Why is this the likely progression of one^ initial response to objectionable difference? Because tolerance is, according to Fletcher, inherently un- stable—both the virtue and its act. At its core lies a psychological conflict that the initially tolerant soon find intolerable, insufferable. They must endure what they dislike and, all things being equal, would prefer to abolish. Their objections quite naturally generate “an impulse to intervene and regulate the lives of others.” At the same time, countervailing reasons of some sort convince them “to restrain that impulse ... [and] suffer what they would rather not confront.”21 And, since all those who suffer quite “understandably prefer an easier way,” the tolerant typically reconsider the objectionable activity or thing that requires their patient endurance and relocate it among the unbearably harmful or the harmlessly unobjectionable.