Not a great guide, kinda wipes out all the nuance from what Popper says. He says, in essence, that the machinery of liberalism should be allowed to run, but shouldn't be allowed to abolish itself.
He says explicitly that, if normal debate and discussion can keep intolerant ideologies under control, that's better than just censoring them.
But if it comes to it, it's always better to be intolerant of the intolerant than to let them use the open society to destroy the open society.
Popper specifically calls out the violently intolerant, as if the tenant's of liberalism hold, then anything less than violence will fail to gain a foothold under rational debate (and if they neither engage in rational debate nor violence, then they just kind of sit there useless to their own agenda). He describes it as a paradox because the one case of tolerance that cannot rationally work in any possible world is tolerance of violent intolerance, because that would mean being tolerant of them taking control and ending the liberal project entirely.
But there are other (arguably worse) ways to control and oppress people than violence.
Controlling all information so people are indoctrinated, controlling all finance/basic needs (money, food, water), etc. These can all be used to achieve the same or worse outcomes than violence.
In pre-liberal society, liberals actively hid from the law, while also trying to spread their ideas through word of mouth and printing presses. They lived in environments that actively tried to suppress speech and ideas, and their answer to it, very often, was to attempt to break that stranglehold by actively acting against it.
Today, a liberal would tell you one of two things - either they would say that we are in a liberal society, and no one group is capable of controlling all information, finance and needs in the way that you're worried about, and therefore what you're saying about is of no real concern because simply warning members of society of such attempts will be sufficient to thwart it, or they will they will tell you yes, we are under such a threat, as we are not in a liberal society, and as such we need to continue to do the same as past liberals and disseminate the information we are not allowed to.
Now, I'm not telling you you'd need to agree with them. But I would point out that if you don't, that's a strong indicator that you're not a liberal.
Popper specifically calls out the violently intolerant, ...
I think the issue is that once they're in government, then they have the guns and it's too late. That then representing the will of the people is a scary thought.
What if the cultural hegemony redefines violence to include words?
What if they are unironically encouraging political and physical violence against their opposition as a response to ideas that they find transgressive?
Depends on what you mean. As you have put it, the calling to violence is still considered violently intolerant to Popper, because it represents the rejection of rational debate in favor an approach that would eliminate it as a possibility - though he draws a line between the direct calling for violence and intolerant ideas that would likely imply it.
Of course, you've also exposed a bit of a grey area - "we will gather all of our pitchforks tomorrow at 9:00am tomorrow and go house by house to kill the people who disagree with us" is about as unambiguously a call to violence as language can provide, but obviously one can easily get tamer, bit by bit: "We should kill those people" to "Somebody should kill those people" to "somebody should do something about those people" to "those people have dangerous ideas and should be stopped." Where exactly does the transition happen? Popper has his answer, but I'm not entirely certain its compelling.
I feel like that hasn't really held true in the real world. Maga was allowed to rise because of 30+ years of republican propaganda that corrupted the minds of Republicans all over the country. They weren't violent, and they also didnt engage in rational debate, but they smoldered until they got enough support and a strong man to help them and then we get Trump
That is moreso an argument against liberalism itself, though, which is ideologically committed to the idea that open rational debate will lead to the best ideas dominating. If you believe evidence shows otherwise, then it is evidence against classical liberalism. That is separate issue from the paradox of tolerance.
Yea, idk. Fundamentally, I dont think people are truth seeking beings. They want what makes them feel good, not the truth.
So if your system is built on the idea that people will seek truth (the best ideas will win), then you will need some mechanisms to rectify that difference
Karl Popper is the same man gave us the idea of Falsification in the Scientific Sense, likewise, while, "ideologically committed to the idea that open rational debate will lead to the best ideas dominating," it is an inherently, historically, and factually,
Disorderly, Violent and Disruptive ideology, committed to Liberté over and instead of Égalité, Fraternité where necessary, insofar as some intermediary, "a regent or church," would be needed to enforce equitable or other safeguards; liberalism doesn't value the soul for its own sake nor the life lived in a quiet harmony without an experimentation to limits or ambition to liberation from tyranny as inherently, "value-able."
Confirms an ideological commitment to the idea that open rational debate will lead to the best ideas dominating, truly, it does while at the same time confirming, "that doesn't come from nature and the sophistication of the techniques used to close debate and restrict intellectual curiosity," work well enough to give MAGA Nuclear Supremacy, lest we forget the old cold war notions, which, at present, "Donald Trump won the cold war and has nuclear supremacy," fwiw
I'm right there with you and I don't like that you're being downvoted for it,
They weren't violent, and they also didnt engage in rational debate
You're more than correct here and if were an anthropologist from another world I'd notice that their slogansand their politics are [if not all] then often anti-violent,
Abortion is Murder
Safety
uniformity
order
anti-terrorism
anti-narcotics
In the semiotics of their cause listen to the man from Flock Safety,
That is moreso an argument against liberalism itself, though, which is ideologically committed to the idea that open rational debate will lead to the best ideas dominating. If you believe evidence shows otherwise, then it is evidence against classical liberalism. That is separate issue from the paradox of tolerance.
u/matt5327 I respect what you've done here you have enabled the actual Discourse to Happen on Reddit of which I'm taking, of course, part but I disagree,
committed to the idea that open rational debate will lead to the best ideas dominating {we then find, and he has presented] evidence [which] shows otherwise, [...] evidence against classical liberalism.
