Discrimination is Not Bigotry: When Tolerance Becomes Civilisational Suicide, By Brian Simpson

No civilised person wants to defend bigotry. That battle was fought and rightly won decades ago. Racism, sectarian hatred, and arbitrary exclusion based on immutable traits are moral failures and social poisons. But something odd has happened since then: the word "discrimination" itself has been placed beyond the pale, as if all forms of judgment, preference, selection, and exclusion were morally equivalent to hatred.

They are not.

In fact, the complete abolition of discrimination — in the literal sense of discerning differences and making careful choices — is not moral progress at all. It is civilisational regression.

What Discrimination Used to Mean

Historically, to discriminate meant to distinguish, to judge, to choose carefully. A discriminating reader had good taste. A discriminating employer selected on merit. A discriminating culture set standards — aesthetic, moral, intellectual — and defended them.

Only recently has the word been flattened into a single meaning: any exclusion is immoral. Under this new orthodoxy, judgment itself becomes suspect, and boundaries are treated as cruelty.

But every functioning system discriminates:

Universities discriminate between applicants.

Courts discriminate between guilt and innocence.

Doctors discriminate between effective and ineffective treatments.

Parents discriminate between safe and unsafe influences on their children.

Remove discrimination, and you remove competence, quality, and coherence.

Tolerance Has a Breaking Point

Tolerance is a virtue — but like all virtues, it becomes a vice when absolutised. Unlimited tolerance does not produce harmony; it produces entropy.

A society that tolerates everything:

loses the ability to say "no,"

loses the confidence to defend norms,

and eventually loses the norms themselves.

This isn't a theoretical concern. When institutions refuse to discriminate between truth and falsehood, excellence and mediocrity, responsibility and irresponsibility, they decay. Standards collapse quietly at first — then suddenly.

The paradox is simple: tolerance requires limits to survive. If a culture refuses to discriminate against ideas, behaviours, or practices that undermine it, those practices eventually dominate.

The "Anything Goes" Trap

The modern creed of open tolerance assumes that all differences are equally valid and all choices equally deserving of respect. But this is not humility — it is moral abdication.

Not all ideas are equally sound.
Not all behaviours are equally constructive.

Not all cultural practices are equally compatible with a free, stable society.

To say otherwise is not enlightenment — it is intellectual laziness dressed up as virtue.

A society that cannot discriminate between what builds it up and what tears it down is not inclusive; it is undefended.

Discrimination as Responsibility, Not Cruelty

The fear of being labelled "discriminatory" has paralysed institutions. Employers retain incompetence. Universities lower standards. Governments refuse to enforce borders, laws, or expectations — all in the name of tolerance.

But discrimination, properly understood, is not cruelty. It is responsibility.

It is the willingness to say:

this works, that doesn't;

this is compatible, that isn't;

this should be encouraged, that should not.

Cultures that survive do not apologise for their standards. They teach them, enforce them, and transmit them — without hatred, and without hesitation.

A Culture Without Discernment Cannot Last

The deepest irony is this: the anti-discrimination absolutists are not building a kinder world. They are building a fragile one, incapable of self-correction.

When every distinction is taboo, the only remaining moral weapon is accusation. When judgment is forbidden, power fills the vacuum. And when tolerance becomes mandatory, dissent becomes the one unforgivable sin.

A healthy society does not need to hate. But it must discriminate — wisely, carefully, and unapologetically — or it will dissolve into incoherence.

Conclusion: Bring Back Discernment

No cultured person wants a return to bigotry. But no serious civilisation can survive without judgment.

Discrimination, in its original and proper sense, is not the enemy of tolerance — it is its precondition. Without the courage to draw lines, make distinctions, and defend standards, tolerance stops being a virtue and becomes a slow-acting poison.

The curve has gone too far. And unless we recover the ability to discriminate — thoughtfully, rationally, and humanely — we will continue mistaking moral seriousness for cruelty, and civilisational self-defence for intolerance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/discrimination_is_good_tolerance_can_destroy_us.html