Each in his own fashion — but please, not LIKE THAT

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On 22 June 1740, three weeks after taking the throne, the 28-year-old Frederick II received a report from the Ecclesiastical Department. It concerned Catholic citizens in a Protestant city who wanted to build their own school. His minister von Brand had objections. Frederick scribbled in the margin:

"Die Religionen Muesen alle Tolleriret werden und Mus der Fiscal nuhr das auge darauf haben, das keine der andern abruch Tuhe, den hier mus ein jeder nach seiner Fasson Selich werden."

(All religions must be tolerated, and the Fiscal must only see to it that none harms another, for here everyone must be saved in his own fashion.)

286 years later, two things stand out. First: the state is reduced here to a referee ("Fiscal"), no longer a guardian of faith — 47 years before the US Constitution, 49 years before the French Revolution. Second, and more important today: Frederick's motive was not humanism but population policy. He needed taxpayers, craftsmen, soldiers — regardless of denomination. Tolerance was reason of state.

Frederick was no modern liberal. His General Privilege for Jews in 1750 was restrictive, his private remarks about Catholics often dismissive. But that is exactly why the sentence still works today: it functions not because it is moral, but because it is pragmatic. And that is the more stable foundation.

Officially, all of us in 2026 are for diversity, of course. Self-determination! Live and let live! It's in every Sunday speech, every corporate mission statement, every party manifesto.

There's this meme that captures it perfectly:

Society: Be yourself. Society (next slide): No, not like that.

That's exactly the problem. Tolerance always comes with an asterisk. A footnote of exceptions that grows longer every year.

You eat meat? Murderer. You don't eat meat? Ideologue. You want kids? Selfish in times of climate change. You don't want kids? Selfish in times of falling birth rates. You work a lot? Hustle-culture victim. You work little? Lazy generation. You fly on holiday? Climate sinner. You don't fly? Privileged abstinence preacher. You believe in God? Medieval. You don't believe in God? Soulless.

Whatever fashion you choose — someone will find it the wrong one. And not quietly, but loudly, missionary-style, often outraged.

Frederick was further along in 1740 than we are today. He accepted — whatever his motives — that as king he could not decide what went on in another person's head. We pretend to have accepted that too. But the moment someone actually lives in their own fashion, the trouble begins.

Maybe this is the most honest self-test: not whether I am officially for tolerance (everyone is), but whether I stay calm when my neighbour does something I consider wrong — as long as he harms no one. That's where most of us fail. Myself included.

"Each in his own fashion" is not a comfortable sentence. It means I have to put up with others being different from what I think is right. And that is what diversity actually means — not that everyone lives the way I consider correct. Frederick understood this because it served him. It serves us too — we just need the nerve to admit it.

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