2627: Tolerance is Overrated

LifeBlood: Tolerance is often treated as an unquestionable virtue. But should it be? You get what you tolerate. That's true with your children, your relationships, your organization, your community, and ultimately your society. This episode explores the limits of tolerance, why values without standards are little more than preferences, the relationship between diversity and shared values, and why healthy families and societies must be willing to distinguish between behaviors that strengthen them and behaviors that undermine them. What do you actually value? What kind of family, community, and country do you want to live in? And what are you no longer willing to tolerate in order to protect those things? Decide what matters. Protect what matters. And act like your values actually matter. Want to say “Thanks!” You can buy us a cup of coffee. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lifeblood George’s newest book is available! Get your copy of You’re Money Isn’t the Problem- You Are here: https://amzn.to/4uDYFRz Feeling busy but unfulfilled? The Meaningful Few helps you identify what truly matters, eliminate distractions, and live with intention and clarity. Learn more here: https://www.mymeaningfulfew.com/ Thanks, as always for listening! If you got some value and enjoyed the show, please leave us a review here: ​​https://ratethispodcast.com/lifebloodpodcast You can learn more about us at LifeBlood. Live http://lifeblood.live/, Twitter https://twitter.com/ourlifeblood, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/lifebloodlive, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lifeblood.live/, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNQ9Gc4mMwCHZKUHjbt0-qA and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lifebloodlive or you’d like to be a guest on the show, contact us at contact@LifeBlood. Live. Stay up to date by getting our monthly updates https://george-grombacher.aweb.page. Copyright LifeBlood 2026.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 01

  "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." That is a profound line that is commonly attributed to G.K. Chesterton, whether he actually said it or not, exactly that way. The idea is 100% worth exploring. It's worth wrestling with because you get what you tolerate. That's true in your personal life, it's true in your family, it's true in your business affairs, it's true in your community, and it's certainly true in society as a whole. We've been told for decades, for decades, that tolerance is an unquestionable virtue. Be tolerant. Accept everything. Don't judge.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Don't criticize. Don't tell someone else how they ought to behave. Live and let live. And there's certainly wisdom in some of that. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just live and let live? And everything would work out awesome. But that's just not how it goes. Again, there's some wisdom in that, but I don't want to live in a society where everybody has to think exactly like me, or believe what I believe, worship how I worship, dress how I dress, or live exactly how I live. That sounds pretty miserable. It sounds like some kind of a monochromatic existence where it's just pretty vapid, pretty bland. Sounds miserable.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I am a big believer in individual liberty, in the power of the individual, the just, it's critically important to me. It's at the heart of so many things that I believe. But, but tolerance has limits. It has to, because again, you get what you tolerate. If you tolerate bad behavior from your kids, what's going to happen? You're going to get more bad behavior. If you tolerate poor behavior inside of your organization, what's going to happen? Well, performance is going to go down. Stock price goes down. Output goes down. Everything goes down.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Performance, everything, progress goes down, deteriorates. If you tolerate people breaking their commitments to you over and over again, what's going to happen? They're going to keep breaking their commitments to you over and over again. And if a community tolerates disorder, theft, violence, vandalism, open drug use, people making public spaces unsafe for everybody else, what happens? You get more of those things. And why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you do that? Humans respond to incentives. It's a story as old as time. We also pay attention to boundaries.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  We learn very quickly what's permitted and what's not, which means tolerance isn't always kindness. Sometimes just being tolerant is neglect. Sometimes tolerance is cowardice. Sometimes tolerance is an unwillingness to enforce a standard because enforcing that standard is uncomfortable. And sometimes what looks compassionate in the short term creates enormous suffering in the long term. And that brings me to another word, which we've been beaten about the head and face with for years, diversity. We've been told that diversity is our greatest strength.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And diversity can absolutely be a strength. Different experiences, different talents, different convictions, different ways of thinking, different cultures, different ideas, different perspectives. It's awesome. Those things, they can make a family, a company, a community, and a country much richer. But diversity, just on its own, on its face by itself, is not a virtue. A random collection of people with nothing binding them together is not automatically strong. Something has to hold the group together. It's got to be glue. Shared values, shared expectations, shared obligations, reciprocity, trust, a willingness to contribute.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Those are, those are glue, those are sticky, those are adhesives. We need a basic agreement about what behavior is acceptable and what behavior is not. Otherwise, diversity can just as easily become fragmentation. And then the question isn't, should we be tolerant? The question is, what should we tolerate? And its companion, what should we refuse to tolerate? To answer those questions, you first must need to know what it is you value. Because values that never influence behavior aren't really values. Those are just preferences, they're slogans, they're things you put on a stupid poster.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  But if you actually value something, you protect it. You defend it, you cultivate it, you reward behavior that strengthens it. And sometimes you say no to behavior that threatens it. So I'll go first. I value a high-trust society. I want my kids to be able to walk to school in the morning safely on their own. I want to be able to walk with my wife to the neighborhood bar at night and do so safely. I want to be able to unlock, to leave my front door unlocked if I want. I want my kids to be able to park their bikes in the front yard without wondering if somebody's going to steal them.

• 6:36Speaker 00

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• 7:17Speaker 00

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• 7:41Speaker 01

  I value harmony. I value reciprocity. I value cleanliness. I value contribution. I value personal responsibility, and I value freedom. And I recognize that every one of those things has requirements. Everything costs. You don't get a high-trust society without trustworthy behavior. You don't get clean communities when nobody is expected to clean up after themselves. You don't get reciprocity when some people are forever expected to give while others are forever permitted to take. You don't get personal responsibility when every bad outcome is blamed on somebody else.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  You don't get freedom without responsibility, and you certainly don't get harmony by pretending disagreement doesn't exist. Those things have to be cultivated and protected, which means we need the courage to discriminate between behaviors. Not between the inherent worth of human beings, between behaviors. This is good, that's bad. This strengthens our family, this weakens it. This makes our company better, this makes it worse. This builds trust, this destroys trust. This helps our community flourish, those judgments are unavoidable. The only question is whether we're willing to make them consciously.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  So I invite you to deeply consider what you value. Not what you've been told you're supposed to value, not the fashionable answer, not the one that gets you likes and applause. What do you value? What kind of family do you want? What kind of neighborhood do you want? What kind of organization do you want? What kind of country do you want? What behaviors make those things possible? And what behaviors make those things impossible? Now, here's for the tough part, the uncomfortable part. We have to start acting like those values matter. We say yes to strengthen them.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  We say yes to those things that, that foster, that help those values to flourish. We need to reward those things. We need to model them. We need to encourage them. We need to lift those up. We need to teach them to our kids. We need to expect them from the people that are leading and representing us, and we need to expect them from the people that we also are leading. We must say no to behavior that undermines them, not in a cruel way, not recklessly, and not because somebody is different from you, but because standards matter, boundaries matter, expectations matter.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And civilization itself depends upon people agreeing that some behaviors are worthy of encouragement and others are not. Tolerance has a place. So does compassion, so does forgiveness, so does patience. But none of those virtues require abandoning judgment. None of those require surrendering standards because you get what you tolerate. So decide what matters, protect what matters, and stop tolerating the things that destroy it. That's the work. And at some level, we're always talking about a very, very similar thing. We're always talking about doing your part by doing your best.

• 11:15Speaker 00

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