Individual Tolerance

The English word Tolerance comes from the Latin toleratus, past participle of tolerare - to endure, to 'put up with'. Akin to Old English 'tholian' - to bear, Latin 'tollere' - to lift up, 'latus' - carried. First Known Use: 1524
Here are some definitions of the English word "Tolerance" in various contexts: ~ To allow something that is bad, unpleasant, to exist, to happen, or to be done. ~ To allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of something that one does not necessarily like or agree with. ~ To refrain from interfering with or prohibiting something undesirable or outside one's own practice or beliefs. ~ To experience something harmful or unpleasant without being harmed. ~ To accept or be patient with or endure something or someone viewed as unpleasant or undesirable. ~ To accept the feelings, behavior, or beliefs of others. ~ To recognize and respect the rights, beliefs, or practices of others.

The Chinese 忍耐 is translated as Patience or Tolerance ~ The capacity to accept or endure and resist, to tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset. The illustrated Chinese character is Endure, Patience, and is assembled from two smaller characters: The sign for Blade above the sign for Heart. This illustrates the difficulty of patience or tolerance.

We regularly tolerate others at various levels.
We expect adults to exercise a high level of tolerance for animals and children. We expect adults to tolerate people who are ill or disabled. We generally view someone who does not do so as untrustworthy or dysfunctional. We teach children consideration for others, and gentleness with animals. We generally require better behavior from people whom we believe ought to be healthy and functioning well. There are many considerations to take into account when evaluating the necessity of tolerance. The relative power between two parties is a major factor.

Affection and Tolerance:
We tolerate a lot of nonsense and bad behavior from people we like and love, sometimes to an embarrassing or even shameful degree! So Affection, Friendship & Love change the equation dramatically. This shows that tolerance is not necessarily the right thing in all situations.

Antipathy and Tolerance:
What about the people we don't like? How can we tolerate them?

Do We Really Need Tolerance?
Can't we just do what we want? Diplomacy is just so complicated. What if we just acted out all our impulses and let the chips fall where they may?

Tolerance seems related to boundaries.
Maybe tolerance starts as a way of choosing our battles. If something crosses our external or internal boundaries in some way, we have to choose whether to tolerate the situation or not.

Is tolerance only necessary for people who don't have a lot of power?
Do powerful people need to exercise tolerance? If you care about people, you tolerate them. So for people in powerful positions, it's a choice. What kind of person do you want to become? Keep in mind that power is often fleeting and fickle. Even if it seems to be a permanent position, it can be extremely costly in important ways.

How Much Tolerance Do We Need?
Do we need to tolerate everyone we meet? When should we stop tolerating? What behaviors are intolerable? Can we distinguish between the people and the behaviors? Some cultures have wrestled with this issue. There are even today cultures that do not believe that they need to tolerate others. There is an important difference between people and cultures. People are living individuals. Cultures are groups, which are machinery that is designed by nature to enhance the lives of the living individuals.

Should we tolerate people who do not tolerate us?
Should we accept intolerance from others?

How Can We Tolerate Others Without Losing ...

• Our safety?
  Should we tolerate aggressive, violent and dangerous people?


• Our values, customs & traditions?
  Should we tolerate people who are different? How should we relate to them?


• Our identity & integrity?
  Should we tolerate people who require or insist that we change completely in order to deal with them?

Quotes

“The highest result of education is tolerance.”
Helen Keller

“Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.”
George Carlin

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.”
Lloyd Shearer, Walter Scott's Personality Parade

“Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
Albert Einstein

“Never judge someone
By the way he looks
Or a book by the way it's covered;
For inside those tattered pages,
There's a lot to be discovered”
Stephen Cosgrove

“Accepting all the good and bad about someone.
It's a great thing to aspire to.
The hard part is actually doing it.”
Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye

“Compassion is the basis of all morality”
Arthur Schopenhauer

“Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”
Timothy Keller

“Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons.”
Jessica Lange

“In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher.”
Dalai Lama XIV


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“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Don't get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.”
Bill Maher

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali


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One day Siddhartha saw a boat coming down a river with a musician and his students.
He heard the musician say "If the string is too tight, it will snap. If it is too loose, it will not play."
Siddhartha then knew that starving wasn't the answer and neither were great riches.
Now he wanted to find a middle way, the balance in life.
Buddhist Story