One day, the author hit a critical mass of “seeing one too many posts on social media advocating the denial of free speech to ‘intolerant’ people, and narrowly avoided a rant on the challenge of defining ‘intolerance’. However, said author was unable to avoid comment altogether, and thus it is that you get this rant about power, instead.
Lucky you.
- We finally solved the problem of defining ‘tolerance’. It wasn’t as hard as you might have thought. We just figured out the difference between those who won’t let you talk because they’re bad, and those who won’t let you talk because they’re good. The former are intolerant, and the latter are helpers.
- We’d tell you how we solved the problem, but somebody good told us not to. Sorry.
- Anyway, that’s really all there is to this story.
- I mean, there are the practical parts, like how we muzzled all the intolerant people. And sure, I bet you think that this is some kind of sarcastic thing where the ‘intolerant’ people turned out to be the good ones after all. But nope! The intolerant people really were the bad people.
- Trust me.
- No, really. That’s not what this story is about. So get over it.
- As we were now in a world where our information came from the good people and not from the bad people, we were able to finally have a government that was Good.
- I know. That sounds sarcastic. Please have faith.
- (The right faith. But that’s another story, isn’t it?)
- So the government that was Good started doing Good things.
- But then there was a Revolution and intolerant people came to power and they used the rules against us even though we knew it was wrong, because they had the power to compel us, and we had given them the framework to suppress it, never thinking that power would fall into the wrong hands.
- This could have been a very unpleasant story, but fortunately, we overthrew the intolerant people. It was a near thing, to be honest. It turns out that being morally correct does not make your weapons any more powerful than those of your enemy.
- But we did prevail, and we put a new Good government back in power.
- And they were able to stay in power, and even, eventually, stamp out intolerant people.
- This gave them a lot of power. Which they used for Good things.
- Only, even in a world where you can tell, absolutely and for sure, what’s Good and Bad (and we didn’t actually know that much)—some decisions involve trying to figure out the lesser of two evils.
- And, like I said, we didn’t have quite that much knowledge. So we ran into difficulties. Like:
- Sometimes, there aren’t any Good choices.
- Or the Good choices aren’t practical. For example, “Fire all Government staff in order to have money to feed hungry people” has multiple problems (won’t the ex-staff get hungry? Are you sure it’s better to fire all those people in the name of something that’s definitely desirable in name, but incredibly nebulous in theory?) –
- but even if it IS simply the Good Answer, who, exactly, is going to administer the program?
- And sure, that’s a silly example, but we’ve seen sillier government and sillier theories, and to be perfectly honest, they often have quite serious and deeply unfunny consequences.
- It turns out that the most Tolerant Government, pressed with the realities of day-to-day governance….ain’t that tolerant.
- They were the right arbiters of Tolerance until they got good at it and began labelling everyone who disagreed with them “Intolderan”.
- Those who disagreed were taken away.
- And none could stand against the joys of Tolerance in that enlightened nation.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities and create things. Every year, I put on Evil Expo, the Greatest Place in the World to be a Villain. I also write a lot of fantasy and science fiction.. You can get most of my books right here. Go ahead, pre-order “I HATE Your Prophecy“. It may make you into a bad person, but I can live with that.
