{"id":96743,"date":"2025-07-24T03:00:49","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T07:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=96743"},"modified":"2025-07-23T14:01:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T18:01:05","slug":"when-tolerance-becomes-a-fatal-flaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/07\/24\/when-tolerance-becomes-a-fatal-flaw\/","title":{"rendered":"When tolerance becomes a fatal flaw"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Crescent and the Guillotine<\/em>, Paul Friesen<\/a> explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1<\/sup> A delicious paradox, too often quoted and too rarely heeded. For we have taken the first half of the dictum \u2014 the imperative to tolerate \u2014 and chiseled it into law, into policy, into university mission statements and NGO pamphlets. But the second half \u2014 the requirement to draw a line, to say “no further” \u2014 has been treated like garlic in a vampire movie: an antique, anathema, unfashionable.<\/p>\n

And so, the paradox has become pathology.<\/p>\n

Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils<\/a> to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs<\/a> for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth<\/a>. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad<\/a> are “unhelpful”.<\/p>\n

This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.<\/p>\n

We have enshrined the rights of the theocrat while criminalizing the instincts of the secularist. The result is not harmony \u2014 it is humiliation.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The West’s greatest achievement is not democracy, nor capitalism, nor even the separation of powers. It is the separation of truth from tribalism \u2014 the idea that individuals are not to be judged by their creeds, but by their conduct. That women are not property. That speech is not violence. That blasphemy is a right, not a crime.<\/p>\n

These are not Western values. They are universal values, discovered in the West by accident of history and preserved through blood, rebellion, and satire. They are the principles that allowed Jews, heretics, atheists, and apostates to live not just safely, but freely. And they are now under threat \u2014 from within.<\/p>\n

The real problem is not Islam. It is the Western inability to demand anything of those who import their gods and their grievances into liberal society. We treat every imported superstition as sacrosanct and every local tradition as suspect. We require ex-Muslims to whisper their fears while we amplify the complaints of veiled Islamists who denounce our culture from our own podiums.<\/p>\n

We are not being pluralistic. We are being duped.<\/p>\n

And the cost of this self-deception is measured not just in freedoms surrendered, but in lives lost.<\/p>\n

Lives like that of Yameen Rasheed<\/a>, the secular Maldivian blogger who thought he could use satire to push back against theocracy \u2014 stabbed to death in his own hallway. Lives like that of Farkhunda Malikzada<\/a>, beaten and burned in the streets of Kabul by a mob of men \u2014 because someone thought she burned a Qur’an. Lives like that of Samuel Paty<\/a>, beheaded outside a French school by a refugee he welcomed \u2014 because he dared to show a cartoon in a civics class.<\/p>\n

These are not random tragedies. They are the predictable outcomes of an ideological toxin given immunity in the bloodstream of liberal society.<\/p>\n

What do all these victims have in common? They did not die at the hands of misunderstood minorities or “oppressed voices” who simply needed better integration programs. They died at the hands of men who were indoctrinated \u2014 sometimes abroad, often at home \u2014 with the idea that God’s honor is more valuable than human life, and that dissent is not to be debated but extinguished.<\/p>\n

And more damning still: they died in environments that should have protected them. Environments that instead prioritized sensitivity<\/em> over security, dialogue<\/em> over clarity, understanding<\/em> over justice. Environments where the ever-watchful eye of diversity officers and DEI consultants was trained, not on the assailants, but on the tone<\/em> of the victims.<\/p>\n

We have created a culture where courage is pathologized, clarity is punished, and moral equivalence is the new orthodoxy. When Islamist mobs swarm the streets chanting slogans that would make the Inquisition blush, we are told to “listen to their anger”. When feminists protest the veiling of children, they are told to “respect cultural differences”. When Jews complain about chants of “From the River to the Sea”, they are informed that they are “overreacting”, “weaponizing trauma”, or \u2014 most insultingly of all \u2014 “confusing Zionism with antisemitism”.<\/p>\n

This is not inclusivity. It is assisted suicide.<\/p>\n

\n
    \n

    1. I refer here to Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies<\/strong>, specifically in Volume 1: The Spell of Plato<\/strong>, Note 4 to Chapter 7. Here’s the relevant passage, paraphrased for clarity:<\/em><\/p>\n

    “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”<\/em><\/p>\n

    Popper argues that a tolerant society has the right \u2014 not to suppress opinions \u2014 but to defend itself against those who would destroy tolerance itself<\/strong>, especially if such groups refuse to engage in rational discourse and instead promote violence or coercion. It’s often called “the paradox of tolerance<\/strong>“.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At The Crescent and the Guillotine, Paul Friesen explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself: It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1 A delicious paradox, too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,53,11],"tags":[459,47,1020,720,217,48],"class_list":["post-96743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-politics","category-religion","tag-censorship","tag-islam","tag-progressives","tag-protest","tag-rights","tag-sharia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-pan","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96744,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96743\/revisions\/96744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}