If we accept the principle that intolerance is always wrong, then we find ourselves in a situation where we are expressing intolerant judgment of others who express views that we find to be insufficiently tolerant. Oddly, this can turn into such a witch hunt that the enforcers of absolute tolerance end up being every bit as authoritarian as the Nazis they're trying to root out. People who truly believe in absolute tolerance realize that their "live and let live" policy must be extended even to those whom they find to be intolerant.
Philosopher Karl Popper warned, though, that this exercise of absolute tolerance will, paradoxically, lead to a society in which intolerant people are given the freedom to spread intolerance.
...and thus we have the Social Justice Warriors, the self-appointed agents of the new Inquisition, who ferret out every trace of what they judge to be bigotry, and punish it with extreme prejudice. They make an exception for themselves because, as the radical adherents of most religions, they feel that their cause is inherently righteous, and therefore is afforded a special exemption.
I'm uncomfortable with the acceptance of this paradox, not just because it leads to a reign of terror, but because it's entirely unnecessary. A logical mind should not get comfortable with cognitive dissonance. When two mutually exclusive facts appear to be true at the same time, it's either because they're not actually mutually exclusive, or because at least one of them isn't as true as you thought it was. The tolerance paradox only appears to be paradoxical because it is misstated.
That is, the initial presumption--that tolerance is inherently virtuous--is wrong. Tolerance is not an absolute good. As with most things, too much is as bad as not enough.
The true virtue in what we've been calling "tolerance" was never tolerance in the first place. It's justice. Racism is wrong. Full stop. But the reason racism is wrong isn't because intolerance of any kind is evil. Racism is wrong because it judges the innocent to be guilty. It disregards the free will and agency of individuals and holds them collectively responsible for what others not under their control may have done.
So if a man of a particular ethnicity robs and kills people, I'm not wrong to hate him for it. He's doing evil things and should be stopped and condemned. We needn't feel guilty about thinking that or saying it out loud. He's bad. But if we then hate everyone of his ethnicity--people who didn't rob anyone and who had nothing to do with his robberies--that's wrong. The reason it's wrong isn't that it's always wrong to condemn people, nor that it's always wrong to condemn people of that ethnicity. The reason it's wrong is that it's wrong to condemn the innocent.
It's also not that it's inherently evil to make broad generalizations. Broad generalizations are fine, as long as they're accurate. If we agree that murdering children is wrong, for example, then we can confidently make the broad-brush statement that all murderers of children are evil. There aren't exceptions. I don't need to get to know each one of them personally and walk a mile in their shoes before I can claim that people who murder children are evil. I sure as hell don't need to be one of them before I can judge their actions to be evil.
The reason it's okay to make a generalized judgment against this group is because the grouping is defined by their evil action and not anything else. Let's say there's a group of people called the Blobbersnots who hail from the mountains of Lower Upstanistan, and some of the Blobbersnots murdered children. It would be wrong for us to say, based on those murders, that all the Blobbersnots are evil, because not all Blobbersnots have murdered children. Only some of them have. Hate the murdering, not the being a Blobbersnot. The mistake people make is to think that murdering children is an inherent part of being a Blobbersnot. But unless their culture mandates that all Blobbersnots must murder children as a rite of passage or whatever, it's not true. If murdering children isn't a cultural tradition or a religious teaching among the Blobbersnots, then there's no reason to judge them all guilty. There's nothing in the Blobbersnot genes that predestines all Blobbersnots to murder children.
Most racial (ethnic, religious, etc.) hatred--call it "othering"--is rooted in this tendency to make judgments based on assumptions about things that aren't true of all individuals in the group. The teaching of colorblindness in the 1960s-1980s was all about uncoupling this mental association between a person's status of "other" and the assumption that they're bad. Society was engaged in the process of unlearning prejudice and to judge people as individuals based on their individual actions and ideas. Under this value system, it would have been okay, for example, for me to hate you for supporting apartheid in South Africa, but not okay for me to hate you just for being a white South African because I assume that you must support apartheid. It's the practice and support of apartheid that's detestable, not your skin pigment or your nationality.
So you see, the thing we're hating is injustice, and people had to learn that just being born into a group doesn't automatically make you guilty of committing injustices. It's difficult to believe that an entire population could have been that simple-minded over something that seems so obvious today, but I saw it. I'm not old enough to have seen segregation (at least not in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where I grew up), but all the adults I knew when I was a child had lived through it, and I got to see their thought processes up close. I listened to their stories and consumed their media. The law had progressed, but the attitudes were still there. Stereotypes persisted. People openly (for a while) made jokes about this or that ethnic group based on the idea that certain characteristics could be assumed to be true of all members of that group.
When we hear those today, we feel disgust. It's repugnant now to attribute unflattering behaviors to a group based on anything other than their behavior. That is, unless the target is one of the groups that the audience still considers to be deserving of scorn. So, straight, white, conservative, Christian males if you're a liberal. If you're a conservative, there are a whole lot more targets you find acceptable--liberals, vegans, gays, Muslims, environmentalists, immigrants, people with colorful hair or any other sort of unorthodox appearance, people in family or relationship structures other than monogamous, nuclear families, artists, academics, the poor, bicyclists, soccer fans, people who are afraid of guns, cat lovers, anyone who eats sushi, anyone who doesn't worship the U.S. flag or idolize the military, etc. (Incidentally, conservatives, that's why you have the reputation as being the bigoted ones, and why liberals laugh at you when you say that they're the real racists based solely on the fact that Republican Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery 160 years ago.)
