When did we unlearn how to tolerate opinions?

In the picture, you can see a stylish lady in the Bavarian sense, disappearing behind the soft focus of a beer mug and the inserted lettering. The saying in the picture, presumably taken at the Oktoberfest, suggests an implied framing that corresponds with rejection.

“If I had known what you do for a living, I wouldn’t have bought you a beer.”

In the further text below the picture, which was sent to me on LinkedIn, the employee from the nuclear industry dressed in a dirndl reports that she stands behind her job and the peaceful use of nuclear power. More details are not disclosed; only that she does not see herself as an activist for nuclear power and does not educate anyone unsolicited. However, when approached, she can think of plenty of arguments in favor of nuclear power. And she shares them passionately.

The lady's contribution below the picture conceals the question that gives this vignette its title.

“When did so many people forget how to simply tolerate other opinions?”

This question can indeed be wonderfully answered. That’s why I’m writing it down here.

Postmodernism began roughly 50 years ago. Around the same time when nuclear power also temporarily gained societal acceptance. Since then, people have increasingly relied on their own constructs. This made them pessimistic because they no longer wanted to acknowledge that things stand in complex relationships with each other. But like nuclear power, its evidently risk-laden nature cannot simply be deconstructed into its scientific genius to eliminate associated difficulties.

I do not know the arguments of professional advocates well enough and do not wish to delve into them.

My concern is with the post-structuralist part, which turned a worldview based on science into a ruin that we today may call the post-factual age because people align a large part of their actions post any fact.

Actions can always be justified. Behavior less often. However, when a privately hegemonic canon of social opinion constructivism is meant as a reason, it becomes difficult.

The emerging relativism was increasingly preferred over objectivity as early as the 1980s. Today, at the height of anti-realism, ideals are no longer even formulated. We are experiencing a pronounced nihilism that places itself above any morality. At best, a few Brahmins produced by the overproduction of elites express costly signals of moralization. No scientific facts help anymore – neither with nuclear power nor with viruses. We move on to the stage of fatalism that quite accurately illustrates the conditions of the masses after a visit to the beer tent. That form of prosperity neglect that sets in when orientation does not return because the contexts have collapsed.

Oh yes… and irrational – because the word was mentioned with the initially mentioned picture – is in itself not an argument. The concept of reason is currently suffering just like orientation primarily from the collapse of contexts (see Pörksen, "The Great Irritation", 2020). Orientation is another word for meaning. The meaning seems to have been lost to us.

As a society, we increasingly fail to let ourselves be guided by reasons in some contexts. Structural rationality has in some sense given way to private hegemony. This makes us maximally unfree at present – despite continued high prosperity and talk of liberalism, which in its political form has just been thrown out of parliament. It hardly gets more toxic. What does a little alcohol matter? Even if it no longer brings joy to life. Cheers!