Introduction

This book is a philosophical exploration of society and human history. It charts political philosophy from Plato to Marx, and shows how seemingly subtle differences in how we interpret history have profound effects on the society we live in.

I chose to read The Open Society and It’s Enemies because Nassim Taleb said in Fooled by Randomness that it was a major influence on him. I started reading the first chapter of The Open Society and It’s Enemies, and I was hooked. I was blown away by the way Popper showed Plato’s thinking echoing through history and reverberating as totalitarianism both as fascism and communism.

The book is a warning against the urges that lead to totalitarianism, and an emphatic argument in favor of liberal democracy.

Context

Karl Popper was an interesting guy. He was best known for his contributions to scientific thinking, for example he promoted the idea that scientific theories should be falsifiable. Take the example of asserting that “all swans are white”. Popper pointed out that you can’t prove this assertion by discovering white swan after white swan. You could discover millions of white swans as “evidence” but that still never proves that all swans are white because you don’t have access to all the swans. In contrast, discovering a single black swan can disprove the theory. So even though the assertion that “all swans are white” is not true, in Popper’s mind it is a good scientific theory in it’s fundamental structure, since it can be disproven (by finding one black swan). He changed the way scientists think, encouraging the scientific community to put out theories that are falsifiable. If something is falsifiable, it is a scientific theory. If it’s not falsifiable, it is closer to a belief.

So what does this have to do with political philosophy? Popper brought some of this focus on rational thinking into the political realm. He wrote The Open Society and its enemies during World War II, at a very scary time for the world. Fascism and totalitarian Communism was on the rise. Popper’s home country of Austria was annexed by the Nazis. He wrote this book in a kind of “pen is mightier that the sword” way of fighting back against some of these troubling trends.

Summary of Content

In this book, Popper traces the roots of totalitarianism all the way back to Plato. He shows how some of Plato’s totalitarian leanings echoed through history and ultimately produced fascism (Nazi Germany) and Marxism (Communist Russia).

Themes and Analysis

The book starts with Plato. Popper shows that the rise of democracy in Athens was threatening to Plato, and Popper suggests that Plato developed some totalitarian urges in response to this. For example, Plato had a theory of “Forms or Ideas” which was basically that everything in the world started as a perfect version of itself - kind of a prototype of that thing. That applies to everything from chairs, to apples, to society itself. Plato believed that that prototype was originally perfect, but as time goes on, each new instance of that thing is a little worse than before. Things basically decay. So Plato believed that if you wanted a perfect society, you would need to make a big effort kind of wipe the slate clean, make it into that idealized “original state” (in Plato’s mind that looked something like Sparta), and then try to make sure it doesn’t change from there. It’s a fundamentally conservative way of thinking.

So how does Plato suggest we stop society from changing? Well there’s a lot that goes into it (and I still need to read The Republic to find out for myself), but according Popper, Plato believes society should be strongly divided into a ruling class and a ruled class. The ruling class should be banned from economic activities so that they don’t get too competitive with one another - he wants total cohesion among the ruling class. Generally speaking, Plato wanted “philosopher kings” to rule - a specially educated elite ruling the masses.

Over the course of the book, Popper shows how the totalitarianism of his day (both in the form of fascism and communism) could be traced back to Plato’s ideas.

Specifically, he argues that there are two types of societies: the closed society and the open society. The closed society could be defined as tribal. Everyone has their role, and the structures, traditions, and customs of that society are rarely questioned by its members. He argues that there is something comforting about this idea to humans. But as society has become more complex, we lose that comfort. Suddenly everything is open to debate. How should we run our society? What are our values? What is my role in society? How should I go about trying to find happiness and meaning in society? To Popper this recommends a kind of fork in the road for society. At this point, we can either try to turn back toward tribal life (the closed society), or we can embrace the unknown and face it head on as an open society, where we accept that everything can be questioned, and we must chart our own path. He argues that fascism and marxism are both attempts to return to the tribal, closed society. They claim to offer a total solution, where if followed, we can rid ourselves of the stress and pain of the open society, and live it a more utopian world.

But to Popper, utopian thinking is dangerous and unrealistic. He argues that society is simply too complex to try to redesign from scratch, from a blank canvas. You would be messing with too many (infinite?) variables at once, and the chance that your decisions will have unintended consequences are unacceptably high. He proposes a different method, which he calls “piecemeal social engineering”. Rather that trying to design your ideal society from scratch (as Plato tried), choose something specific that you want to improve, propose a falsifiable hypothesis on how to improve that thing, try it, and decide if you were successful. This is more inline with the scientific method, and it seeks to isolate variables so you don’t have to wipe the canvas clean (eg. violent revolution) every time you need to make a change.

