I think you have it backwards, the paradox of tolerance is the idea that we must be intolerant towards the intolerant, rather than showing tolerance freely to even those that wish us harm. It is seemingly a paradox because it says that to spread tolerance we have to actually be intolerant towards a specific group.
The person who made this is either a troll or a fascist, and to me it doesn’t really matter which. Poisoning the meanings of words and theories is an old, old fascist trick and that’s all that’s happening here.
And that "paradox" boils down to the intolerant saw of "you're not tolerant if you're not tolerant of intolerance"
It's a paradox b/c it's not really a paradox, but it seems like one, when couched disingenuously.
But it's like freedom. Can you really believe in freedom if you believe in law and punishment?* But can you truly be free with criminals running amok? So to have freedom, you must restrict freedom of those who would take away your freedom.
A paradox is a seemingly contradictory statement which is actually not a contradiction if you look closely. That’s why it’s named like this. Being intolerant towards fascists and other intolerant groups is actually a way to promote tolerance, it’s a tolerant act.
The paradox of tolerance isn’t a paradox. This meme’s body says “Tolerance is not a moral precept - Yonatan Zunger”, which essentially means that tolerance isn’t a fundamental moral belief, it springs forth from other beliefs and because of that is not absolute. The meme itself is saying that arguments that use the paradox of tolerance are just a proxy, that what the person using the argument is trying to argue for is that people should be ok with their bigotry. How I personally conceive of tolerance is that it’s a social contract, where if one side chooses to break the contract then the other side no longer has to obey it either.
My take is that instead of being intolerant of intolerance (the paradox), they want to be an edge lord sack o' shit and be intolerant of things other than intolerance. "To be cool."
OK, the Paradox of Tolerance is a Karl Popper social theory about how society should feel about its subgroups, and made recently famous again in a comic, although I don’t think the comic context is relevant to this meme.
The basic idea is that if we tolerate absolutely every subgroup, then we are logically also tolerating the existence of fascists and other types of subgroups that want or promote intolerance. If one of these groups (let’s say, Nazis) is tolerated by society, it may gain control–indeed, to Popper, this is inevitable–and society becomes intolerant again. So paradoxically, tolerating everything led to the collapse of tolerance itself.
His remedy is that we must not tolerate the intolerant, we must extinguish groups like that through various means. To be clear, Popper is NOT saying we must kill or commit violence against the members of those groups, just that we must make sure the group structure itself is dismantled as it’s being built in every case. And here we get to the rather terrible point being made by the meme. “Minorities”, as the meme puts it, would be the Nazi group from the earlier example, because their viewpoint is a minority. And Popper isn’t promoting violence against them, unless you consider the enforcement of laws to be inherently violent. (A valid point of view, but very far from what the meme is suggesting.)
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