THRESHOLDS OF TOLERANCE (Part 2).

For those of my readers who missed it, I invite you to read the first part on thresholds of tolerance here.

In that text, we set out the idea of thresholds of tolerance and the various forms they take. In this article, meant as its sequel, the subject is the dynamics of those thresholds. In other words, we look at the factors that make one person’s threshold of tolerance differ from another’s.

Among those factors, we have:

• the relationship: a relationship can be defined as the bond, or the tie of dependence or influence, between individuals. In that sense, the relationship existing between two people is the first factor that defines thresholds of tolerance. With people for whom we feel a deep affinity or noble sentiments, our threshold of tolerance is less strict. Conversely, towards people we have only just met, or who have already disappointed or wounded us, we would be less inclined to loosen our threshold of the acceptable.

 

• past history: past history is the sum of the events and situations belonging to someone’s past that bear on an aspect of their present life. These are events we often pride ourselves on having left behind, especially the unhappy ones. Alas, they go on shaping us and steering us one way or the other. For those who have always respected us and understood the limits of their actions in our lives, we will pull our threshold of tolerance back. For those, however, who in the past never stopped trampling our limits and trying to impose their principles, their priorities or their way of life on us, we will logically hold them to a higher threshold of tolerance.

 

• self-interest: self-interest implies a personal advantage expected from a relationship. The interest each of us takes in one particular person means that with this person we will have a high threshold of tolerance, while with that one, things we thought intolerable suddenly become tolerable. What lies behind this variation is the expectation of a personal benefit. That interest may be time, love, money, a promotion, and so on. Once the advantage has been obtained, however, thresholds of tolerance settle back and return to normal. That is why, on Monday, Marie will laugh at a joke about race, and on Wednesday she will call you a racist for telling the very same joke.

 

So there we have three factors that shape the limits we impose on the people around us.

In the end, the theme of the threshold of tolerance turns on the respect we grant others by taking their diversity, their values and their needs into account. Our role, ultimately, is not to understand all of that. It goes no further than accepting it and acknowledging that the other person may live, in friendship, in a couple or in love, by choices that are their own, and that this should not in itself be an obstacle to the relationship that binds us.

We should not lose sight of the fact that the more our behaviour forces a friend to raise their threshold of tolerance, the more we are working, knowingly or not, towards the end of that relationship. Don’t wait until it is too late! Live and let live!

M. Z.