What is social intolerance? Social intolerance is a process by which one person or group hates or shuns another person or group due to differences they possess. Social intolerance is a process, which advances from feelings, which occur as responses to one or more environmental factors. Environmental factors could spark fear, which is normally a major reason for prejudice's birth.
Antipathy of peculiars in a society is known by one common name: Social Intolerance. Social intolerance begins with many sources but mainly begins due to fear of the unknown. An example of fearing the unknown is how the American southerners enslaved and completely opposed freedom of black men due to fears of the black men's potential putting white men out of jobs as expressed in "The Narrative of Frederick Douglass". Fears normally tend to spark anxiety, which is normally heightened by personal insecurities.
Insecurity is a great reason for developing intolerance because the intolerant are so insecure that he/she begins to claim differences as faults. The accuser first thinks the difference as a fault, and when he/she speaks it, many people agree with the accuser thereby spreading an insecure person's stupid hatred thoughts into the minds of other insecure people. In all my experiences, almost every person possesses a form of social intolerance, but thereby denies that fault by creating excuses to justify him/herself. An example of this is people hating racist people but denying this hate as social intolerance, which just goes to show that all forms of hate are still social intolerance because they still do not wish to tolerate the hated. Hate remains the same even after generations, mainly due to the unchanging status quo.
At all times in history a status quo is constantly changing, but most people do not like change so these new changes were greatly abhorred. People do not like the idea of change because then it is getting used to something new and people just do not want that. People begin to believe that change is an insulting concept because it is different from general beliefs, and this ties in greatly with insecurity. One example is the rejection of Nicolas Copernicus's solar system due to the fact that our “great” Earth is not in the center where God can “smile upon us” the church argued. It was rejected for a very long time due to the insecurities of the people believing that “If the church was wrong about the solar system, could salvation be an illusion to easily damn us?” Change and social insecurities both work greatly to belittle great ideas and theories which could help the world.
Social intolerance can be harmful to many people and families, putting people in the Hester Prynne situation, and sometimes even leading to the Dimmesdale-ian insanity. The society can even Puritan-ify itself by the destruction of logic and the establishment of unrationalistic faith. Many people try to dethrone intolerance by using feelings as a javelin, but the javelin is just caught and snapped by the haters' abusive “ well they shouldn't be different” argument. Slave holidays were started by fear of revolt, and the people not allowing any holidays were scolded because of it. Almost all the insecurities of people created new intolerances, and the hate of change only helps to leave all these intolerances in place. People begin to shun the benefits of change and differences thanks to the intolerance. The society's mind narrows by not thinking of the possibilities of the hated; society becomes irrational, and the people only see a piece of the whole picture.
