The paradox of tolerance was a favorite canard of the Left back when they were still pretending to be moral relativists. You still hear it sometimes from Gen Xers who didn’t get the updated Woke Cult rubrics.
According to philosopher Karl Popper, the paradox goes that a total commitment to tolerance would end up destroying tolerance since intolerant people would eventually take over through coercion or threats. Therefore, the tolerant are justified in making an exception for the intolerant.
The fault in Popper’s reasoning is his assumption that tolerance has absolute value which reasoned thought will inevitably discern. Therein lies the real paradox. If tolerance were an absolute good, justifying the suppression of intolerance wouldn’t require appeals to greater goods. Yet Popper does just that:
Less well known [than other paradoxes Popper discusses] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Note that Popper’s argument hinges on a fear of the intolerant resorting to violence. Asserting the right to suppress the intolerant “in the name of tolerance” is a fig leaf. His real justification rests on an appeal to public safety and order.
Just as making an idol of freedom is the fatal flaw of Liberalism, trying to absolutize tolerance is the error at the heart of Popper’s argument. Both freedom and tolerance are conditional goods. They are worth no more or less than the inherent value of the goods they grant access to. One can always ask, “Freedom to do what? Tolerance of what?”
Frequent readers of this blog know that the political Left has curdled into fanatical cult. Their quest for the license to indulge their personal preferences unmoored from any reference to the good succeeded, but at the cost of stripping all meaning from their lives.
It’s the Death Cultists who are destroying public order in the name of tolerance. This should surprise no one, since another way to think of absolutizing conditional goods is removing their limiting principles. Popper’s philosophy has led us to a place where failing to celebrate even the most dyscivic forms of personal expression is seen as tyrannical intolerance.
Just as worshiping the market has concentrated unimaginable wealth in a few hands, making idols of freedom and tolerance has vested the power to dictate which behavior should be celebrated and which suppressed in the Death Cult’s high priests. They wield this power through a number of still-emerging public rituals.
One of the Cult’s favorite rites was ginning up hate crime hoaxes. Every sacrament requires the proper form and matter, and the Death Cult’s rituals are no different. In this case, the form consisted of whipping the media into a frenzy over the matter–usually a noose or a backwards swastika left in a convenient spot.
Such liturgies define the Death Cult since they a) demonstrate that the Cultists know nothing about the normal people they despise and b) epitomize the kind of Charlotte’s Web thinking that drives most Cultists. They project as a rule, and since they delight in shoving their symbols in our faces, they solipsistically assume their enemies desire to do the same to them. Their delusion that all non-Cultists are KKK Nazis explains their choice of symbols. Note that they never plant crucifixes or icons at fake crime scenes.
Still, the Woke Cult’s public liturgies seemed insufficient to numb the pain of living lives devoid of meaning. You could tell by the way they popped antidepressants like candy and burned down cities.
A fascinating development in Death Cult doctrine and liturgy has unfolded over the past couple of years. Whereas before they relied on projecting their collective sins onto imaginary scapegoats in elaborate media morality plays and immolating their neighborhoods as burnt offerings to Diversity, a new Death Cult sacrament has been instituted by the high priests in white coats.
MacIntyre likens the vaccine to Leftist baptism, but in form and matter it’s closer to another sacrament of initiation–Holy Communion.
We see it in the vaccines’ relationship to another Death Cult sacrament, abortion. Previously, that highest of infernal rites could only be performed rarely, only by female cultists, and at relatively high cost in time, effort, and resources.
Now, everyone can partake in the fetid fruit of child sacrifice, easily, often, and for free.
As the Death Cult is a warped mirror image of Christianity, its rituals now reflect the similar shift from the Old Testament, whose sacraments were many, difficult, and exclusive, to those of the New Covenant, which are relatively few, simple, and open to all in full communion with the Church.
This aping of Christian practice has also facilitated Woke Cultists’ infiltration of the institutional Church. Like the cuckoo, prior generations of Cultists secreted their spawn within the Church, where they have hatched and grown into insatiable monsters that seek to push the true children of God out.
As is the besetting vice of their generation, the Boomers in charge of the hierarchy are blissfully unaware that the seemingly nice folks who’ve caused a sacramental crisis with appeals to charity and the greater good are in fact adherents of a parallel, hostile religion. Historically, it’s fallen to the laity to offer charitable correction to corrupt prelates.
