Inspiration - Tolerance, a remedy for excess?

2026-02-11

A great philosopher of the Enlightenment period noted that tolerance “never led to civil war; intolerance has covered the earth with carnage.”(1) It is not difficult to see how zealotry (according to the Oxford Dictionary “fanatical and uncompromising pursuit of religious, political, or other ideals”, to which one could add excessive ideological zeal) has caused bloody wars, such as those between Catholics and Protestants in the 17th century, or today in so many wars around the world. It is however impossible to discuss this subject without mentioning its opposite, which would be permissiveness, which consists of accepting behaviors that are condemned by law or disapproved of by morality and which inevitably leads to the disintegration of society.

It seems obvious that extremes feed off each other in a vicious circle: the more zealots strive to ban anything that might deviate from their dogma, the more protesters proclaim that it is forbidden to forbid. Thus, in 1968, repression reinforced a protest ideology that ultimately rejected marriage in favor of “free love” and work in favor of “leisure.”

And yet, twelve years before these events, the American philosopher L. Ron Hubbard had already observed that “an unhappy man is one who is considering, continually, how to become free. One sees this in the clerk who is continually trying to avoid work. Although he has a great deal of leisure time, he is not enjoying any part of it. He is trying to avoid contact with people, objects, energies and spaces. He eventually becomes trapped in a sort of lethargy. […] One who is plotting continually how to ‚get out of things‘ will become miserable. One who is plotting how to ‚get into things‘ has a much better chance of becoming happy.”(2)

The radicalization that leads some to strengthen censorship of ideas seems to prompt others to retreat into an increasingly radical rejection of the norms that maintain social cohesion, in a pendulum swing that can gradually amplify until it spirals out of control and plunges society into chaos.

The answer does clearly not lie in extremes. But then, where should the happy medium lie? In his Encyclopédia, Diderot advised the following: “Respect the rights of conscience as inviolable insofar as they do not trouble society. Errors about theoretical matters do not concern the state; […] Do not go and make this inevitable problem worse by deploying iron and fire to root it out. Punish crime, but have pity for error, never granting truth any other weapons than gentleness, good example, and persuasion.”(3)

L. Ron Hubbard, meanwhile, offered the same advice in his book The Way to Happiness: “Tolerance is a good cornerstone on which to build human relationships.”(4) He continued as follows: “Any advice one might give another on this subject is safest when it simply asserts the right to believe as one chooses. One is at liberty to hold up his own beliefs for acceptance. One is at risk when he seeks to assault the beliefs of others, much more so when he attacks and seeks to harm them because of their religious convictions.”(5)

And he concluded like this: “The way to happiness can become contentious when one fails to respect the religious beliefs of others.”(6)

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