The Tolerant Society

Elsewhere this project dwells on the question of what defines a society’s culture, and in particular the extent to which the individualist / collectivist axis represents a fundamental differentiator between societies that explains much about the generation of wealth and happiness. Even in the most individualistic western societies though — the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia — survey data consistently identifies a substantial minority, typically somewhere in the range of 25 to 35 percent of adult populations, who hold genuinely collectivist value orientations. The question this essay addresses is the stance that individualistic societies should take toward their collectivist minorities.

The Collectivist Minority in an Individualist Society

Those who lean toward collectivism in generally individualist countries are not confused about individualism or waiting to be educated into it. They hold a different and internally coherent moral framework, one that political psychology has documented in considerable detail: a framework in which community loyalty, cultural continuity, deference to tradition, and the integrity of the group are primary moral concerns, not preferences to be weighed against the demands of individual autonomy. For these citizens, the question of what kind of person to be is not answered by reference to personal choice and self-actualisation; it is answered by reference to one’s place in a community with its own history, obligations, and expectations.

What makes this group politically distinctive — and sociologically fascinating — is that they are often among the most passionate and vocal defenders of what they describe as western civilisation. They rally behind flags, celebrate national traditions, support strong defence establishments, and frame their political commitments in explicitly civilisational terms: the defence of something inherited, ancestral, and worth protecting against forces of dissolution. The irony is almost perfectly constructed. The philosophical foundations of western civilisation, as the liberal tradition has understood it since the Enlightenment, are precisely the values that their own moral framework most directly rejects. The primacy of individual rights over community obligation, the universalism that refuses to privilege any particular cultural group, the cosmopolitanism that treats national belonging as one optional identity among many — these are not peripheral features of liberal democratic civilisation, they are its operating principles. The collectivist champions of “western civilisation” are, quite precisely, promoting a set of civilisational philosophies that are in direct opposition to their own underlying value systems. The cognitive dissonance involved is substantial, and largely invisible to those who experience it.

The connection here to the analysis developed in a previous essay — The Politics of Belonging — is not incidental. What that essay described as the emotional and identity-based needs driving the populist surge in western democracies — the longing for communal solidarity, the resentment of cultural displacement, the need for a shared story about who we are — are the subjective political expression of the same underlying phenomenon that the individualism/collectivism distinction describes at the level of values and culture. These are not two separate questions. They are the same question seen through different lenses. The person whose moral framework centres on community loyalty and cultural continuity is, at the psychological level, the same person for whom belonging is the primary unmet need in modern democratic life. To hold collectivist values is, in significant part, to be someone whose sense of self is constituted through community membership rather than individual autonomy — which is precisely the profile of someone for whom the fragmentation of traditional community structures is experienced as a deep and personal loss rather than a benign social evolution. The political expression is the proxy for the psychological need.

There is a further dimension here that the framework of needs developed in the cluster introduction makes visible with unusual clarity. The most enthusiastic advocates of liberal individualism in western societies are, by and large, operating at the upper reaches of Maslow’s hierarchy. Their material needs are met. Their safety and security are, for the most part, assured. Their social connections are robust enough, and their sense of identity sufficiently secure, that they can afford to treat it as fluid, chosen, and open to ongoing revision. From the vantage point of Maslow’s Level Five — the self-actualisation layer — the primary political concerns naturally cluster around individual expression, personal authenticity, and the expansion of options available to each person regardless of group membership. The collectivist minority in these same societies is not, in most cases, materially impoverished in any conventional sense. What many of them are experiencing is a poverty of belonging: a deficit not at the base of the pyramid but at Level Three, the layer concerned with love, community, and membership in a group that carries genuine meaning. Their material needs are met, but the social fabric that once provided stable communal belonging — the church, the close-knit neighbourhood, the stable industrial or agricultural community, the culturally coherent locality — has been eroded by the same economic and cultural forces that enable self-actualisation for the class above them in the cultural hierarchy. They are not struggling to survive; they are struggling to belong. And a political mainstream operating almost entirely within the self-actualisation register is talking, in the most literal psychological sense, over their heads.

What is distinctive about the current moment is not the existence of this tension — the communitarian critique of individualism has been a serious presence in political philosophy since at least the 1980s, and the political salience of cultural identity has been visible in western democracies for decades. What is distinctive is that the individualistic mainstream has accelerated past the point where it can maintain even the pretence of cultural inclusion for those who sit at the collectivist end of the distribution within western societies. The progressive turn in mainstream liberal politics — rapid change on gender, sexuality, race, migration, multiculturalism, the Environmental, Social and Governance movement, and the retrospective reassessment of national histories and symbols — has moved the cultural centre of gravity at a pace that has outrun any capacity for gradual accommodation. Constituencies whose sense of cultural belonging was already fragile now find that the mainstream account of their own civilisation treats what they value as either embarrassing or actively harmful. The reaction is not simply resentment, though it is that. It is the reaction of people whose belonging need is acute and unmet by the political mainstream, and this is where the politics of populism and illiberalism thrives.

