What does the word ‘tolerance’ mean to you? Where do you land on the spectrum from tolerance to intolerance? The world has become a very polarized place where tolerance for other’s viewpoints are not accepted. In my opinion, the tolerance one has for someone is proportional to how close they are to one another.

I have no intention of making this a political post, as my political views are my own. Instead I want to talk about what tolerance means to me in regards to friends, family, workplace and even in public. Some would say that I am tolerant to the extreme, and that I don’t express my differing viewpoints often enough. Perhaps they are right, but I’ll let you be the judge.

Lets assume for the moment that there are distinct levels of how close one is to another person. Those levels might look something like the following diagram.

The Family

When I think of the first two levels, the ability to tolerate someone is directly proportional to how immediate of a family member they are. In general, you are going to be far more tolerant of your SO and children than you are of cousins. Some of you may have drifted away from your siblings and/or parents as life moves on. They are however family, and most of the time regardless of their varying idiosyncrasies you will still tolerate them for periods of time. Additionally I would put forward that many of us temper our behavior around family in order to improve the overall atmosphere, which helps with the tolerance levels.

The Friends

I would classify the abiltiy to tolerate a friend as just below family. I mean come on, you don’t have to live with them, but they are fun to be around. The strength of a connection between a good friend and yourself allows you to ignore an off hand comment they might make, or some odd behavior they have. In this case as in the family, I believe that we intentionally temper our behavior in order to maintain that friendship.

The Workplace

The workplace is an interesting place to talk about tolerance. In some cases you may be friends with co-workers, and in others you may actually hate someone. Because it is the workplace, you actually don’t have to fully tolerate their behaviors, and can simply walk away. If their behaviors are truly offensive you can work to address that with management and hopefully achieve a better work environment. But again, you impose restrictions on your own behavior in the workplace because you know that not all behaviors are tolerated.

The Public

Ok, so now you are in public. How much do you self regulate your behaviors? How much tolerance for others do you have? I would put forward that generally our tolerance level of others that are strangers is and has become far less than it was in the past. Part of this is due to the fact that many of us are far more comfortable in expressing our true beliefs in public without care about how others may feel. That is, the self-regulation of our behaviors has decreased because we just don’t care what others think about us. At the same time, however, our ability to tolerate others has decreased which in turn induces a level of anger toward those that do not follow our views. As an example, just look at the polarization of politics worldwide. We have not seen this level of partisan attacks in politics in a very very long time.

My Observations

The above diagram provides a generally summary of the viewpoint I blogged about here. The intolerance and self regulating behavior we have is inversely proportional to how close we are to someone. This may not hold true always, but I believe it is a reasonable way of looking at how things are.

Many of you may not agree with me, and some of you might.

For those that don’t agree, I guess you will just have to tolerate me.