Profound Statement

If 'acceptance' were instead 'agreement', the statement would have a better chance of being seen initially as profound.

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'Tolerance' is a form of 'acceptance'. As such, the statement is a tautology with an odd suggestion of a contradiction....IMHO.

I can tolerate this thread on the basis that you must be having a quiet Friday evening with not much else to do.

A tacit acceptance!

How profound.

I don't find this statement profound in any way....who would assume acceptance with silence, silence is no feedback, and no feedback is apathetic in nature, certainly not positive reinforcement...in fact disengagement may be considered a negative reaction....However what is profound to one person may be meaningless to another....Personal growth is a solitary path...

This statement is profoundly overstated. Mistaking tolerance for acceptance is just not so up to it.

Tolerating and ignoring are much the same thing.

So, basically no one cared what he did.

Profoundly lonely.

The whole of western democracy is based on politicians claiming the support of "the silent majority".

That reference is somewhat dated....I would think any politician making that claim nowadays would be voted out of office, and be constantly attacked until their departure....When you point to a group and say they won't stand up for their rights, get ready to start ducking....Look at what happened to Nixon, the one who coined the phrase back in '72 about support for the Vietnam war....

Few people realize the of coining that phrase was what actually caused Nixon's undoing.

Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit (He who is silent is taken to agree; he ought to have spoken when he was able to)

-Latin proverb

That reference is somewhat dated...When you point to a group and say they might have some responsibility even in their silence, get ready to start ducking....Look at what happened to the Latin language, in which the proverb was originally phrased so long ago....

I do not see it as profound. But more so, every day life. Especially when dealing with law enforcement.

Here in the United States, silence in the face of dealing with law enforcement does not truly equate to tolerance or acceptance.

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Silence may indicate an understanding of rights enumerated in the Constitution.

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Silence may indicate appreciation of the liberties one currently has.

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Silence may indicate an appreciation of continuing in a state relatively free of grievous bodily harm. This may vary significantly depending on the particular location of the encounter and the amount of melanin displayed by the citizen/suspect/perp.

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Silence may indicate an understanding that statements made to police cannot be used in court for one's benefit, only against one's benefit.

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Silence may indicate the understanding of the extremely unequal footing one may be on when directly dealing with the police, wherein it is acceptable and common practice for police to lie to those they question, but lying to the police can bring a myriad of charges.

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Never, never. never......

Re: Profound Statement

"Tolerance" and "toleration" carry a connotation of repugnance or disagreement. They are a bit like "forgiveness" in that. Just as we don't speak of "forgiving" an act of kindness, we don't speak of "tolerating" behavior or ideas that we see as good. We tolerate what is not intolerable. What is intolerable is so bad that it cannot be allowed to go on without our interfering with it.

What is tolerable is "not extremely bad". This involves a negation of extreme badness, and this negation, in practice does not include what's at the other end of the spectrum, that is, what's seen as good. In practice we talk of tolerating things that are undesirable, but not so undesirable that they can't be let be.

Toleration is often seen as a virtue, like forgiveness. It implies some moral priorities, and not sweating the small stuff. It also lubricates human harmony in populations with diversities of customs, beliefs, and behaviors. Another aspect-- we don't generally call someone who has no priorities or discriminative faculties "tolerant." ("amoral"? "indiscriminate"?) Both toleration and forgiveness imply some discrimination between the ideal and the less than ideal, and a degree of emotional counter-intuitiveness.

Collectively, though, things are much simpler and less virtuous. Nations institutions don't have to struggle in the same mind between repugnance and toleration or forgiveness. A tolerant nation can be a nation that simply doesn't recognize certain distinctions. Systems don't struggle with moral dilemmas. A system is not a unified consciousness that actually feels the internal conflict. Nations are pluralities of minds, some of which feel or believe one way about a thing, and some of which feel or believe another way. A person can promote tolerance as a political goal, while remaining an intolerant jerk as an individual. There's a lot of that going on today. Collectivized notions of virtue allows for a kind of ethics-by-proxy that leaves individual humans untouched by internal moral dilemmas, and unimproved in the lack of the experience. Political activism bears only the slightest connection to ethics.

Virtue is difficult. Systems don't feel the pain of difficulty.

"Tolerance" is a broader term than "toleration," which is restricted to persons. "Tolerance" is also used as a specification of "tolerable sloppiness" in engineering, where it has little to do with virtue, only practical matters. Fittingly, "tolerance" is the cognate used most commonly for the political or collectivist notion of tolerating.

There's a spectrum of attitudes toward things that are valued differently. Intolerability is at one end. Embracing and support are at the other. (Well, reverence and awe could be included, but let's be practical.) The relative positions in the middle are debatable. I'd say that toleration implies more undesirability than acceptance, but "grudging acceptance" is close to synonymous. Consider the connotative difference between being accepted by a group of people and tolerated by that group. All of these imply more repugnance than assent or endorsement.

Human sentiments are subject to subtle variations, even when the behavior that follows from them is pretty much the same. If one views tolerance or toleration as a behavioral response, it still implies a certain predisposition of sentiment.

As to the original post, I wouldn't call the statement profound, but it does play on a relatively subtle distinction, and might indicate some discernment. But I have to say that it's a distinction that has appeared somewhat frequently in literature and isn't particularly original. Still, it takes some discernment to recognize the difference.

You raise some interesting points and do a good job of fleshing out some of the subtleties.

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While 'how bad something is', certainly plays a role in what we tolerate, another big influence is the perception of our ability to cause positive change. Often people tolerate what they believe they cannot change, but if they thought they could do something about it, many would.

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There are also important distinctions related to theory of mind about what qualifies as an act of kindness. What may may be seen as an act of kindness from the perspective of the doer/recipient may not necessarily be seen as such by the recipient/doer. But a recipient who feels wronged, but later learned that the doer acted out of kindness, may be far more likely to extend forgiveness or even tolerance.

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I still feel that 'tolerance' is a subset of the more general 'acceptance'. Your note of 'tolerance' being very close to 'grudging acceptance' would seem to lend support to this.

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It is also worthwhile to note that the use of 'acceptance' can be very different when the object is a person than when the object is an idea. 'Being accepted by a group' has a generally very positive connotation when the object being accepted is a person.

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When the object is an idea, acceptance might be positive or negative:

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"The group accepted the ruling and came to terms with their individual prison sentences as they had no further legal options."

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"The group accepted the award with appreciation and humility."