Paradox of Tolerance

To remain a tolerant culture, we must tolerate everyone except the intolerant.

Leif Babin, who co-authored the excellent leadership book Extreme Ownership alongside Jocko Willink, once said:

“When it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”

This quote contains a critical insight for team-building: it only takes one toxic person to ruin a team. Leaders must show zero tolerance for bad behavior, because once normalized, toxic shit attracts toxic people.

This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. I believe in inclusion, forgiveness, and second chances...but these virtues can be used against you if you're not vigilant. Too much “tolerance” and you become a doormat. You wind up letting some awful people in the door, who will corrupt everything you've built from the inside out.

The paradox of tolerance

During World War II, legendary Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper introduced a concept now known as the paradox of tolerance.

The paradox of tolerance makes a simple but surprising claim:

To remain a tolerant culture, we must tolerate everyone except the intolerant.

In other words, we should be inclusive of everyone except those who are hateful, bigoted, or otherwise determined to destroy our culture of inclusion. Those people must be immediately removed from the group.

You might bristle at this statement. Tolerance feels like something that should be an absolute principle, offered to all. However, as the people of Karl Popper's time learned from the Nazis, allowing the intolerant into your group often leads to the destruction of the group itself.

The intolerant, such as Nazis, fascists, bigots, and predators, cannot be allowed into an inclusive culture because they are directly opposed to everything your group believes in. Their entire existence is predicated on the desire to take control, and ultimately to crush their opposition. If you let them in the door, understand their goal is never to coexist with you, it is always to supplant you.

No matter how well-meaning you are, you cannot maintain a culture with those determined to destroy what you've built from within.

The key takeaway from the paradox of tolerance is that creating a truly tolerant culture requires us to be tolerant of everything except intolerance itself.

There's a well-known infographic that probably does a better job of explaining this paradox, which I'll include here:

Tolerance in Jiu-Jitsu culture

The paradox of tolerance is useful beyond the study of geopolitics. It's directly relevant to smaller-scale communities like your Jiu-Jitsu gym.

Retired UFC fighter and Easton Training Center owner Eliot Marshall once told me, “You must set core values. What are you willing to lose friends and money over?”

Eliot's comments contain a profound realization: having core values requires sacrifice. It's easy to say what you believe, but it's much harder to speak out and stand up for what you believe — especially when it could cost you.

Having real core values requires willingness to stand up for those beliefs.

As a business owner, would you have the courage to hold your staff accountable for sexual misconduct in the gym, even if it means losing instructors you rely on?

As a coach, would you have the courage to tell a student with a swastika tattoo to leave your gym, knowing it will cost you revenue from their membership?

As a student, would you have the courage to vote with your wallet and leave your gym if your coach fails to take action in these matters?

The martial arts attract all types of people, and it is inevitable that one day, a truly horrible person will walk through the door into your academy. How you respond, and whether you allow them space, will determine what remains of your gym culture.

Some may read this article and feel that politics or drama have no place in Jiu-Jitsu, and should be kept off the mats. That's a statement I generally agree with, but we need to remember that some people's idea of “politics” or “drama” may cross the line into something much more sinister.

It's easy for contemptible people to redefine “politics” to intentionally target vulnerable people in order to bully, suppress, and remove them. Having core values requires all of us to stand against that.

Sadly, we live in a time where truly heinous people are being given high-profile fight contracts, podcast appearances, and financial opportunities. This is the kind of normalization of evil that the paradox of tolerance told us we need to stand against.

Speaking out is important. It's not “virtue signaling.” It matters. By staying silent, we allow intolerance and hate to be normalized. It festers and spreads, and there may come a time when you regret not speaking out against it when you had the chance.