TOLERANCE

 You like to think you owe your brother nothing.

Your "neighbor", after all, is as distant from you as your most distant ancestor.

What do you owe to these people who existed in places, times and circumstances so different from yours, to the point that, if by a completely implausible miracle you were to meet them, you would feel like you were dealing with aliens?

In fact, these "others" who came before you, whose fatuities led them to engender, little by little, the acts that would result in your existence, had little or nothing to do with you, neither in language, nor in manners, nor in ideals. If you have a surname in common with them, that's all of it.

And if from this multitude of anonymous people, your "flesh", your "blood", did not inherit any trace of gratitude, what can we say about being grateful to these strangers who swarm around you, with other names, other faces, other languages, other bodies, demanding your sacrifice, demanding that you give them your place, demanding your respect?

Your aloofness in relation to their desires, their insistent intrusion into this little space of yours, is no greater than theirs when they realize that in everything you are "another", that you do not "belong" to them, that you do not want to belong to them.

The "other one" is your limit, he is your problem, he is your destruction, he is, in everything, the one that will bring your end.

This is where your reluctance to give in is understood. As little as possible. Because the other brings with him a whole world of possibilities that are not yours, of experiences that you will never know and of feelings that are completely alien to you, but in any case, this mystery that he personifies fascinates you. How, you wonder, can they get so excited about so little? How, you ask yourself, can they live and suffer, anguish and die for things that you, without hesitation, classify as trifles?

Then, when you stop to think about it, you see that you're no less strange to them. What are your ideals? What motivates you to breathe, to move forward? Your life, your sacrifice, your efforts all seem vain to them. So you are also, deep down, a mystery to them. They can't actually penetrate inside you. Your armor is so strong that they cannot actually see you as you are.

The biggest argument against mutual comprehension is our inability to truly *see* others. We only see reflections of ourselves everywhere. And such reflexes are sometimes clear, sometimes distorted. We are literally adrift in an "infinitely" indifferent universe, and everything it sends us as a resource, support or help, are images generated within ourselves, which are nothing more than our fears, our anxieties, our idiosyncrasies personified.

So, when you reject your brother based on things that make him intolerable in your eyes, you are largely rejecting yourself, because much of what you despise in him is your own doing, is the result of the limitations of your perception. When the most logical thing would be to extend a hand to someone who, deep down, is as lost as you, someone who is weak, blind, limited, and draws all the little strength he has precisely from this, from his limitations, because otherwise, if he were strong, if he were a god, the insignificance of everyone else around him would be unbearable. He would have noone to turn to, nowhere to run to. And then, when we realize how many of our neighbors' characteristics are part of them because we ourselves put them there, how they are just ghosts that popped up in our minds on a night of particularly feverish dreams, only then do we penetrate the core of a type of understanding that is in keeping with our instinct for self-preservation, because, by supporting my neighbor, I am in fact protecting myself, defending my spiritual integrity, safeguarding my mental health. And behold, finally, the night gives way to a day, even if only timidly sunny, in which the anguish, the hatred, the scream, the carefully elaborated plan to sabotage my brother in any possible way, gives way to the understanding, the REAL understanding, that I project all my defects onto my enemy, that I instigate him to act as I would like to do, that my enemy, as I represent him, is nothing more than my self, my self stripped of the veils of rationality with which I cover it, myself turned into pure anger, pure instinct. My image reflected only with all that is worst in me.

How much of what your brother says is what you would like to say, how much of what he does is what you would like to do? He walks where you want or have wanted to walk, he spends his sensuality where you barely exercise your modesty, he explodes where you would like to explode, he verbalizes the anger that you have grown used to containing, but which threatens to explode in front of him. Until the day when we fully understand ourselves, when we know how to perfectly control ourselves and understand perfectly what we want, what we do, what we think, until the day when we are entirely our own, conscious of every single mental process that goes on in the most impenetrable recesses of our mind, until the day when we can be absolutely certain that our reason for hating is real, palpable, and not a mere projection of some latent fear in our subconscious, until that day, which will most likely never come, we will never have a reason not to at least try to understand our brother and to extend our hand to him when he asks for it, even if it goes against our egoism, even if our instincts rebel against such indulgence. Because in this world where will clashes with will, your neighbor is the one who prevents your ego from destroying yourself, here we are all adrift, children playing in a playground that could implode at any moment, blind people leading blind people to other blind people who will help them find other blind people who struggle in vain to cure their blindness. 

That's all I can argue in favor of tolerance.