Tolerance:

In the past we find that French Catholics attempted the genocide/ethnic cleansing of French Protestants multiple times, simply because they couldn't agree about arcane theological details.  The king of France at the time decided that religion was an insurmountable barrier and one group or the other had to be extinguished forever.  We now know from examples like the USA that freedom of religion allows multiple religious bodies to coexist in peace and harmony, without even any particular ill will between the varying groups.  The religious hatred of the French Catholics for their Protestant peers was unmerited and the cause of horrendous amounts of suffering.  If they had just stopped caring about meaningless things, they would have found that beneath the differences there were more than enough similarities.  Liberalism emerged from the idea that all differences should be treated the same.  We are more alike than different, tolerance is the solution to all differences, intolerant people are the cause of basically all suffering on Earth.  Therefore intolerance is the greatest crime one can be guilty of, the most damaging act against society.  Even people with personal grudges who murder, rape, and steal are less dangerous because their damage never amounts to anything serious and is confined to a local scale.  Intolerance, however, just scales up to infinity and creates seas of blood.  In addition, 'petty' sins tend to be confined to our weak and stupid.  Those who suffer from crime tend to be criminals themselves, or at the least poor, unproductive, or self-destructive in some way or other.  They live ghetto lives and receive ghetto results.  The people who care about politics, who have money, who determine the laws, are never under any threat from 'normal' crime.  The one thing they fear is intolerance, a plague that seems to single out the richest, smartest, and most powerful instead of the other way around.  The one thing 'real' humans are threatened with anymore is the genocidal mobs of intolerance -- street crime, famine, disease, everything else has been largely eliminated and quarantined away from the smart, successful, self-confident types.


The Hugeonots of France tended to be richer and more productive than French Catholics.  The same is true of the jews in Germany, the Chinese in Indonesia, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, etc.  Even the Rwandan genocide was the less successful group trying to eliminate the smaller and more successful group through brute force.  The Russian revolution and the French revolution, the Cambodian killing fields, the Cultural Revolution in China, all of them attempted to eradicate the smart, successful, prosperous elites while largely ignoring the poor and the meek.  Intolerance seems to be a force only for evil.  Therefore, why not be intolerant of intolerance?  If we know something is wholly bad then the solution is to ban it, just like we ban arsenic in drinking water, we could ban intolerance in speech.  The only justification for intolerance is to point out some redeeming value it could have to offset all the horrible things it has done in the past.  But what could possibly redeem the atrocities of Nazism, Communism, Islam, Catholicism, etc?

Let's take some examples of various barriers.  Ethnicity?  That's ridiculous.  The USA has whites from dozens of countries and they all get along fine with one another.  We can't even tell each other apart.  Ethnicity is meaningless and it's outrageous how many wars were fought in Europe to separate each ethnicity out from one another.  The only reason ethnicities have required independence is due to the ethnic consciousness of the rulers feeling no compassion for the ruled.  In America, no one cares if the president is Italian, but in Europe bad things always happened to Bosnians ruled by Serbs, or vice versa.  You could never get justice from an ethnicity not yours.  The solution isn't to create ever-tinier states within Europe, each about as big as a stone's throw, with as many people as a single decent sized city.  It's for Europe to grow up, stop caring about ethnicity, and treat everyone with equality and justice.  Then small ethnic groups wouldn't need freedom from larger ethnic groups out of self-defense, they could just enjoy in peace the blessings of a large free-trade zone and powerful defensive military.

Language?  Switzerland has shown it's not a big deal.  A country can have a dozen different languages and it still manages to get along.  So long as people don't make a big deal out of squelching each other's languages and forced assimilation to some ruling language class, it rarely breaks out into civil unrest.  India, China, Canada, tons of countries find themselves separated by language but able to co-exist.  With the advent of machine translation right across the horizon (already good enough for the written word) there is an ever dwindling need to make a big deal about common languages.  Sure, it's nice when everyone knows the same language and communication can speed up, but tolerance has shown itself superior to the divisive effect of language differences.

