Paradox of Tolerance

 

The Paradox of Tolerance: From Popper’s Caveat to Progressive Dogma

The phrase “paradox of tolerance” was born in a footnote—literally. In 1945, as Allied tanks rolled past the smoldering ruins of the Reich, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper sat in exile in New Zealand and wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume 1, published that same year, contained a single paragraph that would become scripture for the censorious left:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Popper was not issuing a blank check for speech codes. He was describing a narrow emergency brake: a tolerant society may—only may—suppress intolerance if and only if the intolerant are on the verge of seizing power and abolishing tolerance permanently. The example he had in mind was obvious: the Weimar Republic’s fatal mistake of letting Hitler’s brownshirts march, speak, and intimidate while the state clung to legalistic neutrality. Popper’s paradox is therefore situational, not categorical. It is a last-resort clause, not a daily operating manual.

Yet by the 1990s the footnote had metastasized into a slogan. Campus activists stripped away the context and turned it into a universal solvent: Any intolerance—defined downward to include a joke, a pronoun, or a statistical citation—must be silenced now, because silence equals complicity with Auschwitz. The shift from emergency brake to hair-trigger is the core inversion. Where Popper demanded evidence of imminent violent takeover, the modern left demands only the possibility of emotional discomfort.

The mechanics of this inversion are brutally efficient. Step one: redefine “intolerance” so broadly that it captures everything from genocide advocacy to skepticism about affirmative action. Step two: declare that any platform given to such speech is a step toward the gas chambers. Step three: invoke Popper as the unimpeachable authority who mandates preemptive censorship. The sleight of hand is complete when the same activists quote Popper while ignoring his next sentence: “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant”—a sentence that still presupposes a high evidentiary bar and a democratic process, not a DEI officer’s whim.

In 2025 the paradox is weaponized at every scale. A University of Michigan policy cites Popper to justify mandatory bias training; the training materials then label “colorblindness” as intolerant, creating a closed loop where disagreement proves the need for more training. Canada’s Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) explicitly nods to the paradox in its preamble, allowing judges to issue “peace bonds” against citizens who might post hateful content in the future—pre-crime censorship that Popper would have recognized as the Gestapo’s preventive arrest doctrine in rainbow packaging.

The deepest betrayal of Popper is the erasure of his remedy. He never said “silence the intolerant.” He said out-argue them, out-vote them, out-organize them, and only if they reach for guns should the state reach for handcuffs. The left’s version skips straight to handcuffs—digital, social, or legal—because argument is deemed too risky. A 2024 survey of 1,500 Gen Z adults found 68 percent believe “hate speech should be illegal even if it doesn’t call for violence,” a statistic that would have horrified Popper, who spent the war warning that the road to totalitarianism is paved with good intentions to protect society from itself.

Even left-leaning scholars now sound the alarm. In a 2023 paper titled “Popper’s Paradox Abused,” philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the modern invocation “turns a defensive tactic into an offensive ideology.” She points out that Popper was writing about a society facing armed paramilitaries, not Twitter threads. “If every microaggression is Kristallnacht,” she writes, “then the concept of emergency loses all meaning, and we are left with permanent martial law over words.”

The paradox’s final inversion is self-cannibalization. Once you accept that tolerance requires intolerance of the intolerant, the circle tightens: today’s enforcers become tomorrow’s targets. In 2025 a Berkeley professor who pioneered speech codes in the 1990s is himself canceled for using the term “biological sex” in a syllabus—proof, his accusers say, that he is intolerant of trans existence. Popper’s emergency brake has become a guillotine that never stops falling.

John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle: The Forgotten Firewall

If Popper gave the left a footnote to abuse, John Stuart Mill gave them a fortress they quietly abandoned. In On Liberty (1859), Mill articulated the harm principle with crystalline precision:

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own physical or moral well-being is not sufficient warrant.”

Mill’s principle is not a suggestion; it is a load-bearing beam of liberal democracy. Speech, thought, and action are sovereign unless they cross the threshold into direct, tangible harm—punching a neighbor, libeling a business into bankruptcy, or shouting “fire” in a crowded theater (his own example). Everything short of that threshold is off-limits to coercion, no matter how offensive, foolish, or morally corrosive.

The Nazis violated the harm principle on an industrial scale. Their censorship was not about preventing harm; it was about enforcing conformity. Goebbels did not ban Jewish newspapers because they incited violence; he banned them because they contradicted the regime’s narrative. The Reich’s legal theory, articulated by jurist Carl Schmitt, held that the state’s survival trumped individual rights—speech was permissible only if it served the volk. Mill’s principle was the first casualty.

Post-1945 Western democracies rebuilt themselves on Mill’s foundation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) echoed him in Article 19; the European Convention (1950) in Article 10; the U.S. Supreme Court in cases like Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which protected even KKK rallies unless they incited “imminent lawless action.” The message was unambiguous: the antidote to Nazi speech control is more liberty, not less.

Yet by the 1980s the left began chiseling away at the harm principle’s clarity. The pivot came with “hate speech” laws in Canada (1977) and critical race theory’s insistence that words can inflict psychic injury equivalent to physical assault. The argument was seductive: if a racial slur triggers PTSD-level trauma in a Black student, is that not harm under Mill’s own terms? The sleight of hand was to redefine harm from objective, measurable damage (a broken nose, a burned house) to subjective, emotional distress. Once harm became a feeling, the principle collapsed into a Rorschach test.

In 2025 the inversion is complete. Corporate HR manuals cite Mill while listing “hostile environment” as grounds for termination—yet the environment is hostile only if someone feels it is. A 2024 Ninth Circuit ruling upheld a California law banning “misgendering” in nursing homes, arguing that repeated pronoun errors cause “dignitary harm” to transgender residents. The phrase “dignitary harm” is Mill’s corpse doing cartwheels: he explicitly rejected “moral well-being” as a warrant for coercion.

The abandonment is most glaring in education. Mill devoted an entire chapter of On Liberty to the dangers of state-mandated curricula, warning that “a general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.” Nazi Germany proved him right. Yet today’s progressive educators impose SEL frameworks, anti-bias pledges, and land-acknowledgment scripts with the same uniformity Rust once demanded—only the content has flipped. A Florida teacher is suspended in 2025 for refusing to read a script acknowledging that the school sits on “stolen Seminole land”; the district cites Mill’s harm principle, claiming the omission harms Indigenous students’ sense of belonging.

Mill’s own remedy—robust public debate, eccentricity as social progress, truth emerging from intellectual combat—has been replaced by “speech as violence” rhetoric that treats disagreement as assault. A 2023 Stanford study found that 81 percent of undergraduate students believe it is acceptable to shout down a speaker whose views “harm” marginalized groups. Mill’s response, were he alive, would be withering: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

The harm principle’s death by a thousand qualifications has left the left defenseless against its own authoritarian impulses. When harm is whatever the most sensitive person says it is, power fills the vacuum. In 2025, Amazon removes a 150-year-old edition of Huckleberry Finn from its store after a single customer review claims the racial slur caused “irreparable harm” to their child. No court, no debate, no Mill—just a feelings-based veto. The ghost of Goebbels, who banned books for the moral health of the volk, would recognize the playbook even if the vocabulary has changed.

The tragedy is that Mill provided the perfect antidote to Nazi speech control: a principle so bright-line that even a child could apply it. The left, in its zeal to prevent another Holocaust, dimmed the light and invited the darkness back in through the side door marked “safety.”

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