In the wake of the Capitol Hill protests, there will be a rise in calls for censorship. I acknowledge the validity of some of the arguments made by the censors, and would like to give them respect in the best way I can - by arguing against them.

Firstly, I would like to address the “paradox of tolerance”. As I understand it, The Paradox of Tolerance is an idea that posits that in order for a tolerant society to exist, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. The idea goes that tolerance cannot live peacefully with intolerance.

I think that the existence of laws and rights protects people from the intolerant in all meaningful cases. The intolerant cannot simply destroy the property and health of certain groups. In this case, it is not the tolerant that is keeping peace, but a third party - the police.

If the intolerant, however, should attempt to remove these protections, they will quickly run into the problem of rights. I concede that if the intolerant gathered enough members, they could overrule these rights. However, the idea of intolerance of intolerance only handles a small subset of threats to the rights of a nation. There are many other threats to rights that could arise.

A point about this paradox that people tend to miss is that this paradox is not really a paradox at all, but rather an argument from contradiction. If you read it like that, you will see that this is arguing that there is no such thing as a truly tolerant society. This actually makes perfect sense, even outside of the context of politics.

You could say that part of being a tolerant society is “tolerating” property rights. But another part of a tolerant society is “tolerating” theft of property. Obviously, these two concepts cannot coexist.

One of the nice things about writing to a small group of like minded friends is that I don’t have to defend my argument very much, only inasmuch as it communicates a point. If I were writing this for a larger audience, it would be a nightmare arguing against it. Not because it is a particularly good idea, but because there are so many different ways of interpreting any of the ideas expressed in it.

What is tolerance? I interpret this as meaning “respecting one’s natural rights”. But you could also interpret tolerance as “not casting judgement on a person”. In that case, the assertion that tolerance cannot coexist with intolerance is incorrect. Furthermore, what is a tolerant society? Is our society an example of a tolerant society? Is there even such a thing as a tolerant society?

So, in reality, arguing about this with the internet is all a game of weaseling semantics.