this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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There is, and in mathematics we'd define it as Closure. We define a set such that operations on members of the set will always reproduce new members of the set. The problem with applying this logic to a sociological environment is that - in practice - what we're doing is defining "personhood" as membership in the closed "tolerant" set. Dehumanizing anyone outside the tolerant group is not - I suspect - what the OP was hoping to achieve.
That gets us to the "trivial" solution to the paradox of tolerance, which is to kill everyone. Alternatively, to kill everyone except yourself or to kill everyone who isn't in your tolerance set. Viola! Everyone can express perfect tolerance because the only people alive are the folks who share that same sense of perfect tolerance. We might call this a "Final Solution" to the problem of tolerance.
But like many strictly logical and mathematical approaches to resolving social contradictions, it isn't in any way practical or particularly ethical. It is a brute force approach to solving what is, at its heart, a problem of interpersonal perception, accrued bias, and political manipulation.
The real problem of intolerance comes down to the old Dunbar's Number, the upper limit that human brains can process additional individuals as people worthy of empathy. This is a biological limit, not a logical one. And it produces a whole host of knock-on effects that the simple logical paradox doesn't engage with.
there isn't, that's why it's a paradox.
It isn't a paradox. The reference is a misnomer.
Dunbar's Number is an interesting concept, but it is a controversial one. For example, here is an article disputing it. Just one example of many.
No, I don't think reducing the tolerance paradox to biological limits is productive or instructive. Instead, I prefer a more religious lens: People are "religiously" attached to their chosen dogma (leftism, conservatism, centrism, etc) and view those who do not share their beliefs as either potential converts or, in the case of a failed conversion attempt, dangerous threats to be eliminated. We see this kind of rhetoric in all kinds of extremism, which is where intolerance invariably finds its home.
Which all do recognize some general upper limit, even if the variance can dip into the single digits or approach the high triples. The point being that there is a functional upper bound, and certainly not one so high that it can accommodate a fully high school's worth of students much less a nation's worth of citizens.
Its useful from a practical perspective, as it demonstrates a real upper limit on the individual. For the same reason that estimated life expectancy, standard walking speeds, and normal sleep patterns shape our basic expectations of human behavior and comfort, an understanding of social maximal empathy limits can help us engineer social structures efficiently.
You wouldn't expect a normal human to sprint at the speed of freeway traffic. Why would you expect a normal human to empathize with a constituent group of a million people?
We don't just see it in extremist ideologies. We see it in every ideology. Milquetoast moderates like George Bush and Bill Clinton had the same fundamental impulses when they governed the US as Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. Only their policies differed. Policies that were inevitably most favorable to very particular constituencies. This was not a difference in their scale of empathy.
Nativism and alienation will always be a problem for groups of humans at the scale of thousands. And so social and political structures need to be resized to accommodate that upper bound. Otherwise, tolerance just becomes double-speak, a term you toss about when you're angry at some out-group for failing to conform to the biases of your in-group.