The Intangible Benefits of Tolerance
Life is already hard enough. Ease up on Everyone and everything.
When I interact with other people, I am mindful that they’re already doing the best they can do. Whatever they’re doing, they just can’t do it any better than they did it. Even if I feel irritated about someone’s behavior, that voice comes up from the back of my mind. “But he did right before, why not this time?”
This is it. This is as good as it gets.
There is a lack of tolerance in the news and in social media. Terms like cancel culture, culture wars, and polarization are popular in the media we consume. It’s clear that our tolerance for each other is lower than it used to be.
I believe that the root cause of our lack of tolerance for each other can be found in the assumptions we make about each other. So much mind-reading by people who are not at all capable of mind reading.
We tend to be suspicious of motives. We assume that people are basically selfish and that they’re not thinking about “us”. What a crime. We often assume that the “others” are simply not motivated to do better. And we can use all of that as an excuse for confrontation and punitive responses. Let me give you an idea of how perverse even reasonable people can get to be.