Religion?  Most of the world allows freedom of religion now and in truth, most people just aren't that religious in the first place.  Religious differences are only important to a few crackpots and to married couples.  As for co-citizens who largely interact via politics and the economy, they could care less which religion you belong to -- so long as the principle of tolerance is adhered to by all sects. The only reason you would need to separate along religious lines is fear that your religion wouldn't be tolerated by the others.  it's just like ethnic differences. So long as the ruling power doesn't care about religion, you don't have to either.  But if the ruling power does, everyone has to care in self-defense.

Class?  Obviously people of all classes have coexisted since the beginning of time.  There is no fundamental need to separate the rich from the poor, they actually can't do without each other.  The rich need employees, the poor need employers.  The only time classes can't get along is when classes stop tolerating each other -- for instance when the rich stop providing for the poor and tell them to all go starve (like the nobility did to the peasantry of Europe), or when the poor decide to raise in arms and massacre every last rich person (like Communism did in Russia and China.)  Class warfare tends to be a two-way street, poor people who are well taken care of by the rich rarely resent them, but when a long train of abuses mounts up to an irrepressible hatred, the rich finally find out what class warfare feels like in reverse.

Race?  There are dozens of multi-racial countries all across the world getting along swimmingly.  There doesn't seem to be any stumbling block here.  Hong Kong was half white, half asian, and all profit.  Likewise, Hispanics were originally a combination of Asians, Whites, and Blacks all living together and now in perfect conjoined harmony.  America has been multi-racial since its founding and lasted hundreds of years, many times more prosperous and peaceful than mono-racial white countries have managed for themselves.  There doesn't seem to be any reason why a country can't tolerate racial differences, except the same problem we find with every other difference.  So long as the ruling power cares about race, everyone else also has to care about race in self-defense.  If the ruling power is tolerant about your race, you can be too, and everyone can get along in peace.  The only time a race has to separate from others is when they are being oppressed on account of their race.  Color-blind justice should remove all racial grievances and all talk of race from the world.  This would have occurred already except for inequality between the races.  Races of similar quality can get along with each other just fine, but when races of drastically different quality live together, one will always fall into envy and the other into fear and contempt.  I see no way for whites to get along with blacks so long as blacks blame whites for all of their failures.  Meanwhile, I cannot imagine why any sane white state would want blacks to be a part of their demographics or not want to separate in countries that are already multi-racial.  It is just welcoming the plague.  Look what blacks did to Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore. . .what the hell good are they?  Why coexist with any of them?  The same is true, though to a lesser extent, for other sub-par groups.  Why would China want to have a bunch of Indonesians in their country?  Why would Germany want a mass influx of Arabs?  And so on.  Worse, the Arabs, Indonesians, and Blacks won't even admit it's their own damn fault they are inferior, and try to fix their faults on their own.  They demand constant apologies, quotas, handouts, etc to restore 'balance' to offset the superior race's 'racism.'  Before any country can be multiracial, a new amendment must be added to the constitution for all race-hucksters:  "Don't blame us, blame yourself or God."

This isn't to say that the unfortunate shouldn't be cared for by the fortunate.  But that should be due to class, not race.  Class harmony is color-blind and thus promotes racial harmony too.  Poor people get help because they're poor, not because they're black.  Not because white racists oppressed them.  Not because having black skin makes you superior to others and worthy of extra benefits.  But only because we pity you on one hand, and respect you on the other.  We pity your suffering, and respect the richness of the human spirit endowed upon even the lowest among us, and best guarded by holding the line sufficiently downwind of ourselves that our own worth will never be called into question by those yet higher than us.  That is sufficient justification for any handout.  Race should never, ever come into it.

What is so frustrating about politics in America is that Conservatives are racially tolerant while liberals promote racial intolerance and hate.  At the same time, however, liberals are class-tolerant while Conservatives promote class intolerance and hate.  There is no party that wants to be tolerant towards everyone and heal all divides.  Libertarians want to exterminate the lower classes and liberals want to exterminate whites.  No single party wants to get along with everyone else.  Which leads to what looks like the one remaining place tolerance cannot bridge our gaps.

Politics.

