Dear Friends,
It seems to me… the left has become despotically intolerant. Progressives cannot be reasoned with, acting like children, they demand that we not only tolerate outright evil… but pay for it as well! The progressive faction today is more intolerant than the Nazis were. Imagine how intolerant someone must be, to accost a family with children in a restaurant, because of politics?! How close minded to demand the silencing of someone because you don’t want others to hear the message?! Would you ever go to someone’s house and scream at a woman cowering inside, that you are going to rape and kill her… because she has a different idea of the role and scope of government? These actions are those of people who have had a psychotic break with reality. They are not the actions of rational human beings.
Civilization requires as a prerequisite, tolerance. Intolerant civilizations exist, but are uniformly poor, oppressed and hungry. History cannot be denied in this. The industrial revolution could not have happened under anything other than an Enlightened society, economy and people. Only where people are allowed to follow their dreams and ambitions, without regulation from busybodies, can civilization advance. Even Islam had a golden age of tolerance. Short lived as it was, when the intolerant came back to power, it was over. For a civilization to be healthy, prosperous, and safe, it must also be tolerant. The Enlightenment was all about tolerance blended with healthy skepticism. Intolerance, as progressives exploit, can only end our time of prosperity, health and safety.
There is a saying, the intolerant win. Take for example, you are throwing a party, there’s a vegan coming and three meat eaters. You will have a vegan option for her and maybe everyone will have to eat vegan. Because the meat eaters can eat vegan, but the vegan will not eat meat. The intolerant wins. This is true to a point. However, when people are seen as intolerant and unreasonable, they will be ostracized. That is the limiting factor for intolerance. Just as Clausewitz said there is a limiting factor on how violent war can get, and was proven correct by the Versailles Treaty, intolerance has a limit as well. That limit is, the tolerance of the majority for irrational intolerance. Once that limit is reached, the intolerant will be ostracized, for the egoists they are.
When a tolerant civilization becomes so tolerant, it tolerates intolerance, that civilization is on it’s way out. Rational tolerance is for ideas, people, innovation and change. Irrational tolerance is for violence, censorship, fear or oppression to address past oppression. Tolerance of such things can only lead to an intolerant society. That follows like water from a spigot. Civilization itself is jeopardized when an intolerant faction uses violence to enforce it’s intolerance. Any faction that feels it must silence others with fear, riots and threats, is one that should be ostracized, else every faction must adopt violence and intolerance to stay in the game. For civilization to function, we need to be rationally tolerant, and ostracize the irrationally intolerant.
No honest broker could claim the left is tolerant of ideas, innovation or change. They would never accept what they demand others do. Can you imagine a progressive knuckling under to being silenced on a college campus? How often has that happened! The progressive movement has always been loudmouthed, hubristic, calculating and amoral, but now it has become intolerant as well. One could claim, the eugenics movement was a form of intolerance then as well, pointing to a deep, septic, congenital cavity in the heart of progressivism. Their intolerance has become so bad that it threatens even our very civilization! No civilization can withstand such extreme intolerance of itself, it’s institutions and it’s values… from within. In the end. We tolerate the left’s intolerance, at our peril.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
