The paradox of tolerance

Karl Popper and the extinction of the rational mind

Disagreement feels like a loyalty test.

Even the way we ask questions has changed. We phrase them like traps and treat the answers as evidence. That hasn’t stopped us from talking about sensitive topics, but it’s made talking things out feel very performative.

For me, it’s raised a harder question: What does tolerance actually mean? Because those most eager to claim it might be showing us its limits.

I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 11. It’s on Karl Popper and why our ability to reason is losing ground.

The paradox that defined an open society

In the 1940s, Karl Popper was watching Europe fracture under ideologies that promised perfection. Fascism on the right… communism on the left. Each claimed moral certainty, each silenced dissent, and both produced the same result: ruin.

He saw that when societies built on freedom fail, they fail because they forget how to defend that freedom, not because they lack ideals.

That distinction is important and became known as the Paradox of Tolerance.

If a society is endlessly tolerant (even of those who would destroy it) its openness becomes the weapon that ends it. However, if it fights back by becoming intolerant in its defense, it destroys itself from the inside.

You can see the paradox everywhere.

• Online communities that tolerate every voice until no reasonable ones remain.
• Workplaces where “all ideas are valid” slowly turn into echo chambers.
• Governments that either over-police or under-protect, losing legitimacy both ways.

This is where constraints become useful. When disagreement has rules that keep learning possible, a system can stabilize. Remove those boundaries, and what’s left isn’t conversation, it’s noise. Really loud noise.

Is conviction incentivized?

Popper assumed reason would have home-field advantage. That people, given access to enough information and debate, would use both to get smarter.

He didn’t live to see a world where information moves faster than understanding. Where the desire for attention replaced the desire for credibility, and the platforms built to democratize truth started monetizing conviction instead of reflection.

The open society he imagined depended on friction which included time to debate and learn. As we know too well, the systems we built removed that. Attention has become a metric of truth and if you can move fast enough, well, that’s a pretty good negotiation tactic.

That’s when the result starts to feel predictable. Moral confidence will always outperform curiosity, and when belief spreads faster than anyone’s desire to verify it, conviction becomes a competitive advantage.

That’s a design flaw Popper didn’t anticipate: We built networks that prize the expression of belief but penalize the act of changing one.

The moral armor of tolerance

Popper saw tolerance as a civic safeguard. That means a system designed to protect disagreement so reason could do its work. But somewhere along the line, tolerance stopped being a discipline.

Let’s look at where things are today. The people most likely to describe themselves as “tolerant” often carry the firmest moral boundaries. Their openness ends right where their convictions begin. They don’t enter conversations to be open or change. Instead, they enter to show that they don’t need to be.

You can hear it in how people with conviction build their case. They take a broad topic and zoom in until only a small part is emphasized. That part becomes the whole argument, which to them, feels very clear. That’s why conviction feels like clarity. It’s not a wide view, it’s actually very narrow.

This is how those exchanges feel when they unfold.

• Questions feel phrased like traps.
• Answers are scored like confessionals.
• Statement are weighed for moral correctness before they’re considered for meaning.
• There is little desire to ‘abstract’ or take a broader view of a topic.

That’s how tolerance turns into ‘armor’. It wears the language of inclusion but moves like a defense strategy. It’s not there to protect dialogue (or friendship… or relationships) it’s there to protect the person’s identity.

True openness means arriving without a verdict. If your moral identity enters the room first, your curiosity never makes it through the da*n door.

The consequence

Conviction is exhausting. It‘s angry.

I get it. People are passionate, they’re frustrated and feel unheard. And they’re right… a lot of people don’t want to talk to them any more.

But look, I usually don’t disagree with what’s being said, so it’s not because they’re wrong, it’s because every conversation is abrasive.

That’s what conviction does. It makes conversation feel like a sentencing.

Rational people disappear because that’s something they don’t want to deal with. To them, it’s about progress, not persuasion… and that’s a distinction that never seems to register.

They’re watching the same movie… they just notice different things. For them, it’s more about trying to understand how the scene fits into the plot.

Reasoning is endurance. They‘re happy to be in the room… they just don’t need to win it.

My reflection

We can each decide what kind of openness we want to practice… the decorative kind that performs virtue while closing their ears (la-la-la), or the difficult kind that listens without any sort of defense.

I’ve enjoyed reading about Popper. His stuff was meant to keep societies thinkable, which applies to every system we build.

The biggest lesson? Reason isn’t polite — but it’s generous.

If reason feels endangered, it’s because too many of us confuse certainty with strength… and mistake agreement for some sort of progress.

An open society (and an open mind) only survive the same way: by staying corrigible (Which means being open to being corrected).

That’s not a weakness.
That’s design, baby.

The paradox of tolerance was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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