Could it happen? A place for retraining those who won’t tolerate the Progressive left’s erroneous policies?
But isn’t it happening now? In this day of indifference to truth and error, aided by much of the media, the line between the good and the bad is vanishing. Many tolerate any means to money, sex, and power. Many tolerate the killing of their own children before and even after birth. Many tolerate an open-door policy to anyone who wants to illegally enter America, our HOME, infecting us with drugs, lawlessness, and disease, putting enormous pressure on our law enforcement, educational, and medical systems and facilities. Isn’t it just everyday common sense that the toleration of all this is terribly wrong? Isn’t this precisely why Americans need more INTOLERANCE?
A PLEA FOR INTOLERANCE — Fulton J. Sheen
“America is suffering not so much from intolerance, which is bigotry, as it is from tolerance, which is indifference to truth and error, and a philosophical nonchalance that has been interpreted as broad‐mindedness. Greater tolerance, of course, is desirable, for there can never be too much charity shown to persons who differ with us. Our Blessed Lord Himself asked that we ʺlove those who calumniate for us,ʺ for they are always persons, but He never told us to love the calumny.”
“In the face of this false broad‐mindedness, what the world needs is intolerance. The mass of people have kept up hard and fast distinctions between dollars and cents, battleships and cruisers, ʺYou owe meʺ and ʺI owe you,ʺ but they seem to have lost entirely the faculty of distinguishing between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. The best indication of this is the frequent misuse of the terms ʺtoleranceʺ and ʺintolerance.ʺ There are some minds that believe that intolerance is always wrong, because they make ʺintoleranceʺ mean hate, narrow‐ mindedness, and bigotry. These same minds believe that tolerance is always right because, for them, it means charity, broad‐mindedness, American good nature.”
“What is tolerance? Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error.”
“The government must be intolerant about malicious propaganda. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”
Mary’s Mountain is a short novel I wrote several years ago, about tolerance taken to the extreme. It was meant to be futuristic, about what could happen to America. But in just a few years, the future has caught up with today. Here are a few lines from that novel.
Irene and I conceived it together—”The Institute of Tolerance,” for those who won’t comply.
Today, inside its progenies, rigid rooms are covered in fiddle-faddle flowers
and sentimental hearts beating warm and fuzzy pizazz into every state of the union.
Waiters parade among the wayward misfits with tray after tray of elaborate desserts.
Indulge yourself, the waiters say. Pleasure is everything.
So the people grab it, then ooh and ahh, lifting spoons full of artificial whipped cream to their lips,
while outside each building, a neon sign blinks:
Tolerance Today, Tolerance Tomorrow, Tolerance Forever!
The signs have fingers, virtual reality, to motion the people inside.
The signs move. The lights move.
And the people are moved, to tolerate anything.
Only a few resist. For those who do, there is The Solitary Room.
Translating a World on the Edge 