The Paradox of Tolerance

Karl Popper identified what he called the paradox of tolerance in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): that a tolerant society, if it is to remain tolerant, must be prepared to be intolerant of intolerance. A society that extends unlimited tolerance to those who seek to destroy the conditions of tolerance will eventually find those conditions destroyed. Tolerance, in other words, is not self-sustaining — it requires a framework that sets limits on what kinds of conduct the tolerant community can accommodate.

The paradox has two further layers that are worth naming explicitly. The first is that illiberal constituencies within liberal societies are, almost without exception, dependent on the liberal framework for the freedom to maintain their illiberal practices. The freedoms of speech, assembly, religious practice, and community self-organisation that allow collectivist constituencies to persist and to resist cultural assimilation are precisely the freedoms that liberal individualism generates and protects. Illiberalism depends on liberalism in a structural sense that illiberal constituencies rarely acknowledge.

The second layer is the mirror image: people who hold intolerant views — toward minorities, toward cultural difference, toward ways of life that deviate from their idealised norms — typically resent strongly any expression of intolerance toward them on account of those views. The resentment is genuine, and from within their own frame of reference it is coherent. But it is logically untenable to assert the right to be intolerant while simultaneously claiming the right to be free from intolerance. A constituency that seeks to restrict the behaviour of their defined out-groups cannot simultaneously claim that its own behaviour should be beyond scrutiny.

These paradoxes are not rhetorical gotchas. They point toward the logical structure of the liberal settlement: that the framework must set limits on what kinds of conduct it can accommodate, and that those limits are grounded not in cultural preference but in the principle of reciprocal freedom — the harm principle, articulated most clearly by John Stuart Mill, that individual freedom only extends as far as it does not impose harm on others.

Values as a Constitutional Aspiration

Here I want to elaborate on the case, set out in the cluster introduction, that there is social benefit in embedding in national constitutions an expression of the values of the country.

The meta-position this project has taken us to is that there is a strong and consistent correlation between tolerant, liberal societies and human happiness. The causal chain from liberal culture through economic development to flourishing is plausible and partially evidenced. If causation can be established, and if happiness is accepted as the appropriate objective function for government, it follows logically that tolerance and liberalism should be foundational to the design of governance systems.

This is not, however, a conclusion to be imposed by political authority. It is a hypothesis to be tested, debated, and — if the argument is accepted — embedded through the kind of deliberative, citizen-constituted process that the Tribunate concept represents. The case for liberal values is strengthened, not weakened, by being subjected to exactly the kind of careful democratic scrutiny that the Tribunate is designed to provide. A constitutional framework that explicitly defines the aspirational values of the nation, that articulates tolerance and individual freedom as foundational to those values, arrived at through genuine deliberation by a randomly selected body of citizens, carries a democratic legitimacy that no political party’s proclamation of universal values can match. It also creates the objective standard for political accountability, and the mechanism for revision as social sophistication evolves.

To be explicit here and pre-empt the argument: declaring values doesn’t enforce them — but constitutionally embedded values can do more work than pure symbolism suggests. The German Basic Law’s opening statement that “human dignity is inviolable” isn’t a rule able to be enforced through the justice system in the simple sense, but it has shaped the entire German constitutional tradition, informed judicial reasoning across decades, and created a framework of political accountability that has real force. The South African post-apartheid constitution’s value preamble has had similar effects. The values don’t change behaviour directly; they establish an interpretive framework and a standard against which departures can be named and resisted.

But I think the more important point is that it is the process and debate itself that can make a difference. The Tribunate mechanism is actually the key here, and it does something that no parliamentary debate on national values can do. A parliamentary debate about what a nation stands for is instantly partisan — it becomes a competitive exercise in which each side tries to claim the values that suit its electoral interests, and the whole thing collapses into point-scoring designed to optimise the news cycle. A Tribunate process, constituted by randomly selected citizens from across the income, education, geographic, and cultural spectrum, deliberating over time with access to expert testimony and structured facilitation, would be a genuinely different kind of conversation. Ireland’s experience with citizens’ assemblies on questions that were even more values-laden — abortion, marriage equality — showed that this kind of process can produce recommendations with broad democratic legitimacy that no politician could have initiated independently. The belonging deficit is partly about feeling unrepresented and culturally dismissed; a Tribunate process that visibly and seriously gives average citizens — including collectivist-oriented representatives — the authority to define national values is itself a response to that deficit, regardless of what the outcome says.

