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The Open Society and Its Current Enemies

The Open Society and Its Current Enemies

Published in 1945, the book “The Open Society and Its Enemies” is the major work of the philosopher Karl Popper. This work was an important source of inspiration for the political orientation defined by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speeches in Fulton (Missouri) and Zurich: the formation of a group of Western states, based on the principle of freedom and human rights, to confront the Soviet empire. Consequently, the Iron Curtain became not only a physical but also an ideological border: the free world against the expansion of communist totalitarianism. This orientation constituted the framework within which political activity in the West took place after the Second World War: regardless of interests and political programs, the liberal constitutional state, based on fundamental human rights, in opposition to communist totalitarianism, was accepted by all major social groups and political parties. This framework shaped Western politics and society for over four decades. In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the continuation of this orientation seemed normal: freedom and the rule of law had won. The American sociologist and political scientist Francis Fukuyama even spoke of the end of history!

Today, it is clear that a new era has begun. Just as in 1946, humanity is at a crossroads between freedom and totalitarianism, and its choice for one or the other of these two alternatives will shape its life for many decades to come. It is a choice that involves all major social groups and political parties, regardless of their differences.

The open society is characterized by the recognition that every human being is a person, that is, a human being, considered to be a member of the human species, who has an inalienable dignity. He is free to live his life as he sees fit, but is responsible for the consequences of his deeds and actions on other people.

Freedom is the human condition and means the absence of constraints. People are free if they can think and act without any restrictions imposed by their peers. The absence of constraints makes people’s thoughts and actions determined and, therefore, justified by their own reasons - and exclusively by them. In contrast, those behaviours, which are simple reactions to biological stimuli and needs, do not have and cannot be claimed to have motivations. People are free because the human species has overcome the state in which it reacts only to biological stimuli and needs in the course of its historical evolution.

Freedom gives rise to fundamental rights. It is about the right to defend oneself against external interference in the act of choosing how one wants to live one’s life, but also about other rights: the right to life, the right to physical and mental integrity, the right to property, the right to work, social security, etc. In philosophy, these fundamental rights are considered to be given by the very existence of the person. They do not depend on the positive law of the state or on historical circumstances. For example, the idea of ​​natural rights is found in Roman civilization, which invented private property, the person and humanism; in the Age of Enlightenment, which politically demanded that universal human rights apply equally to all human beings and which led, among other things, to the abolition of slavery; in Kant, whose categorical imperative requires that all persons be treated always as ends and never as means; in the 20th century, among others, in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, adopted and proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948. A state governed by the rule of law is a state that respects these rights; it does not control and direct society, but allows its citizens to interact with each other freely.

According to Popper, the enemies of the open society are those individuals who claim to know what the general interest is. On the basis of this knowledge, they claim to be able to control and direct society in a “scientific” (“technocratic”) way, in order to achieve this higher interest. This knowledge is both factual-scientific and normative-moral: the latter refers to good (right) and bad (wrong) goals, and scientific or technocratic knowledge concerns how to control and direct people’s lives in order to achieve good goals. Consequently, this knowledge is more important than the freedom of individuals, that is, above their own judgment about how they want to live their lives.

The enemies of the open society come from within it. Popper clearly reveals this through his extensive description of the conceptions of society of Socrates, Plato, Kant, Hegel and Marx. Thus, Socrates and Kant laid the foundations of the open society; Plato, Hegel and Marx sought to destroy it, justifying their attempt with the claim that they and they alone know the absolute good towards which history is heading. This superior knowledge entitles them to assert that the fundamental rights and dignity of the human being can be violated, because the very existence of the human species is at stake. In other words, they justify totalitarianism: the whole of society and the private lives of families and individuals must be controlled and oriented towards the achievement of a supposedly absolute good, without any limits arising from considerations relating to human dignity and fundamental human rights. The followers of these enemies of the open society manifested themselves by the mass murder of a huge number of people – a “final solution” used several times in the 20th century to achieve the so-called “good”. Unfortunately, in this way, not only were human dignity and fundamental human rights abolished, but a catastrophic result was also achieved in terms of the dreamed good. In National Socialism, the attempt to realize the ideal of a Volksgemeinschaft with pure Aryan blood led to the ruin of the German people. In communist regimes, the economic conditions created by attempts to fulfil the “golden dream” of a classless and non-exploitative society were more oppressive than in the most extreme forms of “wild capitalism”. In order to build the “multilaterally developed socialist society”, dictatorial political regimes were established in Romania and in the other communist countries, based on an organized system of terror, repression and total control over citizens.

These ideologies and their political consequences seemed at one point to belong to the past. However, today, the world is once again faced with the need to choose between an open society and totalitarianism. The current enemies of the open society also come from within society and with the same claims to knowledge, both empirical and moral, which allow them, incidentally, to “scientifically”/“technocratically” shape a society in which human dignity and fundamental human rights are violated. The current enemies of the open society no longer invoke the mirage of absolute good, but appeal to fear, which they feed by invoking a series of alleged threats that would endanger the existence of the human species. These threats are illustrated by mentioning facts such as, for example, the spread of the coronavirus, climate change or Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The mentioned facts are used to resuscitate fears that some higher values ​​are at risk, such as protecting health and the climate, or the survival of the human species. As in the past, some scholars, politicians and economic policy makers today claim to know how to organize and direct social, family and individual life in order to preserve these values. It is, therefore, once again a question of a superior social good, in relation to which individual human dignity and fundamental human rights take second place.

