Tolerance (of whatever form) certainly can be contagious. All behaviors are at least a little contagious—I think we have a module in our brains that observes what other people do and at least considers what it would be like if we did it too. Tolerance as “go ahead and disagree with me and insult me, and I will defend to the death your right to do so” I find inspiring; tolerance as “absolute pacifism” I do not, but I can imagine respecting someone who truly stuck to it—e.g. refusing to fight back even to the point of their own death—and probably some others do find it inspiring. Martyrs in general can be inspiring and tend to make those who killed them look bad.
Also, tolerance in probably any form decreases the incentive for others to be intolerant: one of the major use cases for violence, insults, or other “behavior meant to hurt someone” is as revenge/punishment to disincentivize others from hurting you, and if others’ tolerance means they’re unlikely to hurt you in the first place, then there’s less need for aggressive behavior to be top-of-mind for you.
That said, some of the above arguments also imply that intolerance is contagious. Intolerant behavior is at least slightly contagious due to monkey-brain imitation, and creates an incentive for others to become violent (for self-defense if nothing else).
Is an absolutely tolerant society conceivable? Here I think it does depend crucially on what “tolerant” means.
One point I’d make is, a small percentage of the population is truly bad apples. Sociopaths, who don’t care about morality or others’ pain; sadists, who enjoy causing it. People who respond to “turning the other cheek” with “Great, I’ll hit that one too!”; people who would accept charity and then take the opportunity to steal more from their benefactors. Probably some of them suffer, and feel wronged (by someone or by society), and therefore feel entitled to grab what they want, or want to make others suffer as a kind of revenge. Others think “morality” is a stupid delusion, and anyone bound by it is weak and contemptuous, and that the weak are annoying and should be crushed; others may be animated by an ideology that says “these people are oppressors and deserve everything we might do to them”, and perhaps even “those people are enablers and deserve no better”. Also, when one adds various kinds of insanity into the mix… Well, I don’t claim to understand evil particularly well, and am not eager to understand it better.
The point is: (a) evil exists, (b) in many forms, (c) some percentage of which is completely incorrigible and will just do evil things. The question is then, is (c) going to destabilize your 100% tolerant society? If “tolerance” means letting criminals torch the city unchecked, I’d say yes. If “tolerance” means letting the Nazis and the communists hold their meetings and distribute their pamphlets, without the FBI doing anything until the activists get sufficiently specific in their plans for violent revolution… I’d say it might work, and might not work; that whether those movements would grow to the point that they’re a real threat depends a lot on the population, the culture, and so on. Karl Popper (in my interpretation) would say he hopes that would be fine, but that if they become a big enough threat we should send in the FBI preemptively and feel justified doing so.
So yes, I agree that intolerance can also be contagious—and it’s sort of a quantitative question of which one outweighs the other. I don’t personally believe in “evil” (as you sort of hint there, I believe that if we are sufficiently eager to understand, we can always find common humanity with anyone) - but all kinds of neurodivergences, such as biological lack of empathy, do exist, and while we need not stigmatize them, they may be socially disruptive (like torching a city). Again, the question of whether our absolutely tolerant society can be stable in face of psychopaths torching cities once in a while I think is a quantitative one.
But what I’m excited about here is that in the case that those quantities are sufficient (tolerance is sufficiently contagious, psychopaths are sufficiently rare, etc), then we could have an absolutely tolerant society—even in that pacifist way you don’t quite like. And that possibility in itself I find exciting. And that possibility is something that I think Popper did not see.
Tolerance (of whatever form) certainly can be contagious. All behaviors are at least a little contagious—I think we have a module in our brains that observes what other people do and at least considers what it would be like if we did it too. Tolerance as “go ahead and disagree with me and insult me, and I will defend to the death your right to do so” I find inspiring; tolerance as “absolute pacifism” I do not, but I can imagine respecting someone who truly stuck to it—e.g. refusing to fight back even to the point of their own death—and probably some others do find it inspiring. Martyrs in general can be inspiring and tend to make those who killed them look bad.
Also, tolerance in probably any form decreases the incentive for others to be intolerant: one of the major use cases for violence, insults, or other “behavior meant to hurt someone” is as revenge/punishment to disincentivize others from hurting you, and if others’ tolerance means they’re unlikely to hurt you in the first place, then there’s less need for aggressive behavior to be top-of-mind for you.
That said, some of the above arguments also imply that intolerance is contagious. Intolerant behavior is at least slightly contagious due to monkey-brain imitation, and creates an incentive for others to become violent (for self-defense if nothing else).
Is an absolutely tolerant society conceivable? Here I think it does depend crucially on what “tolerant” means.
One point I’d make is, a small percentage of the population is truly bad apples. Sociopaths, who don’t care about morality or others’ pain; sadists, who enjoy causing it. People who respond to “turning the other cheek” with “Great, I’ll hit that one too!”; people who would accept charity and then take the opportunity to steal more from their benefactors. Probably some of them suffer, and feel wronged (by someone or by society), and therefore feel entitled to grab what they want, or want to make others suffer as a kind of revenge. Others think “morality” is a stupid delusion, and anyone bound by it is weak and contemptuous, and that the weak are annoying and should be crushed; others may be animated by an ideology that says “these people are oppressors and deserve everything we might do to them”, and perhaps even “those people are enablers and deserve no better”. Also, when one adds various kinds of insanity into the mix… Well, I don’t claim to understand evil particularly well, and am not eager to understand it better.
The point is: (a) evil exists, (b) in many forms, (c) some percentage of which is completely incorrigible and will just do evil things. The question is then, is (c) going to destabilize your 100% tolerant society? If “tolerance” means letting criminals torch the city unchecked, I’d say yes. If “tolerance” means letting the Nazis and the communists hold their meetings and distribute their pamphlets, without the FBI doing anything until the activists get sufficiently specific in their plans for violent revolution… I’d say it might work, and might not work; that whether those movements would grow to the point that they’re a real threat depends a lot on the population, the culture, and so on. Karl Popper (in my interpretation) would say he hopes that would be fine, but that if they become a big enough threat we should send in the FBI preemptively and feel justified doing so.
So yes, I agree that intolerance can also be contagious—and it’s sort of a quantitative question of which one outweighs the other. I don’t personally believe in “evil” (as you sort of hint there, I believe that if we are sufficiently eager to understand, we can always find common humanity with anyone) - but all kinds of neurodivergences, such as biological lack of empathy, do exist, and while we need not stigmatize them, they may be socially disruptive (like torching a city). Again, the question of whether our absolutely tolerant society can be stable in face of psychopaths torching cities once in a while I think is a quantitative one.
But what I’m excited about here is that in the case that those quantities are sufficient (tolerance is sufficiently contagious, psychopaths are sufficiently rare, etc), then we could have an absolutely tolerant society—even in that pacifist way you don’t quite like. And that possibility in itself I find exciting. And that possibility is something that I think Popper did not see.