Beyond Bounds Blog

There is a grand canyon between Acceptance and Tolerance and it has huge implications for international and intercultural communication. When two people of different lifestyles meet, they have a choice: to accept the other person, to tolerate him, or to not tolerate him. Obviously the latter choice doesn’t end well, but the former two choices have just as important implications that might not be so obvious. Is tolerance better, or is it just non tolerance for the patient and opportunist? We are taught tolerance in school, but we should really be taught acceptance.

The fundamental differences:

Acceptance involves understanding and togetherness; it celebrates differences and allows people of different places and lifestyles to live together and help each other. Accepting someone means that you let them completely into your heart regardless of their lifestyle or way of thinking. You connect yourself to them and openly share yourself with them and them with you. There are no boundaries, just different ways of approaching the same problems.

Tolerance involves separateness and ignorance; it requires that two sides endure each others presence, even though neither one enjoys it. One side is right and the other one is wrong, but there is nothing that you can do about it. You don’t understand why other people are the way they are and you don’t want to know. When you tolerate someone it is like tolerating bad behavior from a child. Some will ask “why do we tolerate this” and others will want to move into action to discipline the child, but doing so will disrupt the system so those feelings are suppressed.

Acceptance is unconditional, while Tolerance is conditional. If conditions change tolerance changes with it, but acceptance doesn’t change. A parent might tolerate a kid’s bad behavior until it affects her in a big way, in which she will blow up and take care of it. If this parent accepted the bad behavior, no matter what the kid did she wouldn’t do anything. While this is a very superficial way to look at acceptance vs tolerance, I hope this helps illustrate the point. When dealing with people, we accept the people and not necessarily their actions.

Tolerance hides deeper problems. Acceptance embraces reality. Accepting the wrong things can be a problem, but at least it’s honest and consistent.

Turning tolerance into acceptance

Be Honest. You have to find out what your true feelings are about other people before you can even begin to shed your shield of tolerance and build acceptance. If you find yourself saying “those silly French” or “I can’t stand Chinese people,” don’t hold it back. Embrace your ignorance, don’t deny it.

Only once you can openly admit that you have a tolerance problem can you move on to finding the roots of it and attacking it with acceptance. It’s very similar to an alcohol problem. If only we had tolerance-anonymous clubs

I would continue here, but I’m still working it out myself. Sometimes I feel that I have completely moved onto acceptance of the way the locals are here, but I falter more often than I’d like. I’m honest with myself about it, but I am still working out exactly what it means to be accepting.

Being at the level between tolerance and acceptance can be confusing sometimes and that confusion can hurt. At tolerance we turn that hurt into hate and the idea of “others” to channel that energy away from ourselves. Have you ever heard someone say “oh that’s just how they are”? We can ignore the mutual problems in our interaction by blaming the other person and letting it go.

When you don’t have that shield up anymore but haven’t gotten to the level of acceptance, the energy flies in all directions – this is where I am right now. I’ll continue to come back to this in the future. I really want to get over this hump soon. I feel that I’m close.