The Worst Evils and Wars are Driven By Our
Lack of Tolerance and Our Love to Some Ideas of God, of
Truth, of Good
Tolerance is inseparable from love: we easily forgive
the errors and the sins of those we love; we hardly
forgive those we don’t love. Love makes us tolerant;
it’s lack makes us intolerant.
But tolerance isn’t only linked to love. It’s also
dependent on information. Only those we know themselves,
and have a contemporary view of human nature, can be
tolerant. If we value our reasons too much, or if our
bad humours are taken too seriously, or if we don’t
recognize the relative value of our ideas, or see
ourselves as superior to others, or with a superior culture
or God, or superior predicates, we become intolerant, and
the intolerance becomes the cause of conflicts and wars.
That’s what philosophers such as Seneca proclaim:
We will be more prudent if we observe our interior, if
we interrogate ourselves in these terms: Haven’t I done
something alike? Haven’t I also sinned? Do I have
legitimacy to condemn those faults?
Seneca, 4 a.C.-65 d. C., Roman philosopher and
politician, Of Rage
Tolerance is indeed tightly connected to our ideas.
Driven by our love to some ideas of God, of truth, of
good, humans predispose themselves to the worst evils
and murders. We become fanatics and blind, as the many
past revolutions show: the French, the Soviet, the Nazi…
That’s what François Jacob states:
History hugely shows that anything is so dangerous, so
murderous, as ideologies, as fanaticisms, as the
certainty of being right.
All the big crimes of our History have been a result of
some fanaticism. All the big massacres were perpetrated
by virtue, in the name of the legitimate nationalism, of
the true religion, of the true ideology.
F. Jacob, 1920, French biologist, The Statue Within
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