The Myth That Is Tolerance
How do you tolerate the intolerable? That is the million dollar question.
What I hear on a daily basis is that we all need to be tolerant of each other regardless of how wrong or offensive we feel some action or idea might be. Unfortunately what is meant by this daily barrage tolerant-speak is that people with conservation views and principles are expected to be tolerant of those who insist on making up the rules as they go along to suit their own personal interest. It also means that those of us with conservative views should hold absolutely no expectation of reciprocation of tolerant attitude.
We are living in a time when the word tolerance has become the catch all for every action and idea one group wants to inflict upon another. Liberals have constantly touted the social benefits of tolerance to the point where the word itself has lost its intended definition and in doing so has also lost any hope of achieving its purported inevitable outcome.
The concept of social salvation through the ever-saving qualities of tolerance has been forced into the waffling public consciousness for so long that the definition has somehow morphed into the mistaken assumption of acceptance. No two concepts could be farther apart than tolerance and acceptance. Acceptance requires action. Tolerance requires inaction.
Tolerance does not beget the latest nebulous concept of “Change” that has swept across the country. In fact it has the exact opposite effect. It seems only fitting that the candidate who campaigned on the mantra of “Change” would also be the one lecturing on the benefits of “Tolerance”. It shows how hollow the rhetoric is. I am either tolerant of something or I am looking to change it. It can’t be both as the two concepts are mutually exclusive of each other.
Acceptance requires change in attitude. Tolerance requires restraint. If anything is to change it requires first an acceptance that the change being proposed is the more beneficial than tolerance of whatever currently exists. That acceptance comes by the careful examination of all the aspects that change entails. Acceptance is based in reality and truth and sometimes it is only after trying and failing at every other option that we are willing to accept. Reality brings acceptance, the lack of reality requires tolerance. Any of us, regardless of how stubborn we want to be, cannot overcome reality. Even if we deny its existence, eventually reality always wins.
Conversely, tolerance is a cheap ploy used by those who are trying to justify the unjustifiable. It requires a complete disregard of reality by burying those basic instincts of right and wrong or what is real and what is an illusion. That’s why tolerance is always a one way street. It is only proposed that a conservative viewpoint tolerate the liberal viewpoint because the liberal view has no tolerance and more importantly is unable to provide a reasonably convincing argument to evoke acceptance.
Politicians even try to legislate tolerance, which is as silly as trying to legislate good weather. Regardless of the issue or how unacceptable we find the activity we are told we must be tolerant. From same sex marriage to the murder of the unborn to the reverse discrimination of supposed affirmative action to gun control to the complete abandonment of personal responsibility, conservatives are told we must be tolerant for the greater good. But no permanent good can come from tolerance because tolerance is not based in reality.
Tolerance is attainable in small doses for relatively unimportant situations. But when tolerance is proposed as a solution for long term or far-reaching problems it can only lead to increased pressure and resentment which will eventually create a greater crisis and more profoundly negative outcome once that pesky reality comes into play.
Listen carefully to the liberal use of the concept of tolerance. It is usually attached to a viewpoint that has no basis in reality and is completely counterintuitive. The only hope for the survival of such viewpoints is mandated acquiescence through the faulty and dangerous notion of tolerance. The graveyard is full of those that tolerated pain. They were unwilling to accept the reality that some underlying issue was causing their pain and so by tolerating it signed their own death sentence.
It happens with people. It happens with cultures. And it happens with entire countries.
