With A Grateful Heart by Chris Gil

For the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing friends and colleagues compare the current political climate in the United States with Karl Popper’s theory of intolerance. Without getting into political ideologies; because, just as I didn’t agree with many of Freud’s or Adler’s ideas, I don’t entirely agree with Popper, I want to write here about what I think regarding people who misinterpret the ideas of a brilliant mind, using them to justify hatred and their own inability to accept ideas that contradict their own.

Karl Popper never said that intolerance should not be tolerated; on the contrary. What he left us was a much more complex reflection. Rewriting and repeating only a fraction of what he said, misleading younger generations with an incomplete or mistaken interpretation, is not only disingenuous, it can have a harmful effect on less mature minds.

According to Popper, the use of force or arbitrariness against intolerant speech is, and always will be, completely counterproductive in the fight against intolerance. The weapons we should use against hate speech, extremism, fundamentalism, nationalism, discrimination, and all those other ultra-irrational ideas that disgust us are debate, rationalism and critical thinking, intellectual responsibility, and an attitude of respect toward ideas contrary to our own, along with the constant pursuit of truth and justice through pure, free, rational, and ethical discussion.

The fact is, for those who still don’t understand (or don’t want to), freedom of expression protects not only the ideas we like, but also those that oppose our own and that we find repulsive. And here, dear misguided friends and colleagues, lies the real paradox of Popper: in trying to silence and forbid the speech of others, those who claim to defend tolerance, diversity, and freedom end up turning their own tolerance into intolerance. In other words, intolerance devours tolerance, and worse, it can turn the intolerant into a victim.

What seems to confuse the “well-intentioned” is that Popper did warn that, in extreme cases where intolerance rejects dialogue and seeks to impose violence, it may be legitimate “not to tolerate” in the sense of defending oneself against those who aim to destroy dialogue and the democratic framework itself.

A modern paradox equally worthy of debate is the spread of disinformation, ignorance, and misinterpretation in the age of information and connectivity (ironically). Anyways, the promotion of ignorance as a weapon for manipulating the masses, and the destruction of critical thinking in real time. Meanwhile, scientists, artists, and thinkers hesitate, refine, and reflect, the mediocre take the podium and lead societies, unchecked by natural selection; as a friend of mine put it, “without natural predators.”