Put another way, the USCCB gets 40 percent of its funding from the government. That seems like a lot until you consider that the faithful contribute the other 60 percent. The time is rapidly approaching, and may have arrived in some locales, when Catholics of good conscience must inform their bishops that they’ll not put one more cent in the collection basket till the shepherds give up serving Caesar and return to serving Christ.
Put yet another way, don’t give money to robbers in shepherds’ clothing who violate canon law and the Magisterium to deny innocent Christians access to the sacraments.
You don’t tolerate someone vandalizing your home every night–you either call the authorities or you confront them. Tolerance is literally about putting up with things that negatively affect you. It being a virtue is entirely situational.
So of course it has been enshrined as a modern secular commandment and a buzzword to be used at all times.
Just like everything in clown world, it’s just so tiresome.
Adhering to hard virtues would require submitting to an external standard outside one’s personal preferences. These people are defined by their inability to do that.
This probably comes as a surprise to no one but her profile indicates that she’s a mother. Says a lot that her vaccination day is the happiest day of her life.
It’s possible she considers carrying her child to term a moral failure, and getting the vaccine is a way to retroactively participate in child sacrifice. It’s the joy of the prodigal daughter absolved.
In the 2010s, a Protestant TV channel called Wretched posted a clip of a college soyboy who expressed his concerns with overpopulation. His message to women was literally, “You have to kill your babies.”
Did weak men drive women mad, as John C Wright believed?
Every single disorder that makes up Clown World only persists because men allow it.
Brian is correct.
https://twitter.com/freakyf1shguy/status/1440801460405501952
Oops, turns out that reply was to the wrong comment.
The number of likes aren’t very encouraging though
Only 6% of Americans don’t want children. That’s gives us a clue to how small a minority hard-core Death Cultists really are.
The problem is that white Christians have been conditioned to think that using the power of our majority status while we have it would be somehow immoral.
There are other tweets in response to the original that actually endorse the anti-child attitude, ex:
“Imagine thinking that woman can only have their happiest moments because of their children…..gross”
or (in response to someone saying that your children’s birth will top your list of greatest moments unless you hate your kids):
“For years they just eat and poop and cost money”
You’re on Twitter. Normal, sane people don’t use it regularly, or if they do they don’t last without getting banned. Remind yourself that you are looking at Crazy Leftist Central, not America.
Another flaw in Popper’s argument is that somehow, rational tolerance will be rationally indefensible. Near as I can tell that should never occur inside the system he seems to be working within.
Here’s another obvious problem. Popper elevates scientific thinking. We SHOULD act rationally and based on knowledge. We SHOULD NOT treat as proven something that cannot be disproven. We SHOULD be tolerant because tolerance is good – a proposition which cannot be disproven. In fact he sets his “violent defense of tolerance” criteria up in such a way that implicitly, if tolerance’ virtue is disproven, we respond with violence.
Anyway, anyone with better training and sleep schedule should feel free to critique or correct my logic here, but it seems to me that Popper overall ties Popper in knots.
Showing once again that there is no philosophy after the Scholastics.
I was pushed into getting vaccinated by my family who constantly worried that I wouldn’t be allowed to go back to work if I didn’t (we live in Ireland, which has different laws than America and has a government more clearly hostile to the Church and also more paranoid about lockdowns – we STILL haven’t completely opened up and won’t until mid October, IF they don’t change their minds). I wasn’t happy about it, but it was causing such great internal strife that I felt I didn’t have another reasonable choice. I hope that I’ve done the right thing.
You should have asked your family about the taste of America’s penis.
More seriously, the rights of a nation’s citizens mean nothing when it comes to stopping deadly pandemics. If the COVID vaccinations were so critical to keeping the human race from dying out, and if the vaccines were magic rituals that required every… single… person… on Earth to take them to keep even the vaccinated from dying, the authorities would simply hold you down to vaccinate you or shoot you. Yet despite your leaders’ threats of cutting you out of the economy, they ultimately give you a choice. I wonder why…
I couldn’t have been so rude to my parents. Arguing with them proved to be a waste of time; they believe the Mainstream news entirely, or at least they give that impression.
