Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: If a society tolerates all types of speech and political expression it will be challenged and subverted by those who wish to suppress freedom and tolerance.  In order to defend the tolerance of a society, one must be intolerant of intolerance.  If I’m reading the article right, he said that while outlawing intolerant speech would be undesirable, rational discourse should be used to help maintain the popular dominance of tolerant principles – that intolerance defends itself by suppressing rational discussion.  But that at the end of the day, a tolerant society must reserve the right to say a dangerous enough expression of intolerance is illegal and can be suppressed.  I expect the way that was written into post-WWII German law would sit well with him, whether the actual application of those laws would or not.

I’m not here to discuss the plus and minus or the exact nature of how to best adjudicate the tolerance v intolerance in an ideal society.  Taking the paradox only on its face but not going all the way to the conclusion he offers.  And having done that, I want to look at a phenomenon affecting modern politics that can serve as an example of the paradox in action.

The current flavor of fascism is a direct result of the very postmodernism that it postures against.  There are other factors and influences, especially the “therapy culture” that emerged in the boomer generation, but in the course of my life, this is the one I’ve seen time and again.  The tolerance that was used to justify this intolerance was grounded in postmodern values.

Postmodernism has many aspects, but I’m going to use the broadest version here.  Modernism was the idea there are right ways to do things, truths that can be discovered and known.  Postmodernism was about uncertainty, vagueness, and especially the idea there are multiple “ways of knowing” – functionally, that opinions can be as valid a view of reality as facts.  The cry of the postmodern fascist, when they have lost the bully pulpit and know they’ve lost the argument as well, is a Lebowksian, “That’s just, like, your opinion, maaan.”

The Sokal hoax was, on its face, convincing enough.  Given that Sokal himself is part of that raft of neo-nazis and enablers in Epstein Pal Krauss’s new book, I suspect there are valid arguments that his stunt was bullshit from go.  It was meant to illustrate that postmodernism bad, reality is in facts and concrete things.  And yet the Krauss cohort is a clown car of people who habitually and fiercely ignore good strong science that refutes their biases, and that use flimsy and handwavey science to support what they want to believe.  “Facts don’t care about your feelings” cries lil Benny Shaps on monday, “Your intolerance hurts my feelings” on tuesday.

Faux News popularized opinion-as-reality.  It’s possible to cherry pick reportage of factual things to support ideological positions, but it’s so much easier to spew propaganda when you realize “somebody said a thing” can be “news.”  Then it’s Editorial Page: the Ostensible News Network.  You can’t say anything anybody says is wrong, because that’s just, like, their opinion, man.  I’m using my freedom of speech! You hates freedom?

I’ve heard this play out so so so many times at the street level.  In my high school classrooms in 1993, in the arguments of randos on buses, in arguments with people I know.  Person expresses factually wrong idea, is shown to be wrong, and says it’s an opinion, or even cites the first amendment.  Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels to me like a natural extension of the idea that all opinions about truth have some validity – an essential postmodern idea, embraced by the masses without ever acknowledging the source.

There were variations on this that predated my youth, but based on the attitudes of teachers and adults and opinion-havers of the world as I observed back then, it seems to me that it was an idea whose promotion began with 1960s mysticism, developed into therapy culture in the 1970s, and stayed with us in that form ever since.  Liberal schoolteachers were big fans of the idea, trying to encourage kids to debate because that’ll make us smorter.  I got smortified off having to hear what skinhead Ron thinks about the just society.

The funny thing is, I don’t even think the idea is wholly lacking in validity, nor is postmodernism itself as a larger package deal.  We’re all so powerfully influenced by our cultural environment and personal situations that assumptions about the nature of any given phenomenon can seem like Objective Truth when they are no such thing.  And yet, those feelings and perceptions have a power that creates a sort of reality, a sort of truth, which is in some ways the only truth we can truly apprehend.  Agnostic shit.

But the postmodern justification of and promotion of fascism shows the weakness of this liberal idea, employing it to ultimately work against itself.  Fascist propaganda was just opinions which are all valid, until fascists won control of the media, the government, the church, big business, etc etc.  At that point, all opinions are no longer valid.  Fascist propaganda is “fact” – and fascist control of science publication and journalism means there is no official source you can point to that isn’t soon to express only the facts that the Aeternal Reich wants you to see.

It’s sad how George Orwell, Karl Popper, and any number of other intellectuals going back to the dawn of the written language can call these things out, illuminate them so clearly and simply a child could understand them, and yet collectively we fall for the trick unto the end of (our) time.  Fascists working against education is certainly part of that, but there is a flaw in the human animal that is doing no small amount of the work for them.

We’re not as smart as we like to think we are.  When you see the fancy talking heads spouting big words in defense of callow bigotry, using lofty language to make it seem like black is white, bad is good, up is down…  You’re seeing smart people outsmarting themselves.  The flaws in their thinking are obvious as all hell to you and I, but they are fucking impervious to truth.

Reality is what we make it and we are what that reality makes us.  The vast majority of this country’s media is painting the picture of reality the Kochs and the Murdochs and Muskerbergs want people to see.  It’s everything around them.  They are swimming in hate speech and propaganda nonstop, all day all night, cradle to the grave.  It used to just be radio, TV, and newspapers.  Now it’s algorithms in social media sorting people into camps that can be marketed to more effectively, fueling division and strife, and even genocide if it makes the page views go up, makes money for the shareholders.

As much as they’re my hated enemies, I don’t blame US conservatives for having shit ideas about basically everything.  It’s the world as they know it.  A perversion of liberal principles, unashamedly hypocritical.  Contradictions don’t mean a thing, because this stuff thrives on goldfish memories.  The human animal is not as smart as we’ve wanted it to be – as every flavor of modernism supposed we would one day be able to achieve.

But being unintelligent does not mean you deserve to be misled.  Blaming fools for being fooled is letting the foolers off the hook, and in this situation, those foolers are just the worst motherfuckers in human history.  Hook their fucking asses.  I don’t know that we can ever really beat this type of shit, but I do know we have to keep trying in any way we’re able for as long as we can.

If the world goes nasty, you owe it to yourself and the people you care about to make your own piece of that world as nice as possible.  Just sucks knowing what you’re up against in that fight.  But power on my people.  I love you.

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