Incidentally, if you'll allow me a brief aside, I often find these days that American conservatives hold the right position for the wrong reasons. This--the idea that American liberals (let's just say "Democrats" since that's who they're always targeting with these statements) are "the real racists"--is one such position. That is, they're right, but not for the reasons they think they are. I say this because, by and large, most American conservatives alive today have embraced colorblindness to at least some extent. Observe the prevalence of spokespeople for the right who don't fit the mold of straight, white, Christian male. They're valued, in part, because they don't fit the mold, because they're living proof that what conservatives value are ideas that can be held by people regardless of their ancestry, and because they put lie to the claim that conservatives are racists.
Liberals, on the other hand, particularly of the "woke" variety, are very racially motivated. They draw lines between races and judge people to be good or bad based on the color of their skin, with white people being the devils and everyone else being the angels. They strenuously reject colorblindness and feel it's right to judge white people as all being undeserving oppressors. It's racist, but as with the tolerance paradox, they make an exception for what they feel is a righteous cause. They aren't truly against racism. They're against racism against people of color. They think it's virtuous to be prejudiced against whites. So while some conservatives still have some racial prejudices, they're actively trying to shed the image that they do, while liberals are fully embracing their own hatred of whites and making broad assumptions about the victimhood and powerlessness of whole races of people based solely on their race. It's ugly, and they need to own up to it before pointing any more fingers at conservatives.
End of digression. It wasn't all that much of a digression, really, as it brought me back around to the point I wanted to make anyway, which is that for all the Social Justice Warriors' posturing about how they won't tolerate intolerance, much of what they're labeling "intolerance" isn't any such thing. It's the opposite. It's accepting that people are self-governing individuals, responsible for their own choices and actions. It's the conviction that each individual ought to be held accountable for what they do as an individual, and not be given a pass or a condemnation because of their membership in some genetic group.
I've been avoiding specific, real-life examples because they tend to be triggering and divisive in such a way that they cause people's rational faculties to shut down, and they react with hostility, completely missing whatever point I was trying to make. So let's return to the Blobbersnots. In America, the Blobbersnots are a minority who carry the nasty reputation of being a culture that murders children. Predictably, the conservatives hate them for the simplistic old "othering" reasons. "They ain't like us! Kick 'em out!" But then the liberals react to that by acting as though the Blobbersnots are the good guys. And the part that I find infuriating is this thing they do today where, instead of making the argument that not all Blobbersnots murder children and that it's racist to assume that they do, the liberals instead are saying, "It's okay for Blobbersnots to murder children if they want to, and you're a bigot if you say they shouldn't!"
And that's a good example, albeit a hypothetical one, of what I mean by saying that liberals often hold the wrong positions, while conservatives often hold the right ones for the wrong reasons.
Before I go any further, I want to make clear that the child-murdering allegory is no veiled reference to abortion. I just needed something extreme enough that everyone can agree that it's bad, and we live in a time of such evil that it's hard to come up with an evil that won't have a faction defending it, so I reached to human instinct ("preserve the species") for an atrocity that so deeply offends our core nature that people across the political spectrum would agree that it's bad. The fact that I have to clarify this, though, for fear that it will be mistaken for a wedge issue that many liberals strongly defend, is a good enough demonstration of what I'm getting at here: liberals often defend evil. They might rationalize that it's about some noble ideal like tolerance, but it really arises from an overdeveloped sense of compassion that seeks to extend unjust mercy--to fail to stop evil and to forgive it instead of smiting it.
One of the best artistic representations of this I've seen is an episode of The Walking Dead called "The Grove" (season 4, episode 14). If you're unfamiliar with the series, it's set in a fictional, present-day America (Georgia and Virginia, mostly) in which all dead people turn into flesh-eating zombies unless their brain is destroyed. In this episode, a young girl of about 12 named Lizzie has decided that the zombies have been misjudged, and that they really just want to be our friends. She likes playing with the zombies (having them chase her) and thinks we'd all be much happier being zombies ourselves. To this end, she murders her little sister so that the little sister can become a zombie and "prove" to the adults that zombies aren't really so bad. That kind of crazy can't be fixed and is a danger to everyone, and so the heroine of the episode, Carol, who had assumed responsibility for caring for these two girls, tearfully executes the oblivious Lizzie, saying, "Look at the flowers, Lizzie," before shooting her in the back of the head.
Lizzie is the embodiment of absolute tolerance. She illustrates the danger of tolerating evil. The zombies want to eat us. Being nice to the zombies by letting them isn't virtuous, it's evil. But the current iteration of American liberalism ("Wokeness") has decided that dedication to niceness is more virtuous than dedication to justice, and so they meet evil with kindness. "Jayjay got shot while stabbing a policeman? That's sad. We should get rid of the police, so people like Jayjay won't get shot anymore when they stab people. Randall twisted his ankle running out of a jewelry store that he robbed? Then we should make it legal to rob stores so Randall won't have to run in fear anymore and risk hurting himself." They protect the guilty at the expense of the innocent. They're so wedded to the idea that all strong and capable people are the villains that they root for many of the real villains.