How do we choose which things to improve? Don’t try to make your citizens happy. This sounds counterintuitive, but Popper offers a compelling rationale: there is no one prescription for happiness. Who is to say what values lead to happiness? Plato would probably say that the philosopher kings would know? But Popper argues that happiness is ultimately up to the individual. Instead of trying to make citizens happy, we should try to relieve their suffering. We should use piecemeal engineering to remove the suffering that is a barrier to their happiness, whatever that means for a given individual. This means we should be trying to reduce poverty, crime, exploitation, and other barriers to individual freedom.

For example, Popper states that “the piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good”.

He goes on to say:

“…the piecemeal engineer can claim that a systematic fight against suffering and injustice and war is more likely to be supported by the approval and agreement of a great number of people than the fight for the establishment of some ideal. The existence of social evils, that is to say, of social conditions under which many men are suffering, can be comparatively well established. Those who suffer can judge for themselves, and the others can hardly deny that they would not like to change places. It is infinitely more difficult to reason about an ideal society. Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization. As opposed to this, blueprints for piecemeal engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single institutions, for health and unemployed insurance, for instance, or arbitration courts, or anti-depression budgeting, or educational reform. If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a re-adjustment not very difficult. They are less risky, and for this very reason less controversial. But if it is easier to reach a reasonable agreement about existing evils and the means of combating them than it is about an ideal good and the means of its realization, then there is also more hope that by using the piecemeal method we may get over the very greatest practical difficulty of all reasonable political reform, namely, the use of reason, instead of passion and violence, in executing the programme.”

It is important to note that in the addendum to the book, Popper stresses that it is not really as simple as making your public policy’s only goal to “reduce suffering”. This is an oversimplification and would have strange consequences, in the vain of Goodhart’s law that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

From the addendum:

“On the other hand I certainly never recommended that we adopt the minimization of misery as a criterion, though I think that it is an improvement on some of the ideas of utilitarianism. I also suggested that the reduction of avoidable misery belongs to the agenda of public policy (which does not mean that any question of public policy is to be decided by a calculus of minimizing misery) while the maximization of one’s happiness should be left to one’s private endeavor. (I quite agree with those critics of mine who have shown that if used as a criterion, the minimum misery principle would have absurd consequences; and I expect that the same may be said about any other moral criterion.)”

Throughout the book, Popper stresses the importance of preserving democracy. He says that democracy is the ability to change your rulers without violence. This is incredibly precious, and is the key to making the open society work. Totalitarian systems might promise the world, but what happens when you question their methods or their competence? What happens when the values of the rulers are out of sync with the values of the ruled? They you are stuck needing to muster up the courage to put together a violent revolution and all the pain and suffering that goes along with that. Democracy, on the other hand, gives the ruled a mechanism by which they can rule their rulers.

Popper acknowledges that democracy, and open societies generally, are not free from conflict, growing pains, and the like. In fact, he states clearly that this is an important fact about open societies - it is stressful for a society to be constantly questioning itself, making adjustments, and allowing individuals to disagree. But it is the only path away from tyranny. He urges us to be brave in the face of these challenges, and reminds us that history isn’t some inevitable march toward democracy and freedom, it is something that each generation must choose for itself and work to protect.

Aside from his criticism of Plato, Popper also spends plenty of time attacking Hegel. He believes Hegel was not only an incomprehensible writer, and an unoriginal philosopher, he also believes Hegel’s work was effectively propaganda for the Prussian monarchy. And Popper provides plenty of examples where Hegel twists seemingly liberal values like constitutions, freedom, and liberty into endorsements of monarchy. Popper seems utterly frustrated that philosophy was so heavily influenced by Hegel, mostly (according to Popper) because they fell for his fancy-sounding writing that said nothing at best, and at worst planted the seeds of fascism and totalitarianism  that would threaten the world and lead to World War II.

Deeper exploration and random musings

Science as GAN

In the chapter “The Sociology of Knowledge” Popper explains how the social dynamics of the scientific method allow collective objectivity to emerge from individual subjectivity. Science doesn’t depend on each individual scientist going through deep introspection to rid themselves of their own subjective point of view. In fact, scientists often have pet theories that their are partial too, and they are motivated to prove those theories. This turns out not be a problem because of how the social structure of science works: scientists try to disprove each other’s theories. So while each individual node (scientist) might be subjective, the network as a whole (the social aspect of scientific method) is objective.

