So I am a part of the LGBTQ community and work in a big city in middle europe. A lot of my coworkers are religios and have a foreign background. They are mostly very nationalist and homo-/transphobic. I hate them for their blind hate and bigotry, which wont change. I have realised, that I have become a bit bigotred towards people like them in the last few months, which is, even tho my biases often revealed to be true, just unfair to them. How could I stop that?
It’s not a paradox, it’s a social contract. Tolerance is only deserved by those who are tolerant themselves.
In philosophy, “paradox” often doesn’t mean that something really is self-contradictory, but rather that it seems self-contradictory. There are what Quine called “veridical paradoxes” which seem at first to be contradictions but actually turn out to be true but non-obvious. That’s the case for a lot of “paradoxes” arising from math, for example the birthday paradox.
(In any event, “deserve” is much more complicated than “paradox”!)
It is a paradox because there’s no objective, universal definition of tolerance. It’s literally impossible to be tolerant of everything. So you’re left with different forms of what intolerance people deem acceptable.
People make the same mistake about bigotry. It’s impossible not to be a bigot. You just don’t want to be the wrong kind of bigot. Now if only we could all agree on exactly what that was.
The “paradox” here is that by being tolerant of intolerance, we are actually decreasing the overall level of tolerance when normally we’d expect tolerant behaviors to increase tolerance.
Compare it to the “death wave.” When someone stops in a multi lane intersection to allow someone to cross in debt of them, the pedestrian/vehicle can’t see around the stopped vehicle and this can result in them being hit by a motorist in the adjacent lane. It feels like you’re being safe and considerate, but you’re actually putting the other person in more danger than if you had simply followed the right of way. It happens often enough that a name has been coined for the phenomenon.
Tolerating hate increases hate, not tolerance. Tolerating hate in the extreme decreases tolerance not only relative to the hate, but because once hate takes over they eliminate tolerance (see Florida).
The word paradox has too many meanings, alas. I like jan Misali’s explanation of the word: there are five definitions of paradox. https://youtu.be/ppX7Qjbe6BM?si=Lnkao0t0qFLi9tjj
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