A tension around values worth naming though is between universal and particular. Constitutional values tend toward the universal and abstract — dignity, freedom, equality — because those are the terms that can command broad assent across cultural difference. But the belonging need is for something more particular: not human dignity in the abstract, but a constituency’s way of life, traditions, a shared story about who we are. A constitutional values exercise conducted by the Tribunate might produce a document that’s too universalist to address the actual deficit. The response to this isn’t to abandon the exercise but to be clear about what it can and can’t do: it can establish the civic framework within which particular identities coexist, and it can model the democratic practice of deliberating across difference. It can’t substitute for the particular cultural belonging that displaced constituencies are seeking. The Governing for Happiness framework’s leadership dimension then becomes the mechanism for the particular — how governments model and promote specific national behaviours within the universal framework.

This is where the discussion in the cluster essay around leadership gains real meaning and becomes more than a platitude. The constitutional values process gives it substance: leadership isn’t just modelling abstract values, it’s actively engaging with and responding to a citizen-derived values framework that has genuine democratic authority. The Tribunate produces the framework; the leader’s job is to animate it — to tell the national story within the terms the citizens themselves have defined. That’s meaningfully different from a politician simply deciding what values to perform.

Accommodating the Illiberal

Within a liberal framework, individual preferences must be respected — including, at first sight paradoxically, the preferences of those whose values are themselves illiberal. This is not inconsistency; it follows directly from the harm principle. A collectivist constituency whose members prefer to live within a close-knit, tradition-bound social structure, where individual choices are constrained by communal expectations and cultural loyalty is prized above personal autonomy, is not causing harm to those outside the constituency simply by existing. The appropriate response of a liberal society to such constituencies is not hostility or forced cultural assimilation, but accommodation within a framework that preserves the exit option — an individual’s genuine ability to exit the communitarian group.

The power of the harm principle as a limiting condition becomes clear precisely in this context. What cannot be accommodated is the extension of the constituency’s internal norms to those who have not chosen to be subject to them, or the denial of the exit option to those who would prefer to leave. The freedom of a rural community to maintain its cultural practices and collective identity is fully compatible with the liberal framework. The suppression of dissent within that community, or the use of social or legal pressure to prevent members from leaving, is not.

The political accommodation that follows from this is more generous than the liberal mainstream has typically offered. It means actively supporting the conditions under which collectivist constituencies can maintain their distinctiveness — funding cultural institutions, protecting local traditions through subsidiarity arrangements, ensuring that all constituencies have genuine political voice rather than being systematically outvoted by individualistic urban majorities. It means taking seriously Charles Taylor’s argument that recognition — the genuine acknowledgment that a constituency’s way of life has value — is itself a component of flourishing, not merely a political concession. And it means designing institutions, like the process for formalising national values through the Tribunate, that include rather than marginalise these constituencies in the national conversation about what kind of society everyone is trying to build.

What it does not mean is endorsing the suppression of individual freedom within those constituencies, or accepting the use of social pressure, legal restriction, or public policy to impose collectivist norms on those who have not chosen them.

The Irresolvable Remainder

Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism deserves the final word here, because it provides the most intellectually honest framing of what remains after all the accommodations have been made. Berlin argued that genuine human values are plural and irreducibly so: freedom and community, individuality and belonging, the open society and the rooted life are not aspects of a single coherent ideal that a sufficiently sophisticated political philosophy can reconcile. They are genuinely competing goods, and the tension between them cannot be dissolved by any institutional arrangement, however carefully designed.

This is not a failure of the framework proposed in this project. It is an accurate description of the situation that any framework for human governance must navigate. The goal is not to produce a society where everyone flourishes in the same way — that aspiration is both philosophically incoherent and practically unachievable. The goal is to produce a society where the institutional conditions for diverse forms of flourishing coexist, where the tensions between them are managed through democratic deliberation rather than resolved through cultural imposition, and where the standard against which the whole arrangement is evaluated is the breadth and depth of human wellbeing it actually produces.

A tolerant society is not a frictionless one. The friction between individualism and collectivism is a permanent feature of any society where these values co-exist. This project is pointing in the direction of advocating for collectivist societies to become increasingly individualistic, a direction that if realised would only see the incidence of this tension increase. Managing that friction well — creating institutions that can hold the tension rather than suppress it — is one of the core tasks of governance for happiness. It is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be governed, and governing it well is itself one of the expressions of a society that takes human flourishing seriously.