On too many issues, concerning too many things, it is simply impossible to co-exist with people of different politics.  Politics involves coercion and it's the one time people are forced to aid and abet issues they personally feel immoral or evil.  This is an obvious violation of human rights.  Not only this, but politics creates the environment one lives in, whether cultural, economic, or moral.  It is impossible to live a fulfilling or good life when the values of your society are completely incompatible with your own -- IE everything you see around you is hateful and disgusting, and everyone around you finds you hateful and disgusting for wanting something else.  The proper target of intolerance should be anyone with different politics.  IE, the borders between states should be the exact same as the borders between ideologies.  Those who want abortion legal can go live in Abortionstan, those who want legalized drugs should go live in Druggeestan.  Those who want welfare for the poor should go live in Welfarestan.  Those who want free trade should live in FreeTradeStan.  And any combination of platforms should live together in that exact political platform and among no one else.  If you want a citizen's dividend + free trade + universal misfortune insurance + isolationist foreign policy + eugenics + death penalty + drugs banned + marriage mandated + divorce banned -->  You shouldn't have to live around anyone who disagrees with you about one single thing.  This is because ALL of them are deal breakers.  Virtually every single political policy is immeasurably important.  Abortion is the murder of millions of babies that just goes on and on and on -- and anti-abortionists know that every day their tax dollars are helping the murder factory continue, and that their own children could be aborting their own grandchildren next and there's nothing they can do about it.  This is too important to just hold hands and sing about.  It's something flat out unacceptable.  Intolerable to be around or have anything to do with.  When liberals complain about the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians due to the Republican Iraq war, I'm sure they feel the same way.  Their blood must seethe with rage over the innocents they have been forced to kill with their tax dollars due to authoritarian, redneck, bible-thumping, ignorant, stupid hicks who think the solution to everything is war in the Middle-East followed by the return of the Messiah.

When Republicans ban research into cloning or stem cells which holds the cure to the deaths of millions of people with diabetes or alzheimer's, how do you think that makes Democrats feel?

When democrats make Republican children learn about the joys of gay sex and parenting and have to argue with their own children whether the normal, married life is more fulfilling than misery, promiscuity, and death at 40, how do you think that makes Republicans feel?  It's all well and good for democrats, who don't even have children, to teach a death cult in the public schools -- they're already old enough to avoid it and it has no impact on their lives.  But when you give your whole life and all your heart and all your love to your child, and some death cult teaches him it's okay to 'explore himself' and he's lost to the homosexual lifestyle thereby, NOTHING can repay your loss.  The government may as well have walked in and shot him in the head right in front of you.  This doesn't require there is no genetic basis for homosexuality.  All it takes is for homosexuality to not be 100% genetic and it's still murder to promote homosexuality in the public schools, because who knows but if that was the environmental influence that tipped the scale.  Personally, I don't really care if the fellow teaching my child the joys of homosexuality is black or white, rich or poor, French or Spanish, English speaking or Spanish speaking, even gay or straight, what I care is that due to his politics, and the politics of people like him, my child is learning the joys of homosexuality and there's nothing I can do about it.  Politics about homosexuality is MORE DIVISIVE than homosexuality itself.  Politics is the insurmountable barrier no one can tolerate because tolerating a political difference is the same as compromising your own soul and destroying your own life's work with your own hands.  Just as no businessman should have to tolerate communism that takes the fortune he spent his whole life accumulating through his own effort, no family man should have to tolerate anything evil influencing his kids he spent his whole life raising.  These issues are just too damn important.

Tolerance can overcome all other human differences, but tolerance will never overcome political differences.  Politics is often, almost always, a matter of life and death, good and evil, happiness and misery.  The only way to reach a cohesive nation is for everyone to share the exact same politics.  For all our talk of America being a proposition nation, there isn't a single proposition nation on Earth and there never has been.  One can only imagine the heaven it would be for everyone to finally get their way in politics, to live in a country exactly fitting their own views.  Just magnify the tears everyone was crying when Obama was elected by ten thousand, then give that feeling to all Americans equally, and you would start to get the idea of the fundamental improvement in quality of life the world could have if we really were proposition nations.  Therefore intolerance, more than tolerance, is the key to a better world.  We just have to stop tolerating the right things.