This comment was chosen by Mod HS from the post “Saker Podcast # 11 (ideas from a distant past)” and a small snippet from “A small reminder and clarification: I am an alien, really :-)”.  The moderator believes this comment showed an interesting take on the idea of tolerance and what it really means. To quote Voltaire – “What is tolerance? It is the consequences of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature”. Read, digest, ponder.

A very interesting take on the idea of tolerance and what it really means – a topic indeed rarely brought up, since the West generally takes the “scientific”, or should I say, technocratic definition of tolerance as the only one that is “reasonable”: that is, tolerance as in indifference towards other people’s opinions. But let’s not digress on that; suffice to say what some call the western technocracy has its own set of truths that brands anyone who disagrees with them as ‘unreasonable’, thus too foolish to even talk with, too foolish to participate in their version of democracy even.
On the other hand, ecumenical religious movements are tolerant in the sense they are open to discussion with a person; the very concept of dignity disallows to just flatly reject a whole person as unreasonable. Everyone is allowed to participate. Such a person is misguided, and should be taught; an unreasonable person, on the other hand, cannot be taught, they must conform. And heresy is something different altogether.
Heresy is a word which has bad press nowadays, but I think it could be summed up as “rejecting the objective reality in a socially hurtful manner”. Any society that wishes to survive must protect itself from universally hurtful behaviour. This goes beyond criminal code; it is based on some fundamental perceptions of truth and reality a society has. So, intolerance understood this way is an instrument of survival. It’s not surprising that the western tolerance – or indifference – is not far away from hedonism, solipsism and nihilism – schools of thought that generally reject human survival as important (or even, in extreme cases, as desired).
Going even more esoteric, this creates a division between what I will call the cult of life and the cult of death. Cult of death is not concerned with the survival of humanity, since it gravitates towards the notion of unbounded, predatory competition between people, which naturally favours “super-predators” which, in objective reality, means people with power and money.
Another topic I wanted to touch upon is the difference between Europe and US, and, specifically, one facet of it: it is often overlooked that, unlike Europe, the US society is strongly influenced by religious fanaticism; its roots are religious fanaticism (sectarianism), and this is in my opinion as strong an influence as the myth of the colonist. Not only a substantial portion of settlers was composed of various extreme sects, fleeing the Europe; happenings like what ISIL is doing nowadays were going on in the US as recently as late 19th century – example: massacres, kidnappings and all sorts of illicit behaviour by the Mormon sect. What’s more, those responsible were never punished; the sect was integrated into the statehood and allowed to go on. It might be therefore worthwhile, I think, to discuss what tolerance means in the US; it must be somehow based on an alliance between multitudes of extreme sects, a federation of sects of sorts. Therefore it must be based on partners-in-crime like pragmatism, not any dogma since no common dogma really exists. These are just my musings, not even a full fledged theory, though.