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Answering intolerance with intolerance doesn’t work. [1]

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Date: 2023-08-23  

Before I start, I want to be clear — I am not talking about mockery or even being insulting. Schadenfreude is a legitimate thing people feel, and when someone in a position of power does something foolish or boneheaded, raking them over the coals can often be an effective means to dissuade them from doing it again in the future.

Instead, I am talking about the belief that being intolerant towards the intolerant is effective at combatting them. It is not, and never has been, because intolerance does not accomplish anything in and of itself. It can only work if paired with action that suppresses the targets of intolerance.

For example, the former Confederacy was able to act on its intolerance towards freed slaves by enacting (unconstitutional) legal restrictions on them and their descendants, paired with vigilante terror tactics to intimidate them into accepting those restrictions. Other countries have done it via different means, but ultimately they all come from a group in power using political, social, or economic means to act on their intolerance.

And that’s really the point, and the problem. When you become intolerant towards something, you act to control or suppress it. This is a basic part of human nature; for example, most people are not tolerant of things like bedbugs or lice (with good reason), so they label them “pests” or “vermin” and kill them en masse. Historically, we have done the same thing with out-groups of people; we stop seeing them as people who we can live with, and start seeing them as monsters we must suppress or kill.

It doesn’t matter how immune we think we are to this tendency, because nobody is. Circumstances can and will push us into doing the unthinkable over time, as long as we just react instead of thinking. We can resist it and remain the way we want to be, but it requires us to consciously decide to be that way, then put in continuous effort to remain that way.

To slightly paraphrase what Aristotle said in Nicomachean Ethics, “virtues are formed in us by our actions”. If we behave intolerantly towards those who are habitually intolerant, we are all too likely to become habitually intolerant ourselves. It does not matter how pure our intentions are, or how noble our goals are; what we do is how we will be known.

And all too often our pure intentions and noble goals fall by the wayside, trampled by what we did and how we therefore are known.

I am not writing this to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. It’s your decision and your responsibility. I am writing this because I want you to think about what you want to do, and therefore how you want to be known. If you don’t think about it, then circumstances — and other people — will decide for you.

If you let people you hate push you into acting like they do, then they come out ahead because they have made you more like them. That’s how hate spreads. That is what we must fight and win against.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/23/2189180/-Answering-intolerance-with-intolerance-doesn-t-work

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