This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 25th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Carl Popper once argued that tolerance can be washed away by intolerance,

all because the Tolerant were, well, too tolerant.

Cato Research Fellow Jason Kuznicki discusses how to think about the paradox of tolerance.

I want to be a tolerant person.

I want other people to be tolerant.

You want to be tolerant.

We all want to be accepting of things that are different and we want to even,

you know, it's a matter of pride I think for libertarians especially to tolerate the existence of things that they personally find repugnant.

So what does Carl Popper have to say about tolerance and how have his words been used?

Well, Popper was a classical liberal and was broadly supportive of tolerance, but he did note one sort of complication which he called the paradox of tolerance.

And he said that, I'm going to quote here

from the Open Society and its enemies,

he said, 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 toleration with them.

Now this has been used in a lot of not necessarily helpful ways.

All right, it seems obvious that the idea would be

...