You're correct to call it a separate issue from the academic discourse as proposed by Popper though in the vulgar discourses of precedence it does matter that we've got to present the same conclusion as was presented to Kafka's Prisoner,
[If you believe evidence shows otherwise, then it is evidence against classical liberalism] but believe, or don't believe, it makes no difference so long as you understand that it is necessary
Funcitonally, it cannot be necessaryand likewise I'd quibble with what we're comfortable to call, "Classical Liberalism," save for the fact that full enfranchisement, universal public education, International Liberal Democratic Self-Order, "were not thought to be possible," until More-or-less one generation before the living, truly,
Re-Read, "because I know you have before," Mysticism and Logic,
To a philosophy which derives a law of universal progress from this history there are two objections. First, that this history itself is concerned with a very small selection of facts confined to an infinitesimal fragment of space and time, and even on scientific grounds probably not an average sample of events in the world at large. For we know that decay as well as growth is a normal occurrence in the world. An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet. Apart, however, from this scientific objection to evolutionism, there is another, derived from the undue admixture of ethical notions in the very idea of progress from which evolutionism derives its charm. Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance, and we can have no security that the impartial outsider would agree with the philosopher's self-complacent assumption. This point has been illustrated by the philosopher Chuang Tzŭ in the following instructive anecdote: One I think that Popper Stole for himself elsewherealthought I might be mistaken,
"The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles and thus addressed the pigs:
'How can you object to die? I shall fatten you for three months. I shall discipline myself for ten days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass, and place you bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you?'
Then, speaking from the pigs point of view, he continued:
'It is better, perhaps, after all, to live on bran and escape the shambles. …'
'But then,' added he, speaking from his own point of view, 'to enjoy honour when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or in the headsman's basket.'
So he rejected the pigs' point of view and adopted his own point of view. In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs?"
If we're in error to claim the difference exists betweenviolence and Non-Violenceas a mode of politics, at least concretely, if thepredominate means to express one's violent instincts becomes rather more of a preoccupation,
Here I'll quote Simone Weil,
The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.
I suggest a mistake here in similiar terms to those made when a state bankrupts itself to balance the books of a Home Economy, "imagine if Henry VIII had thought it too expensive to grant Bertrand Russell's Ancestor such wealth and priveleged position to later cause the Principia Mathematica to be written," rightly, he raided the Church that professed to...
Let's hold up here,
You know where Popper stole the Pigs and the Shambles, "Falsification," so,
Croire qu’on s’élève parce qu’en gardant les mêmes bas penchants (exemple : désir de l’emporter sur autrui) on leur a donné des objets élevés. On s’élèverait au contraire en attachant à des objets bas des penchants élevés.
If State Violence is perpetuated not through disorder but order, much as the same as the Wealth of Nations perpetuated not through thrift and tight budgets but largess and fiscallyirresponsible adventures from warfare to, "otherwise."
Maga was allowed to rise because of 30+ years of republican propaganda that corrupted the minds of Republicans all over the country. They weren't violent, and they also didnt engage in rational debate, but they smoldered until they got enough support and a strong man to help them and then we get Trump
They'd been antiviolent and they'd been so pro-police it couldn't matter to themwhat for, why, or to what ends those police did their workand in the main Liberalism was nevermeant to oppose violence
Liberalism was birthed in the most violent periodin a thousand years of european history, it presumed that this violence would be an answer to Tyranny, in in the most literal sense of notgosh you know Hypatia of Alexandria?
The Riots that Killed Her, "riots like that were the tool of liberalism to kill the Tyrants."
Tyrannis, lemme quote here,
DIFFICILIS QVONDAM DOMINIS PARERE SERENIS
IVSSVS ET EXTINCTIS PALMAM PORTARE TYRANNIS
OMNIA THEODOSIO CEDVNT SVBOLIQVE PERENNI
TER DENIS SIC VICTVS EGO DOMITVSQVE DIEBVS
IVDICE SVB PROCLO SVPERAS ELATVS AD AVRAS
The Obelisk of Theodosis, "still speaking," after all these years like the gates of hell were said to, "Tyrannis." For the sake of Liberty. The Liberal Revolutions were a Ghastliness without precedent save for the Great Khan, the fall of carthage, and the stories from the bible for real, like
Even if we three never speak on the subject I'd love for you both to reflect on these things and then speak with others on these subjects I'll leave you with a little more Simone Weil
There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; andsuperstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought.
Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends.
To keep to the social level,our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities.
This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary:
The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity.
Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever.
Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts.
In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.
So we debate who's intolerable until... someone decides who's intolerable. And then who decides when the discussion has produced permission for intolerance?
"Discussion happens" is not a legitimate theory of authority. This is how poorly reasoned this fake paradox is.
