[AbrahamParangi]

The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it.

I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.

[programmarchy]

René Girard has done an anthropological investigation of this topic. The gist of it is through the psycho-social mechanism of scapegoating, opposing groups can simultaneously believe they are victims while acting as oppressors, often using their victim status as justification for their oppression of "the other".

Girard explores this phenomenon of scapegoating and postulates it goes back to primitive humans e.g. during a drought tensions rise within a tribe, and a certain "witchy" tribe member is singled out to take the blame and either expelled or murdered. After this, social tensions in the tribe are relieved (even if the drought does not subside), and the scapegoat paradoxically becomes a sacred, or savior, figure. Through history, this develops into ritual and religion. It provides a useful lens to reason about messianic cults, as well as social power dynamics.

There's a good overview on his Wikipedia page, but he delves into this particular topic in the book Violence and the Sacred. He also pioneered the field of Generative Anthropology, which other academics like Eric Gans have built upon, theorizing about the mechanism in much more detail, and using it to explain effects in modern culture.

[AndrewKemendo]

Thank you for referencing Girard!

Agreed that this is a compelling hypothesis

Have you looked through “A thousand plateaus” from Deleuze/Guattari (I don’t know anyone who has actually read the whole thing)?

[programmarchy]

I timidly approached Deleuze a few years ago but didn't make it very far, haha. Should probably give it ago again... did you find it useful?

[AndrewKemendo]

Yes! Though if I could follow along for more than a few pages I would probably get more out of it.

I’m going to actually restart with just Ch15 and see if that is a better approach

[boplicity]

> The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left

Basically, people are fed up with general bigotry, racism, misogyny, and the destruction of the environment -- all of which have real life and death consequences for many people. That, combined with polarization, has made people very reactive to which "side" they perceive things to be on.

[ralusek]

People are just now fed up with those things, at their lowest point in history?

[boplicity]

Of course people are fed up with those things. They also have the ability to organize and make noise about it. That, combined with polarization, as I've said, heightens both the activism and the perception of such activism.

[ASalazarMX]

I think polarization is the main cause. Demagogues love to craft an "us vs them" narrative, pose as heroes of the "us" side, and plenty of gullible people fall for it with gusto. Mentally, we're still monkeys who will follow a strong leader without questioning.

Mind you, demagogues are not only politicians, they can be human rights activists, teachers, businessmen, neighbors, etc. Emotion managing should be a mandatory class at basic school, so many of us need to think with our heads instead of our guts.

[f38zf5vdt]

Yet, remarkably, many others will identify with:

> The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the right has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it.

> I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.

We are diving deep into the irony of bifurcated political systems where the two groups simultaneously believe themselves to be victims of their opposing teams rather than circumstance and systemic failures.

[fluidcruft]

I can't say that I have found the right to be any more accepting of wrongthink.

[enragedcacti]

The paradox of tolerance gets you a long way to understanding it, but you will also have to be far more specific if you want answers because practically everyone has limits to what they consider acceptable speech, even if they don't call it that.

Beyond that, there is a pretty concerted effort to elevate minor grievances into the national spotlight to portray the left a certain way, e.g. the Oberlin Cafeteria scandal, where story in the college paper about the quality of the food in their college cafeteria became both a national news story and a symbol of just how deranged the left had become.

Is that actually indicative of anything? Is it something the general public should actually care about? Does it even reflect "the left" as a political body?

I think once you start asking those questions a lot of the "wrongthink" stories (not all!) start seeming a lot closer to college kids complaining about bad food than they are to the sands of politics and free speech shifting underfoot.

[nostromo]

People are constantly misapplying The Paradox of Tolerance - which is an argument for protecting free speech in all cases other than one: opposition of free speech.

Somehow that got contorted by modern-day activists into "I can shout down or physically attack people I don't agree with" -- which is exactly opposite of what was being argued by Popper. It's an argument for more permissive expression, not less. He notes that the best path is nearly always rational argumentation of opposing views.

[enragedcacti]

"We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

[nostromo]

You really should read the whole work before citing it.

[mcpackieh]

Even as you describe it (I think you've described Poppler's argument well), it's still bogus. We don't need laws forbidding speech against free speech to protect free speech; the solution to the "paradox" is that there is no paradox. Our system of checks and balances to undo unconstitutional laws works well enough that we don't need to curtail political speech to protect political speech. The system is resilient to speech which criticizes it.

Poppler seems to think that fire must be fought with fire, that's his 'paradox'. He forgets or deliberately discounts the existence of fire extinguishers, e.g. checks and balances.

[foldr]

I can't find any textual support for that narrow interpretation of the Paradox of Tolerance in anything that Popper wrote. Where does he say that only opposition to freedom of speech counts as 'intolerance' in the relevant sense?

[nostromo]

You'll need to read the book -- if you're looking for a soundbite you're doing yourself a disservice -- it's short anyway. But note that he's talking specifically about argumentation.

The book is a response to Plato, who generally opposed free speech for the masses. In general, Popper strongly disagrees with Plato. And it's important to note that he described of the paradox as he understood it from Plato, but does not necessarily endorse it.

The people suddenly fond of this one footnote might take a moment and read his work anyway, as they may be surprised to read his views on socialism and Marx specifically.

[foldr]

I have read the book. I'm saying that I don’t find any textual support in it for your narrow interpretation of the paradox of tolerance. Under that title it's treated by Popper in one brief and quite vague paragraph. If you think that other parts of the book point to a narrower or more specific version of the paradox of tolerance, then you should at least be able to give some indication of which parts.

Also, he more-or-less does endorse the idea just a little bit beyond the famous paragraph:

>All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands the way suggested in section II of this chapter, or perhaps in some such as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public.

[gochi]

The book Open Society and its Enemies is moreso about how an open society cannot truly be tolerant, much in the same way that Herbert Marcuse expresses, in that tolerating dangerous ideas allows them to grow thereby destroying the entire concept of an open tolerant society. It was not specifically about opposition of free speech, that's absurd as even he would recognize that you can't protect free speech from dangerous ideas without being intolerant of those ideas. Hence, the paradox.

So people shouting their enemies aren't doing the opposite of what Popper suggests, they are proof of what he claims. Remember, he viewed socialism as a beautiful dream, but struggled to align that with his views on individual freedom and how reaching such goal would be very difficult without violent means of overthrowing the status quo (these means again infringing on his beliefs of individual freedom).

Perhaps you are due for a re-reading of his work.

[username332211]

The paradox of tolerance is the invention of Karl Popper, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society - a hard-right group literally founded by F.A. Hayek. It is a justification for the persecution of collectivists, which mostly meant the persecution of left-wingers at the time. It's the justification of the actions general Pinochet would later undertake.

The only way I can use such a thing to understand left wing thought is by assuming someone is picking and choosing ideas in the pursuit of power . Citing it makes me think of an unconventional medieval priest who tries to justify burning all his enemies at the stake by combining Calvin's inflexible concept of damnation with the Catholic penchant for punishing sinners and heretics.

And the simplest statement of the paradox is "It's OK to persecute and kill collectivists (meaning communists and fascist), because they deny the validity of a universal reason". I assure you it's not an argument that justifies "de-platforming".

[btreecat]

You might be interested in "The paradox of tolerance"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

>Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.