ID: A scene from Legally Blonde of a conversation between Warner and Elle in the corridor at Harvard, in 4 panels:
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Warner asks “What happened to the tolerant left?”
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Elle replies, smiling “Who said we were tolerant?”
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Warner continues “I thought you were supposed to be tolerant of all beliefs!”
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Elle looks confused “Why would we tolerate bigotry, inequity, or oppression?”
I like this but I’m not even sure it’s such a paradox - if you are tolerating people who do not follow that social contract then can you call yourself a part of the tolerant group yourself? It is a necessary part of being tolerant to reject the intolerant.
It’s not a paradox because nobody says that absolutely anything anyone does is fine. There are always rules to acceptable behavior in society. The “paradox of tolerance” is a strawman.
I once heard a professor of physics tell us that paradoxes were just questions posed incorrectly (paraphrasing since we weren’t speaking English, sorry if I wrote it in a confusing way) and I’ve never stopped thinking about it that way
The liar’s paradox would beg to differ!
If one tolerates all actions other than those causing harm to non-consenting others (basically “adults can do whatever they want with themselves and with other consenting adults”) which is sort of the traditional maximum tolerance boundary, one will tolerate many practices which, whilst not amounting to causing harm to non-consenting others, do spread intolerance.
From where rises the Paradox that such choice of putting one’s boundary of Tolerance at the maximum level possible actually ends up in aggregate reducing Tolerance.
Making it a social contract reduces the boundaries of tolerance by the minimum amount possible that’s needed to just stop Tolerance from allowing the very tools of its destruction to work.
Under “social contract rules”, at a personal level those who are NOT tolerant of intolerance are, very strictly speaking, being less tolerant, but at a Systemic Level they are actually making there be more Tolerance in aggregate than if they had tolerated the intolerant.
PS: I actually work in Systems Design (amongst other things) and it’s actually quite common for certain ways of doing things which are perfect at the individual level will in aggregate cause systemic problems making the whole function worse, so the optimal choice for the whole is actually to use a less optimal individual choice. Thinking about it, I would say that pretty much all Tragedy Of The Commons situations are good examples of that kind of thing.
Mind you the actual tragedy that happened at the commons is that the rich fucking stole them.
Any “solution” to “protect” the Commons that involves private ownership of it is always meant to make somebody very wealthy from it.
The original Commons (things like pasture spaces with no owners and shared use by the community) were all stolen from the community and given owners already way back in Monarchic times (for example, via Inclosure Acts in England) and Capitalism is just a continuation of Monarchy were the reduction of choices for the riff-raff is a bit more disguised so that people think they are free and hence are more productive for the Owner Class.
I think there’s a subvariety of “paradox” which aren’t actually paradoxes, but we call them that because at some point, the name stuck