We Have Met the Zombies and They Are Us

Tolerance is the failure point of democracy? If you tolerate intolerance, you permit and enable forces that will eventually cause your position’s tolerant demise, because intolerance will kill off tolerance if it is given its lead unless tolerance takes an intolerant stand against it, which defeats it anyway when the tolerant become intolerant, transformed into its opposite like a person becomes a zombie in The Walking Dead—which is a perfect parable for the nature of intolerance: You cannot tolerate intolerance, which means you cannot be a tolerant person unless you exclude yourself completely from intolerant people, which the zombies are a metaphor for. In the Walking Dead, when intolerant Merle, who has relied on intolerance to survive, realizes he’s been an asshole and does a u-turn to help out the “family,” he is killed and turns into a walker, which brooks no alternative but to eat people. In other words, the walkers are the epitome of intolerance. They are mindless intolerance. The only defense against them is to kill their (mindless) brains. Humans, even the mindful ones, conclude that you cannot tolerate a blind force that will ultimately kill you given half a chance. This is a fundamental flaw in human nature, which is, still, in the process of evolving toward “a more perfect union,” which only tolerance can promote. People of advancing evolution see the advantages of democracy as an institution that enables the maximization of both individuality and cooperative social interaction. But democracy requires tolerance. If intolerant people are excluded, individuality, to whatever degree necessary, is disallowed. In practice, it becomes a matter of a workable mean; extremes (like Charlottesville) must be avoided. But how do we do that without becoming intolerant? Proper policing might help a great deal; but we have seen that police forces often harbor and may readily exercise intolerance, especially when it comes to defending intolerant people who tend to align with policing mentality. Separation of “sides” can also help; but that’s just another way of separating us out instead of joining us into a more perfect union. And, anyway, one of the sides that we are separating doesn’t seem to be any more or less tolerant than the one they are being separated from; and the truly tolerant people are many miles away, staying out of it altogether, which is not a solution, but an escape from the problem inherent in the practice of tolerance; or, iow, we “sane” people do not tolerate the intolerance of either side. We will not let the zombies eat us if we can help it, and we will not kill them off; but we will exclude them from our social interaction, which itself is an intolerant practice. I can only conclude that we humans are hopelessly intolerant. Maybe, one of these millennia, we will have evolved into a better, more inclusive state of existence. But we are not there yet. Humans exist on a tolerant/intolerant spectrum. We each have our degrees of each, which becomes prompted by circumstance. When we are tolerant, we are nice people, pleasant to be around; when we are intolerant, we are assholes who seek others like unto ourselves that we may engage in hate together in a less perfect union. Existing pleasantly together, we epitomize the vision of our democratic principles; existing hatefully together, we yet pretend to practice these principles. But we do not. We cannot be both intolerant and democratic at the same time; and yet that is exactly what we would have happen. And since America is in principle a democracy, and since to be patriots means that we aspire to and adhere to those principles, when we are intolerant of others, we are not by definition patriots. The intolerant extremists who claim to be patriots are not; and on that perception, they may be excluded—except that our laws include them a priori. They were born here. So let them die here. In one way or another. Death always wins, in any case.