I do think that avoiding strife is a good aim, but I am not sure that getting vaccinated is an effective way to prevent it. In my experiences based on my own family I’ve noticed two things:
1.) Most people will eventually stop talking about the vaccine as long as you stop talking about it. If it gets bad saying “I’m sick of talking about this since this is all that’s on the news, all people at work talk about, etc.” often works. It also helps if you don’t make any statement about whether you are vaccinated or not and let them fill in the blanks as they want to (though obviously once that option is gone it’s gone.)
2.) The exceptions are mainly from relatives who will never get off your case. The type of people who, if you get vaccinated, will immediately say “have you looked into getting a booster” or “make sure you keep wearing your mask” or even change the topic to something like “don’t you think its horrible how the republicans are openly endorsing racism?”
So from what I’ve seen getting vaccinated or not does little in and of itself with the level of familial strife. What does contribute tremendously is what you talk about and how you talk about it. Your family might be different, of course.
All of you are focusing on the familial strife, but none of you are mentioning the endorsement of infanticide. When you line up for your shot, you don’t get to tell Pfizer, “I’m only taking this shot, because you created it with cancer cells that were harvested from an unborn child who was already killed in the 20th century.”
Instead of asking yourselves whether or not rejecting the shot is worth Mommy and Daddy accosting you, since the Lord already warned you that would happen, you should ask yourselves whether or not the unborn can be used to make medicines to prolong the lives of adults.
The American bishops certainly think so, but I call BS. Adam’s sin was not so great that we have to sacrifice our own children to survive a literal cold virus.
There’s no question that all of the vaccines materially cooperate with the grave evil of infanticide. In the case of someone who receives it now, particularly for free, the cooperation is pretty remote.
Still, even remote material cooperation in grave intrinsic evil is usually sinful. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s statement essentially said that taking the vaccine with the motive of protecting one’s health and others’ sufficiently mitigated that evil.
However, that statement was made in December of last year, before the vaccine’s effectiveness turned out to basically be a coin toss–like all previous coronavirus vaccines.
The CDF was reckoning with an effectiveness rate of 98%. Subsequent information calls for re-doing the moral calculus.
Cantu’s
Me too. I was under familal pressure and at the time my regional government was contemplating the vaccine passports, etc. I’m still put off that I complied but did so to avoid familal strife. I regarded that as more deleterious.
xavier
Only tangentially related, but has there been a mainstream song that attacks abortion? I realized that an anti-abortion message slips into many metal songs, with Slayer’s Silent Scream probably being the most prominent. But I can’t think of anything mainstream touching the topic.
Interestingly, I believe both Kanye West and Nicky Minaj (of the recent vaccine flap) both mention abortion in a negative fashion in a couple of songs. Also, I think the song ‘Freshmen’ by the Verve Pipe is about a girl who kills herself because of the grief of an abortion.
My wife tells that anti-abortion themes are actually pretty strong in rap and r&b, which makes a kind of sense, given how the abortion industry was birthed by a woman who wanted to eradicate black people. They may not *know* that but I’m sure a type of awareness of it has crept into their culture. How could it not?
Perhaps Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” fits the bill?
@Brian,
Well I’ve already gone and taken it now. Are you telling me that I’m in grave sin for doing something that, according to the information I could get, was morally tolerable, and which I was strongly pressured to do by those people to whom I owe a debt of obedience? An awful lot of this discussion, especially from D Cal, sounds like I’m being accused of apostasy for not having the guts to tell my parents, whom I live with and who support me, to go fuck themselves. I admit, some of this is probably my conscience prodding me, because I don’t feel proud of having done it, but what am I supposed to do now?
If you’re (literally) an adult, you should ask Brian for my email address. Have you ever wanted to see the American South?
I’ve heard it’s a nice place, but it’s far too hot. Besides, I am the homiest of homebodies – I don’t think I could handle moving to another town, much less another continent. And while I’d prefer not to air my personal circumstances any more publicly than I’ve already done so, they suggest to me that such an idea would end terribly.
Just remember that you’re among friends here. We want you to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, but we don’t want to paralyze you or make you give up. God will direct you if you pray for His wisdom.
