The Popper Principle

The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash.

Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosopher Kings is given inside of a conditional---the condition being: those leaders must be True Philosophers; where True Philosophers know the Good and thus know (in a nearly omniscient-like way) what is best for everyone (and act accordingly). It is left wide open whether such True Philosophers even exist, thus it is left wide open whether such a social organization would ever work in reality.

Plato's other political dialogues, like Statesman and The Laws, are much much less utopian and "authoritarian" and deal with very practical political issues. It would be weird to be an authoritarian utopist and then go and write dialogues like those.

I'm a big fan of Karl Popper's work. I learned about him when reading the book Empirical Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson. At the time, it was a pretty iconoclastic publication, since it directly struck against the assumption of nativism by framing the study of language as something that could be evidence-based in a way where hypotheses were truly falsifiable. The ability to collect and process large amounts of data pertinent to language make it a lot easier to strike down some of the more inscrutable theories of the '90s and '00s -- at least to those who are willing to do real science.

An antidote to this antiquated and distorted view of Plato can be found in the following book: In Defense of Plato by Ronald B. Levinson.

> the principle of fallibilism: Truths are only true if they are verified through the give and take of experience and experiment.

I think Popper would object to the phrase "truths are only true if they are verified". We don't knowingly verify truths. The things we think are truths aren't even true, they're just not false (yet).

I was first exposed to Popper in my first year in university, in an introductory course to epistemology, and I liked him right away. I've carried Refutability and the Paradox of Tolerance with me ever since.

By the way David Deutsch could be reasonably said to be Popper's biggest fan. If you're interested in Deutsch and Popper you could do worse than picking up "The Beginning of Infinity" to get acquainted with both, it's a great book.

What if a society's collapse is a feature of progress, not a failure of it? Popper argues that open societies thrive on questioning and closed ones stagnate by suppressing it. But this introduces the contradiction that openness can't be preserved by any fixed set of rules as rules rigid enough to structure a society inevitably devolves the openness they're meant to protect.

The optimistic read of that problem is that the devolution is itself the corrective. Athens outpaces Sparta through openness, devolves, falls. Rome's republic succeeds it, devolves, falls. Promoting growth is then: promote openness as a principle and accept that when a society devolves, its failure clears the way for selection for increased openness.

Also worth reading, I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates” that sets the context. TL:DR Socrates was deeply involved with a group of Quisling aristocrats who briefly overthrew democracy with Sparta’s help. Athens’ withdrawal agreement with Sparta stipulated amnesty for the collaborators, so they used the roundabout prosecution. They were not going to execute him, just strip him of his civic rights, but his arrogant conduct during the trial so incensed the jurors that more voted for the death penalty than had voted to convict him.

Otherwise, it’s important to remember Plato sock-puppets Socrates, who had no truck with the newfangled and subversive invention of writing and thus could not correct the record. What is clear is that Plato, a disgruntled aristocrat himself, exiled for being part of the quisling faction, was a proto-fascist far beyond the wildest dreams of a Stalin or Hitler. But philosophy teachers like the conceit of a philosopher-king and that’s why he hasn’t been consigned to the trash heap of history where he belongs.

Hmm, was the rise of the Third Reich because a far-right and social democratic regime had liquidated the entirety of the militant left wing in Germany? Was it because of the vulnerabilities of parliamentary democracies that Carl Schmitt identified and helped the nascent Nazi movement exploit? Was it because the much lauded dialectical progression towards societies of greater freedom, touted by the German idealists, instead led to a country ravaged by war, leaving disillusionment and a moral void that a strongman with some convenient scapegoats could exploit?

No! Of course it was because Plato's authoritarian Republic ideas because they, with the most surface level interpretation, share the concept of class collaboration with fascism.

Popper has many good ideas but I think this was not one of them. The rise of fascism was incredibly historically contingent. It was a black swan event, and one of the defining characteristics of such events is that people always write flimsy narratives to explain them with the benefit of hindsight.

Given the argument tactics employed by Socrates in Plato's Dialogues, which include most of the standard catalog of fallacies, the question that arises in the mind of many readers is "why didn't they kill him sooner?"

Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized Catholic hangover.

The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.

It has never worked, and it never will.

I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.

If you like Popper you'd like Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth

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