It’s worth sharing the full quote from Popper:

“Everyone who has an inkling of the history of the natural sciences is aware of the passionate tenacity which characterizes many of its quarrels. No amount of political partiality can influence political theories more strongly than the partiality shown by some natural scientists in favour of their intellectual offspring. If scientific objectivity were founded, as the sociologistic theory of knowledge naïvely assumes, upon the individual scientist’s impartiality or objectivity, then we should have to say good-bye to it. Indeed, we must be in a way more radically sceptical than the sociology of knowledge; for there is no doubt that we are all suffering under our own system of prejudices (or ‘total ideologies’, if this term is preferred); that we all take many things as self-evident, that we accept them uncritically and even with the naïve and cocksure belief that criticism is quite unnecessary; and scientists are no exception to this rule, even though they may have superficially purged themselves from some of their prejudices in their particular field. But they have not purged themselves by socio-analysis or any similar method; they have not attempted to climb to a higher plane from which they can understand, socio-analyse, and expurgate their ideological follies. For by making their minds more ‘objective’ they could not possibly attain to what we call ‘scientific objectivity’. No, what we usually mean by this term rests on different grounds8. It is a matter of scientific method. And, ironically enough, objectivity is closely bound up with the social aspect of scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists.”

This “friendly-hostile cooperation” of the social aspect of scientific method brings to mind the concept of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in machine learning and artificial intelligence. A GAN is essentially a computer program with two competing programs inside of it. You can think of these competing programs as two “adversaries”. One of these adversaries is called the “generator”, and the other is called the “discriminator”. The generator’s job is produce data (for example an image of dog riding a skateboard). It essentially guesses what this data might look like. Some guesses will be good, others bad. Now the second actor in this program (the discriminator) is to discriminate between the data generated by the generator, and real data (for example, real photos of real dogs riding real skateboards). As the generator tries to get things past and discriminator, it learns to get closer and closer to the real thing, otherwise the discriminator will be on it’s case. This sounds a lot like the “friendly-hostile cooperation” that Popper described, nearly 70 years before GANs were invented.

The fundamental principle between both the scientific method, and GANs is: “falsify your way to truth”. By creating a healthy tug of war between assertion and falsification, we can get closer to the truth.

Similarities to natural selection

The same principle of friendly-hostile cooperation can be seen in natural selection, the process by which evolution occurs, only with different actors. In natural selection, random mutations produce what could be seen as hypotheses, and the the environment acts as the hostile “discriminator”, falsifying (killing) the mutations that did not turn out to be beneficial and keeping the mutations that turned out to be useful.

If we look closer, we can see more similarities between Popper’s political philosophy and natural selection. Popper talks about the need to resist the urge to design a Utopian society from scratch by “wiping the canvas clean”. Nature seems to agree. It prefers piecemeal iteration (evolution via natural selection) rathe than intelligent design from a blank slate. New, fully formed, fit for survival organisms don’t just appear out of nowhere. The are always incremental iterations of a mostly similar previous version.

Divergence from natural selection

While the similarities between Popper’s ideas and natural selection are striking, there is one important difference: our consciousness. In evolution, there is not a predetermined goal, and the mutations aren’t consciously chosen, as far as we can tell. In piecemeal social engineering, we have the ability to to harness this iterative process and adapt it to serve our goals. Iterative design gives you lots of upside (the improvements collect over time) without much downside (you don’t need to start from scratch every time, and each failed iteration gets fed back into the process as information). This means we have a big advantage over natural selection: our mutations don’t have to random. We can use rationality to decide what our goals are, and produce “mutations” (eg. policies and institutions) that could plausibly achieve these goals. But you must be willing to admit when an experiment was a failure (falsification). Without this part of the process, you have left the realm of rationality and science.

The Open Society in the Age of AI

I wonder how Popper would adapt his ideas in the age of AI. I anticipate a resurgence of historicist and Marxist thinking as AI continues to improve. It will be very tempting for people to claim that “this time will be different”. It will seem more plausible than ever that using AI we might be able to extrapolate laws from history to predict the future, and to design utopian societies.

I hope we can find a balance between harnessing AI to reduce suffering and to solve concrete problems, while avoiding the temptation toward the kind of utopian thinking which leads to totalitarian rule by non-human philosopher-kings.

