the liberalism paradox, aka tolerating the intolerant or welcoming the unwelcoming

November 6th, 2022

• the liberalism paradox, aka tolerating the intolerant or welcoming the unwelcoming
  • I wrote in Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam
    • > It seems to me that: sometimes it’s easy to welcome each other because we seem to already be on the same page about how we see the world and what we want from our lives and each other. It also seems to me that there are ways to learn to welcome everyone, even across vast cultural chasms.
  • Michael "Valentine" Smith responded
    • > This is the most questionable part, to me. I agree! And yet, it's the part I'd be least surprised to discover were wrong.
      
      I'm reminded of the basic postmodern glitch. If you're welcoming everyone, do you welcome those who don't welcome everyone? Those who don't welcome you? How does that work?
      
      Closely related to "How does a tolerant society deal with intolerance? Do we tolerate it, or not?"
      
      This is the basic thing I see Wilbur's Tier II shift addressing. The Green to Teal transition.
      
      (I know you know all this. This just seems like a part that isn't fully addressed yet, so I'm keeping an eye on it.)
  • Some initial thoughts on the topic:
    • a few key points:
      • one main thing to differentiate is that there's a difference between
        • coherence empathy, ie a stance of honoring that people's points of view are what they are and not expecting them to change those without evidence
        • allowing people to DO anything in particular that you have the power to not allow them to do
      • another is that people may not actually trust that you are in fact empathizing with them or welcoming them
        • ie they may not feel any sense of welcome even if you're genuinely trying to welcome them
          • and NNTD of course says "if they can't trust they're welcomed, they don't have to trust that"
          • and ofc they may not trust that you respect that they can't trust it, but you'll still engage totally differently if you actually do respect it, and that "totally differently" will work a lot better"
        • and of course optimizing for "everyone reports feeling welcomed" is extremely hackable by "bad actors" who simply extort demand from you until they feel welcomed
        • so there needs to be some substantial ability to say "I don't know how to welcome you in the way you say you want, in a way that works for my integrity, and I'm not going to compromise that"
          • this of course will get accused of being all sorts of things, among them perhaps illiberal, and insofar as liberalism has this paradox, perhaps it is illiberal! ideally it's truly post-liberal in a sense
      • to some extent the best approach is to try to ignore the intolerant whenever possible and go build a more awesome scene that has tolerance as a prerequisite, and then welcome people into that scene to the extent that they're capable of also tolerating
        • this isn't without issues, but as a basic stance to start from it's better than trying to welcome everyone all at once

• Michael "Valentine" Smith brought up the liberalism paradox, aka tolerating the intolerant or welcoming the unwelcoming again
  • re
    • >  A vast diversity of cultures can exist on top of this cultural platform. What these cultures have in common is a certain kind of interoperability—a capacity to see and honor each other.
  • and I commented:
    • well there's also "they can see and honor each other" which is different from "they can see and honor cultures that aren't able to see and honor other cultures"
    • like in some sense the answer to the latter also has to be yes, but also... it's in practice much harder/messier.
    • oh! huh, using the speciation metaphor, here's another rather weird way of thinking about it:
      • Gen3 cultures have wildly different phenotypes but are broadly all of the same species in the sense that they're interoperable...
      • and then ALSO some Gen3 cultures will also be able to mate with some Gen2 cultures
        • and the Gen3 genes/memes are dominant and therefore the offspring will be Gen3
        • I say "some" here because I think that for a Gen3 culture to mate with a Gen2 culture, they need to be much closer in object-level-culture-space than two Gen3 cultures need to be
      • (and for completion's sake, I guess Gen3 could also mate with Gen1?)
    • also "mate" here is something like the deep perspectival intimacy of parallax/ophanim, which we already talked on tuesday about how it has an interpenetrative vulnerability quality that's somewhat like sex.