't seem to care about our day to day lives Hating what is different is always a great way to distract people from what's going on at home... Intolerance has a high cost, both financially and societally

And there's always the point that to someone else YOU'RE the outsider who is different- and I'd rather live a life where I can pour my resources into making life more pleasant, advancing knowlege and loving my neighbors instead of going all Stone Age and fighting with everyone who's different from me! The plowshare approach- learning how to grow better food, build better houses, learn more things that can benefit me and everyone else seems much wiser than the sword approach of just fighting and pouring your energy into that- how does that make life worth living?

Tolerance is really the more evolved approach to humanity- appreciate that which is unlike you so that you can learn even more, and knowlege really IS a form of power!

Ok, but why don't you get rid of them ? (just asking)