Every society contains a population which together, as shareholders, possess a portfolio of norms, a portfolio of opportunities, and a portfolio of capital.
When we tolerate something, it means that we are willing to bear the knowing theft, involuntary transfer, or privatization of some small part of those portfolios that we would expect other members of the society to avoid.
We can bear these costs for both positive and negative reasons:
Positive: as an investment in the future, in the hope that these people will learn the norms, increase the portfolio of opportunities, or increase the portfolio of assets.
Negative: as a matter of convenience, resulting in our privatization of public assets ourselves, we can refrain from paying the cost of policing the portfolios by forgoing opportunities with the individual, or bearing the costs of protecting those assets from involuntary transfer.
The only way to know the difference between the positive and negative use of Tolerance, is to know whether the actions of the individual or group in question will result in the accumulation of assets or not.
But it should be clear that it is impossible to perform neutral tolerance. All tolerance is either good or bad. Claiming ignorance is just convenience: privatization. Theft of public assets for one’s personal consumption.
The complexity arises when multiple portfolios are involve and outcomes are speculative.
Unless ‘Tolerance’ is an economic strategy whose impact is fully understood by the population, it is not investment but convenience.
The example in the western countries is that they pay for their social programs by a) letting the USA pay for their international trade and defense costs, and b) using immigrants to create consumption not possible for the people to create by productivity. In canada, we add c) which is that we export resources. So the cost to canada is one of a pair of risk propositions: that immigrants can be assimilated sufficiently that a ‘canada’ and its portfolio can be maintained, OR that the future is irrelevant, and there is no responsibility we hold toward the future.
In the States, one population holds to its heritage – attempting to retain its portfolio in the belief that it is something unique in human history. Another seeks to consume that portfolio in an attempt to build a more utopian society. And that is the source of conflict.