The preferred means used is to present these dangers in the media in such a way that they appear as existential crises: a deadly virus circulating, a climate crisis threatening the lives of future generations, and so on. The fear thus aroused makes society inclined to accept the violation of the fundamental values ​​of modern civilization – just as in the totalitarianisms criticized by Popper –, in which the alleged good motivated many people to actually commit criminal acts. Evil is not necessarily done by inherently evil people, but is often caused by good people who believe that a certain danger has a fundamental value and commit acts that ultimately have devastating consequences.

The cultivation of fear is a means that strikes at the heart of the open society, because it exploits the existence of a real problem: negative externalities. This problem stems from the fact that a person’s freedom ends where it infringes on the freedom of other people. A person’s actions, including freely concluded contracts, have a certain impact on third parties outside these relationships, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish may be affected by the respective facts and acts. The limit from which a person’s freedom to live their lives as they wish affects the life of another person is not given a priori. This limit can be defined more broadly or more narrowly. The cultivation of fear consists in defining this limit in such a restrictive way that, under the pretext of solidarity in the face of danger, there is in fact no room for manoeuvre for living one’s own life freely: any life project of one’s own can be interpreted as causing negative externalities that prevent the realization of another person’s project.

The current enemies of the open society fuel the belief in the propagation of so-called scourges of the century. It is obvious, for example, that any form of physical contact can contribute to the transmission of viruses and bacteria. It is also clear that any human action has a certain impact on the environment and can therefore contribute to climate change. The consequence, however, is that all individuals can be accused of harming others by what they do. The burden of proof is reversed: it is not necessary for the accuser to bring concrete evidence that someone causes harm to others, but, on the contrary, each person has the burden of proving that they do not harm others, including future generations. Consequently, no one can escape generalized suspicion unless they present a certificate of good conduct, such as, for example, a vaccination certificate, a green certificate or a social credit certificate – in general. This practice is a variant of the sale of licenses by the state. It abolishes freedom and establishes a new totalitarianism, because it makes the exercise of freedom and the guarantee of individual rights dependent on a permit granted – or refused – by an elite made up of experts, bureaucrats, politicians, etc.

The choice facing society is therefore between, on the one hand, an open society, which unconditionally recognizes each individual as a person endowed with inalienable dignity and fundamental rights, and, on the other, a closed society, in which access to social life is permitted on the basis of a certificate, the conditions for the release of which are established by certain specialists – such as, for example, Plato’s philosopher kings or Marx’s “vanguard detachment of the working class”. Like these, whose alleged superior knowledge is refuted by Popper, their current descendants do not possess any special knowledge that would allow them to establish these conditions as they wish.

The problem of negative externalities is old in economic science. It stems from the impossibility of precisely defining this type of externality. The essential aspect, however, is not the existence of negative externalities, since it is indisputable that they exist, but the danger of using them as a pretext for establishing totalitarian control, which threatens even democratic states and societies. This danger stems from defining negative externalities in an arbitrary way, so that, in the end, any human being, whatever his actions, can be suspected of causing them.

This phenomenon can be combated by a vision of man based on the fundamental values, which are freedom and human dignity. From this flow other fundamental rights, which apply unconditionally, in the sense that their validity cannot be subordinated to a higher objective. They cannot be suspended, unless the measure is imposed by the defence of the existence of the state that guarantees them, such as in the case of an external military attack. This is the foundation of the open society – in Popper’s sense. Such a society has knowledge as open in its investigations and results as it is itself. The open society is not, however, self-sufficient, but exists only on the foundation mentioned above; for only starting from this basis, which gives each member of society the right to live his life as he sees fit, can negative externalities, which concretely and significantly affect the freedom of others, be limited.

In other words, the axiom is the freedom of the person in his or her thinking and actions; recognizing a person as a person means granting this freedom and, therefore, respecting his or her dignity. This implies the right to shape one’s own life. There are no moral values ​​superior to this dignity and in the name of which it can be justified to define negative externalities in such a way as to give rise to the generalized suspicion that one person harms another in terms of certain values ​​(such as health or climate protection). In philosophy, such a consideration is called the “transcendental argument valid a priori”. Empirically, starting from history and experience susceptible to repetition, it is also known that, if this foundation is abandoned, enormous harm is always caused to the vast majority of people, and any possible benefits accrue exclusively to the elite, who take advantage of the characteristics of the closed society. This empirical argument complements the transcendental argument.

As on the eve of the Second World War, humanity is facing an imminent change of direction today, which will probably determine its destiny in the coming decades, since it generates a tendency likely to encompass all the major social groups and political parties. It is therefore necessary for humanity to realize that it is at a crossroads. This process requires a lucid and responsible vision, which is not afraid of the fears provoked by the current enemies of the open society, namely a vision based on trust in what characterizes each human being as a rational being (homo sapiens): the dignity of the person, which consists in his freedom to think and act.

 
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