RODNEY HIDE: Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance

In “The Open Society and Its Enemies” (written during the Second World

War, in New Zealand), Karl Popper identified a structural problem for

liberal societies. Unlimited tolerance, he argued, is self-defeating.

If a tolerant society extends unlimited tolerance even to those who

are themselves intolerant — and who would, if they gained power,

abolish the tolerant order — then the tolerant will eventually be

destroyed, and tolerance with them.

The core idea is simple: a society committed to openness, free speech,

equal legal rights, and individual liberty cannot treat every demand

or practice as equally legitimate. It must be prepared to defend the

conditions that make tolerance possible. This does not require

suppressing private belief or voluntary practice. It does require

refusing to allow the institutional or political expansion of systems

that reject the open society’s foundational rules.

Popper was writing against the totalitarian movements of fascism and

communism that used democratic freedoms to undermine democracy itself.

The principle is general: any closed ideology that demands supremacy

over liberal norms poses the same structural challenge.

Application to Sharia and Full Female Covering

Sharia, in its classical and many contemporary formulations, is not a

private ethical code. It is a comprehensive legal and political system

that claims authority over public life, family law, criminal

punishment, and the status of women and non-believers. Where it is

applied as state or community law, it rejects key liberal principles:

equality before the law regardless of sex or belief, freedom to leave

the religion, and the priority of individual rights over religious

authority.

When Muslim immigrants or community leaders press for the application

of Sharia principles inside Western liberal democracies — parallel

legal systems, pressure for religious exemptions that override sex

equality, or demands that criticism of Islam be treated as

illegitimate — they create exactly the situation Popper described. The

open society is asked to tolerate practices and claims that, if

generalised, would end the open society. Unlimited tolerance of those

demands is not neutral; it is a one-way concession.

Full covering of women (niqab or equivalent, leaving only the eyes

visible) is a related but distinct issue. In a free country, adults

may dress as they choose. Voluntary religious dress is protected. The

difficulty arises when the practice is defended or promoted as a

non-negotiable religious requirement that must be accommodated in

public institutions, schools, workplaces, and official ceremonies, and

when criticism of it is branded as bigotry. At that point it ceases to

be merely private and becomes a public signal of sex segregation and

the subordinate visibility of women.

This collides with the liberal achievement of the twentieth century:

the principle that women are full public persons, entitled to equal

presence and equal legal status. Celebrating or institutionalising

comprehensive female concealment as “empowerment” empties the language

of women’s rights of its original meaning. It also creates practical

pressure on other Muslim women and girls who do not wish to cover, and

on the wider society’s expectation of open-faced interaction in civic

life.

Popper’s point is not that immigrants must abandon their religion or

that private covering must be banned. It is that a liberal society has

both the right and the duty to insist that its public institutions,

legal equality, and cultural norms of openness remain intact.

Tolerance does not require accepting the expansion of a parallel legal

or social order that rejects the equal status of women and the

priority of secular law. When demands for Sharia norms or for the

normalisation of female invisibility in public life are treated as

beyond criticism, the open society is no longer defending itself. It

is negotiating the terms of its own erosion.

Application to Māori Tribal Customs and Ancestry-Based Partnerships

The same principle applies inside New Zealand. A liberal democracy is

built on equal citizenship, individual rights, and laws that apply to

all regardless of ancestry. Māori culture, language, and history are

part of the nation’s inheritance and can be freely practised,

celebrated, and taught. Private voluntary association by descent is

also legitimate.

The difficulty arises when tribal customs and ancestry-based claims

are elevated into constitutional or institutional requirements that

create parallel systems of authority, resource allocation, and

political power based on bloodline. Co-governance arrangements,

race-based decision rights, and the treatment of the Treaty of

Waitangi as an ongoing partnership that privileges one ancestral group

over equal democratic citizenship move beyond cultural recognition.

They introduce a closed principle: political and legal status

determined by genealogy rather than by equal membership in the open

society.

Unlimited accommodation of these demands risks the same outcome Popper

identified. If ancestry becomes a permanent source of differentiated

rights and institutional power, the foundational liberal rule — that

the state treats citizens as individuals, not as members of ancestral

collectives — is eroded from within. Cultural respect does not require

constitutional dualism. A free society can honour Māori heritage

without accepting permanent political structures that divide the

population by descent and place tribal authority alongside, or above,

equal democratic law.

Again, the paradox holds: to preserve an open society of equal

citizens, there must be limits on the expansion of closed,

ancestry-based systems of power. We cannot tolerate the intolerant.

To sustain an Open Society we must understand it, know its limits, and

defend it.

Our present leaders’ openness without limit is destroying our Open

Society: totalitarian thinking and practice are on the march and well

advanced in our Parliament, government departments, schools and

universities. Our mainstream media are gone.

It is well disguised. It’s not jackboots across the Rhine. Or the

Red Guards’ New Long March. It’s the pink-haired mum full of caring

and kindness teaching our kids. Or the humble gentleman calling you a

bigot or worse for defending the freedom he doesn’t even know he is

giving away.

We need words not guns to defend our freedom. We need to use them

while we still can.

Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT party leader