Marx’s original sin

One final thought about the book: while I found it fascinating to see the way Plato’s ideas (and his totalitarianism) echoed through history and eventually produced Hegel and Marx, I couldn’t help but feel that Popper pulled a bit too firmly on this intellectual thread spanning thousands of years. I felt that he tried to transfer the blame of Plato’s more despicable views onto Hegel on Marx. That just because he could show the influence, he could show the moral failings.

I haven’t fully decided how much I agree with Popper on this issue, and I certainly appreciate the depth of his analysis, but at times I admit if felt like Marx and Hegel were being punished for the original sin of being philosophers post-Plato.

With that said, anyone who read the book can see Popper’s treatment of Marx is quite evenhanded and respectful. It’s not your typical red scare criticism of Marx and his followers. Popper acknowledges the things that Marx got very right, and applauds Marx’s humanitarianism, but he is clear about the things he got very wrong – especially Marx’s prophecy of the state disappearing after an inevitable proletariat revolution.

Personal Reflection

Overall the book made me appreciate democracy and freedom. History is not some inevitable march toward democracy and individual liberty. Our ability to change our leaders without violence is a huge luxury that was fought for tooth and nail, and we must preserve it.

Popper’s deep analysis of philosophers and their writings made me much more interested in reading philosophy. Specifically, I’m going to read Plato’s “The Republic”, and I plan to read Schopenhauer, who Popper quotes a lot in his criticism of Hegel. I learned that Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to be influenced by Buddhism, which sounds interesting to me.

Critical Evaluation

While I found myself agreeing with Popper most of the time, the area where I found myself disagreeing was on Popper’s rejection of the idea of collective thought, society as an organism, hive mind, and similar ways of understanding society as a kind of superconsciousness. Personally, I am open to the idea that there is decision-making happening at a level above individual decision-making and conscious group consensus. Of course Popper would probably ask me for some kind of evidence of this superconsciousness, and I would point him to markets. Lots of meta-decisions are being made constantly by the market: namely resource allocation and prices. A market is a kind of super organism, or collective consciousness that seems quite obvious to me. Given Popper’s relationship with Friedrich Hayek, I would imagine this topic came up at some point. I hope to stumble onto some writing on this topic that would give me an idea of how Popper reconciled his disbelief in collective consciousness and his apparent believe in the power (and danger) of markets.

I get the sense that what Popper really takes issue with is our awareness that there may be a superconsciousness, because it makes it too tempting to then extrapolate an inevitable march of history (historicism), and most of all because ambitious politicians might try to exploit that awareness in the public to convince the public to give him or her a turn steering the ship (often with tragic results).

Key Takeaways

• Plato’s tendencies toward totalitarianism echoed through history

• Those totalitarian tendencies laid dormant for a long time in Philosophy until Hegel came around

• Hegel was a propagandist for the Prussian monarchy and so he took Plato’s totalitarian ideas and ran with them

• Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel, especially his historicist views that we can extrapolate laws from history that can predict the ultimate conclusion of history

• For Marx this was the inevitable disappearance of the state after a proletariat revolution

• Both fascism (on the right) and communism (on the left) were born from these totalitarian and historicist seeds planted by Plato and Hegel.

• They are ultimately attempts to return to the tribal closed society

• But we are past the days of tribal life, we must embrace the open society

• The open society is one in which everything can be questioned. Our roles, meaning, taboos, customs, everything can be questioned and change.

• This process of questioning and change is stressful for a society, but the answer is not to retreat to the apparent safety of the closed society, because we can’t have it both ways.

• We must use reason to proceed bravely as an open society and chart our path as best we can.

• We must use reason to try to arrive closer to the truth together.

• Rather than trying to wipe the canvas clean and build a Utopia, we should try to make gradual but consistent improvements to society using piecemeal social engineering, and by continuously building and improving our institutions.

• Democracy is the precious ability to change your rulers without violence.

• Democracy is the best tool we have to avoid the horrors of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.

This is all beautifully summed up in the following quote from the book:

“Arresting political change is not the remedy; it cannot bring happiness. We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic. For those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human71. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way—we must return to the beasts.”

Conclusion

The Open Society and Its Enemies had a profound impact on me. Popper’s ability to follow the threads of political philosophy from Plato, to Hegel, to Marx was incredible to see unfold. Popper has a fascinating mix of exacting rationalism and a deep love for mankind. It’s a beautiful book that made me realize that we are in control of our own destiny as a species, and we must face our challenges head on, together.