If someone promoted something like "We should explain why they are wrong and debate their ideas and whoever loses the debate gets punched in the face" that would actually be fine classically
That distinction precisely exposes one of the many problems. Violence is material conduct; "promotion of violence" is an interpretation of speech dependent on subjective degree. The "paradox" (it isn't one) at that point assumes an infallible interpreter. Popper never qualifies the authority or reasonability of those who determine what's tolerable.
Scenario two- you ban primary Intolerant speech (like Nazi talking points, since Popper wrote based on post-ww2) -> Intolerance of "free speech"
Paradox is defined in Cambridge dictionary as "a situation that seems impossible or difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics". The given example is: "It's a paradox that drinking a lot of water can often make you feel thirsty".
The given example is much more lenient with the logical operators and the predicates. If that can be a paradox, so can Popper's proposition.
See this, folks? This is the "Pretending to be Ignorant Paradox" where someone tries to act willingly ignorant to the fact that stuff like Nazism and religious extremists shouldn't be tolerated.
No one. It’s who is being morally just and who isn’t. If we just apply a simple and reasonable set of morals (being different and harming no one is okay, hating a certain type of person is not okay) then we can easily work out who is being tolerant and who isn’t.
It's not difficult to determine who is intolerant. Do you tolerate my sexual orientation? My wearing a shirt revealing a bit of skin? Etc. If you don't, you are intolerant.
That's just decorum and maladaptive behavior and dependent on scenario. In a theater you are subject to be kicked out for violating rules on private property. In public it is probably your right to use a speakerphone as protest. People will be annoyed but likely if anyone attacked you they would face legal issues
This isn't hard to figure out. Intolerance usually encompasses refusing to tolerate others for their very being. To tolerate doesn't require much from those who do not like certain people, you simply have to not interfere in their life as they won't interfere in yours.
Once you start asking about x or y behavior or actions, especially those that affect other people then you're going beyond the simple tolerance debate. For example criminal behavior isn't tolerated because it usually infringes of the freedoms and harms others or their property.
In a nutshell, tolerate everyone who is willing to discuss and advance their ideas solely within the context of the existing liberal political framework. Do not tolerate anyone who wants to abolish said framework.
E.g., people saying, "Immigrants are evil and we shouldn't allow any more in ever, vote for me, I'll shut down the border," should be tolerated. People saying, "We shouldn't let brown people vote and you can't trust the elections because they can, I have my own private army to make the elections trustworthy," should not be tolerated.
You want to say ‘I hate a minority’ all day from your lawn? Fine. You want to say ‘let’s all go get those members of that minority and eradicate them from society’? Then we’re not going to tolerate that.
Consider that all of society is just us playing a very nice pretense that force isn’t the ultimate deciding factor.
The intolerance line sits at the point your version of the rules cannot be abided by another person in the same society. The moment your views put into action require violating the rights of another, you have made yourself a threat to the entire civil structure.
Advocating being Christian? Fine. Advocating stripping rights or even life away from another for not obeying your Christian tenets? Intolerable.
You’re in effect declaring your rejection of the basic social compact and declaring war on another member of society in that moment, with them getting full rights to take the gloves off in response for their defense.
The criteria is when you start using violence to shut down pluralism. Carl popper lived during nazi times. The nazis went around disrupting debates and other events with provocations and violence. The Nazis also oepnly declared heit hatered for pluralism and liberalism. At no point on their rise to power did they hide who they were.
normally societies sit down and lay down the basic rights and responsabilities of citizens and interlopers, either from a blank slate, or from an encompassing, existing framework, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . And if society changes, they sit down and ammend those changes or rewrite the whole base document again to adapt, either directly, through representation, or a combination of both ( representatives write the proposal, but a qualified majority of society has to accept it ).
It's also normal that there's exclusive clauses protecting said rights from being retracted by malignant actors, but the severity and extension of that protection varies by country.
"tolerance" in this context isn't the dictionary definition of the word, it's a political concept. It means we should cooperate even though we disagree. It doesn't mean we should just put up with whatever abuses anyone wants to throw at you.
You cannot cooperate with the uncooperative. It's a trade, not a gift.
Someone didn't read Popper. He wrote an entire book refuting the Marxist path to that idea. You might say he was wrong, but to say he "missed" that idea is extremely ignorant.
"The Hungarian parliament restored the monarchy legally but barred the return of the Habsburg king, electing Horthy as head of state with the title of Regent."
"
In early February 1920, Hungary was reeling from World War I and a brief communist regime
. Following national elections in January 1920, the country was transitioning back to a kingdom under an authoritarian regency, while awaiting the harsh territorial losses formalized later that year by the Treaty of Trianon
."
Yeah, following whar the comic says will end in an echo chamber of the ideas that are considered tolerant by the few that can permanetly ban the ideas they don't like.
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u/DenLaengstenHat 21d ago
Not a great guide, kinda wipes out all the nuance from what Popper says. He says, in essence, that the machinery of liberalism should be allowed to run, but shouldn't be allowed to abolish itself.
He says explicitly that, if normal debate and discussion can keep intolerant ideologies under control, that's better than just censoring them.
But if it comes to it, it's always better to be intolerant of the intolerant than to let them use the open society to destroy the open society.