The totalitarianism of "tolerance"

The common tolerant person’s favorite phrase is “all ideas deserve respect.” How nice. You can even change ideas to anything else and it’s still effective: try “all squirrels deserve respect,” “all beers deserve respect,” or even “all assholes deserve respect.” If you want, you can tattoo it on your chest and release colorful balloons out the window and take a selfie of yourself kissing a kitten while repeating it over and over again like one of those deranged TikTok loopers. But there is nothing tolerant about respecting diabolical, aberrant, and harmful ideas. Likewise, tolerating stupid ideas doesn’t make you more progressive. It makes you more stupid.

There is an age-old misunderstanding to which the totalitarianism of tolerance contributes. It is to believe that all ideas are equally admirable. It is not necessary to travel all the way back to Nazism to understand the folly of such an assessment. It is rather people, and not their ideas, that must be tolerated; and that is, by the way, thanks to Christianity, which accords each individual the special dignity that comes from being a child of God. Thus, many of us tolerate every human life, respect its dignity, and love its freedom. But we travel the world with our bags full of intolerant prejudice, thanks to which we have the moral and aesthetic defenses to despise, quickly and without hesitation, the unjust, the ugly, the bad, and the repugnant.

In the end — and don’t say that I didn’t warn you — under all this debate lies a danger that threatens the foundations of Western civilization.