- Tolerance and True Freedom. After a few decades of widespread
Social Engineering, this has become a difficult concept to
make clear, sometimes. Tolerance doesn't mean that you never
comment on another's choices. What if that person has been so
heavily conditioned, from birth, to believe that something is
her duty, or something desirable, that she has never had the
chance to sit down, clear her head, and decide independently,
for herself, what it is that she believes, or wants? By
challenging those beliefs that have been beaten into her, does
one undermine her freedom, or help to bring it to life?
Too often, we've seen the attitude that if one pressures
someone to give into a demand, that is OK, because one is
"entitled to one's opinion". Yet, if someone then attempts
to give a little balance too the situation, and tries to
convince the one targeted to resist the demands, he is
told to "mind his own business". But, isn't he "entitled
to his opinion"? And shouldn't those who were pressuring
the one he spoke to have felt obliged to "mind their own
business"? It is, absolutely, a double standard and one of the reasons why we have an age bar on membership.
Not that this should be a surprise. Hypocrisy, for many, has
become a way of life, and words, rather than providing a means
for the communication of ideas, are seen as tools for getting
other people to give one, what one wants. The rightness of
those desires isn't even seen as being an issue.
When someone is required to stand alone, without support, in
the face of a seemingly endless string of people telling her
that she should do something - and nobody is ever allowed to
contradict them - her resistance will tend to be worn down.
Especially given a traditional attitude that the truth must
lie with the majority view, as expressed in such bits of folk
wisdom as "What? Are you right, while the whole world is
wrong?", often consciously rejected, yet buried deeply in
one's psyche, from years of conditioning. Gradually, this can
wear away at resistance, as the one being pressured is left
facing this illusory majority, and her final choice may be
nothing more than a reflection of this experience, her freedom
of choice becoming illusory as that majority was.
So, what is freedom? What is tolerance?
A short answer, is that true freedom comes, when the
opportunities exist to live out choices that are an expression
of one's true inner nature, and desires, NOT when those
choices are a reflection of one's conditioning, which one
is directly or indirectly blocked from examining. And,
certainly not when those choices are made out of ignorance
of other possibilities, or resignation to a situation that
one has given up on trying to change, or get past. True
tolerance, is the desire to help others find that kind of
true freedom, and sometimes it does call for us to speak out.
Let us note, at this point, that those we treat cruelly, find
that their freedom to live as they would, has been interfered
with. To adopt the value of freedom, then, requires us to
adopt the value of enlightened benevolence. This brings us
full circle. What we see, on examination, is that given human
nature, each of these values contains the others, and so
rather than being four truly distinct values, they are but
one, viewed in four different ways. This single unified value,
shall be termed "enlightened civility", here.
One very old technique for subverting freedom of choice, is
the use of deception. To take an extreme example, suppose that
we have a bottle of spring water, and a bottle of poison,
and we switch the labels on them - then inviting someone to
choose which to drink from. One might say that our victim
chose to drink the poison, in a sense, but there is not a
court in the land that will say that he consented to do so.
What we would have done, in effect, is short circuit the
victim's ability to pursue the course of action of his choice
- to drink the water, and not the poison.
When people employ trickery to get others to do as they wish,
too often patting themselves on the back for what they think
of as their cleverness, they've done much the same. They've
allowed the person to choose his course of action, but
thwarted his attempt to carry it out, by relabeling his
options while he wasn't looking. Some might attempt to defend
this by saying that the victim could have checked the
truthfulness of what the other person had to say, but if all
could defend their dishonesty on this basis, how could one
ever sort fact from fiction in the chaos that would result?
In order to tell a lie from the truth, one seeks for
inconsistencies with what one knows, but if we have no grounds
for confidence in any of our information, we have nowhere to
begin. Nor is it likely that we shall have time to sort it all
out through direct observation.
It should also be pointed out that we are well out of the
Paleolithic, here in 1999, as much as some would like to
return our mentalities to it. We are well past the time when
we can get by purely on our own efforts. Instead, each of us,
to get through his day in a productive fashion, is dependent
on the efforts of many others, and their willingness to do as
it is understood that they will. The freedom to take the bus
southward means nothing, if the bus driver feels free to turn
north on a whim.
Thus, in order to have our value of freedom mean anything - in
order for the concept of "live and let live" to make any sense
at all, we must insist on a concept of personal honor. And we
can not be tolerant about it. With tolerance, as with freedom
and many other things, there is a point of diminishing
returns, which if we attempt to pass, we find that we are left
with less than we would have had, had we held back. We are as
the farmer who, desiring as full a larder as possible, eats
the seed corn in one year, only to find his granary empty
in the next. Only here, we find ourselves bereft of that we
sought, the moment others embrace the lack of value we would
have so thoughtlessly promoted. No need to wait at all.
This brings us to the matter of honor.
Some choices ...
- continue
- return to main discussion
- Discuss how might a small group remain a free place to be.
In particular, one might ask, how would one prevent a small religious
organization - say, a prayer circle, or discussion group, or small
place of worship (a synagogue that barely finds a minyan each morning,
or a Pagan circle) from taking on cult-like characteristics?
If we are to claim to take this value seriously, we're going to have to
consider the reality of how it might be experienced in a real social
setting, yes? Or not experienced, as the case may be?