A Tolerant Person

 A Tolerant Person

Tolerate does not mean liking. To tolerate someone means to endure them. To tolerate is merely a negative act of decency. A person who is on friendly terms with all sorts of people has a tolerant personality who makes no distinctions of race, creed, social class, sex orientation, or gender. Such a person not only endures but approves of other people! Not to mention, also follows the law! Regardless of the groups to which others belong, the tolerant person expresses a friendly and trustful attitude. The tolerant person is still critical but not in dread of racial or ethnic differences, or different sexual orientations, or differences in social power. The tolerant person is permissive and lacks the threat orientation found in prejudiced types, delinquents, bad neighbors and hotheaded siblings!

Marcuse 1969 ‘Repressive Tolerance,’

“Tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled.”

If the rulers enforce capital punishment and permit deadly force, what do you expect from the unsublimated?

Marcuse, “The idea of tolerance implies the necessity to become illegitimate if and when the established legitimacy prevents and counteracts the development of dissent.”

Marcuse advocated a great refusal of all modes of domination and repression, not all social norms. Marcuse recognized that new forms of social control produced one-dimensional people who preferred consumption for false needs and were conditioned by advertising - were uncritical of mass media.

Excerpt from Karl Mannheim 1940 “Man and Society,”

‘Tolerance does not mean tolerating the intolerant. Democracy ought to do away with substantial irrationality, retaining merely those customs which facilitate the smooth working of social relations.’

5 years before Popper’s Open Society.

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. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.” Karl Popper, 'The Open Society and Its Enemies' (note 4 to chapter 7).

Tolerance was supposed to be acceptance, but tolerance became repressive as it was practiced by separatism and shunning.