And if you do stand up to your parents, definitely don’t use the language that I used. The mainstream culture probably stresses them out already.
The cooperation is rather remote, the goods resulting from it were at least believed to be substantial and outweighing the cooperation, your freedom was arguably reduced by your circumstances, and you were working with the best information available. Unless you did it in bad conscience–that is, believing that it was gravely sinful at the time and doing it anyway–I don’t think you have much to worry about.
Here is my take on things:
-The vaccines were created using cell lines from aborted fetuses. Some just in testing, others in production. Thus using them constitutes cooperation with evil.
-However, the level of cooperation is very remote and can be excused by other factors. In this case several clergy and theologians made a determination, early in the pandemic, that the risk of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of the vaccine made it justified to use, in spite of the cooperation.
-Since that point we have seen that the vaccines are much less effective than promised, especially over the long term, and to some extent COVID-19 is not as dangerous as predicted early in the pandemic. Both of these change the moral calculus so the determinations made earlier may no longer be valid.
-What does that mean now? It means that there is no “official” determination. You will need to use your own moral judgment to determine whether the cooperation is warranted. That does NOT mean that if you feel it is good then it is; you could be mistaken. But since there is no where else to turn for a complete discussion of both the pragmatic medical issues as well as the moral issues, you are effectively forced to make the determination yourself.
-While the morality of an action is not determined by your knowledge, your moral culpability is. If using the vaccine is illegitimate based on its origin and the pandemic cannot justify remote cooperation with its manufacture, then that is the case whether you know it or not. But if you honestly think it is 100% effective and necessary to stop a plague, then you might not be morally culpable for using it. All of this assumes that you make an honest effort to investigate the issue before making a decision.
-What makes this particularly complicated is that the aborted fetal cell lines are not the only consideration against the use of the vaccine. Other important considerations are its possible side effects, endorsing a dishonest propaganda campaign surrounding the vaccine, and endorsing a forced vaccination campaign and surrounding authoritarian measures. To complicate matters further still you might find a way to take the vaccine but oppose other problems (such as by getting vaccinated by refusing to reveal your vaccination status to your employer.)
-Put this all together, and the only people who are going to have a clue as to whether you sinned or not are you and your confessor.
-Supporting your family is important and part of honoring your parents is obeying their commands, when legitimate. But commands towards evil are not legitimate. For a more extreme example where it would be clear that a parent must be disobeyed (in your situation it is murkier) consider the example of a girl getting pregnant and being told by her parents to abort the child (we can’t waste money on it, having you give birth out of wedlock will ruin our reputation, etc.) She would be obligated to disobey her parents, and if she obeyed them and got an abortion she would be sinning. So before you can say whether or not it is right to listen to your parents you first need to determine if they are asking you to do something sinful.
-Beyond that, this is the first time you’ve phrased your situation in terms of obeying people whom you owe obedience. You initially talked about the matter in terms of being pushed into it and avoiding strife. That’s why I responded to you not in terms of morals but in terms of pragmatism, i.e. that you can get the vaccine but that decision probably won’t be the determining factor in ending strife in your family.
-It’s possible to refuse your parents without being an asshole about it or literally telling them to fuck themselves. You won’t be able to honestly assess the best course of action until you get it out of a false dichotomy.
-All that being said, you’re now vaccinated and can’t get unvaccinated. There are only two reasons to reflect on the matter: 1.) To determine if you have any guilt and 2.) so that, if you did make the wrong decision, you can act rightly in the future (and if you made the right decision, you can make sure you did it for the right reasons.)
Right. I apologise, I reacted emotionally and lashed out because I was disturbed by the thought that the thing I did by gritting my teeth might have been the wrong thing to do.
Apology accepted, though not required. I think everyone here understands the pressure you’re under and is looking out for your spiritual welfare.
It’s not my place to say whether anyone is in grave sin. Such matters are known only to God, the sinner, and if he seeks the sacrament, his confessor.
What I did was go through the moral calculus. If reading that instilled a pang of conscience, consider going to confession.
Do note that the requirements for a serious sin are grave matter, full knowledge, and full freedom of the will. The remoteness of taking the vaccine from abortion at least mitigates the first condition. The hierarchy’s muddled statements likely mitigate or remove the second. Again, only you and God know for sure.