Enemies of open society

 Open societies value all the progress that is precious for humanity and holds a beacon for dealing with complexities of present and future uncertainties. Open societies nurtures individuality and liberty of each human, and rights and freedom to explore their potential. It provides positive frame and synergy for individual to assimilate, contribute and value life on earth. Open societies are benchmark of human progress, it provides nurturing space for differing thoughts, ideas, creative abilities and expressions. It is a precious space for pinnacle of creations of body and mind, that feeds and nourishes. This precious space must be cherished, valued and protected. Future of humanity is very much hinged on it.       

There is a serious threat to open societies by systems that nurture uncouth, primitives and increasingly belligerent herds. There are also powerful entrenched greedy people who want to keep narrative control to their fancy and assert their entitlement by mollycoddling this vicious threat to humanity. They use common people as fodder as they position for deeply troubling morals while tightening narration control. It’s the same narrative control they used when natural resources were used as buffer to pander the worst under the garb of economic progress and prosperity while they wallowed in hedonistic plunder and wanton consumerism. Last few decades are testament to this ransacking of common resource by few. These market capitalist decadence were carefully packed as liberal values and expressions of freedom and choices offered. With natural resources depleting at fast pace while biodiversity losing its resilience at an alarming rate the hypocrisy is in the open. They can no longer distract or create subjective perceptions to scuttle the reality. Life giving systems are collapsing in realtime. Climate change is systematically unleashing the breakdown for us to witness and rue. What logical minds and insightful people (essentially byproduct of open society) were predicting -with well researched facts and evidence, is now unfolding. It took a while for even those posing as ‘liberal’ media to acknowledge (since it reduces easy benefits and exploitative connections) while market media still posits these as quirks of fate and dire consequences of unknown to work on the fear as motive to attract eyeballs. (I was reading about oligarchic oath that finds mention in Politics by Aristotle “I promise to be an enemy of people, and to do my best to give them bad advice”). 

The same denial is what you see by the liberal posing narration controllers as open spaces and democratic ideals are assaulted by vicious herds. Open societies are evolutionary outcomes of brilliant minds with humanistic concerns and egalitarian values, it is an outcome of debates, discussion and exchange of ideas for best possibilities. These are based on social contract of collective will and personal accountability. That makes open societies extremely fragile hence the need for constant vigilance as if the soul of humanity is hinged on it. I was reading Open Societies and Its Enemies by Karl Popper, extremely important book for the times we live in where marauding mobs with various excuses and grievances assault humanity’s cherished institutions and egalitarian values while the safeguards collapse under the chicanery of pandering for immediate gains while using narrative control to distract. It must be understood in clear terms that each and every attempt at restriction of open society is a grievous attack on soul of humanity. Karl Popper understood these threats (there is a chapter on how oligarchs tried to scuttle fledging ideas of democracy). “A closed society at its best can be compared to an organism… A closed society resembles a herd in a semi organic unit whose members are held together by semi biological ties” while open societies move towards abstract hence equip to associate with humanistic global concerns and abstract ideas that have universalistic implications the reason why humans have made astounding progress. Quite clearly transformation from closed society to open society was the “deepest revolution” of humanity. Popper hints at existential crisis that individuals encounter, the source for incisive philosophies on human condition from Nietzsche to Camus to creative expression of literature from Dostoevsky to Kafka or art from Von Gogh to Picasso, “It is a strain created by effort which life in an open society continually demands from us -by the endeavor to be rational, to forgo atleast some of our emotional social needs, to look after ourselves, and to accept responsibility”. Popper writes “we must, I believe, bear this strain as the price to be paid for every increase in knowledge, in reasonableness, in cooperation and in mutual help, and consequently in our chance to survival…it is the price we have to pay for being human”.      

When members of closed societies -a magical (read religion) collectivist primitive, enter open societies and are encouraged and patronized to cherish their primitive association and dehumanizing value system instead of evolving into better as the opportunity presents this then is the first step towards assault on open society. An open society cannot survive by tolerating the intolerance of intolerant. That is not social contract nor is it rational choice or expression of freedom. Ideally as open societies evolve individuals find their synergic associations the problem is when outsiders enter, not as vibrant individuals like European migrants to US, but as herd representing the collective primitive. These primitives will exhibit themselves as vicious herds if not dealt since they are incapable to handle freedom nor equipped to be responsible. Narration of exceptionalism enters through miracle books and scriptures that infects into herd with that the impossibility of being a human while primitive conceptions of patriarchy gets embedded into feeling of natural authority. Education has a significant role to prevent these degradation. Remember about 2400years back when the brilliant philosophers in Athens worked on ideas of democracy -that had far reaching influence on progress of humanity (imagine the fertile egalitarian smart minds of ‘School of Georgias’ -among many who made these valiant efforts, they developed fundamental tenets of anti-slavery, of rational protectionism, anti-nationalism -a creed of universal empire) oligarchic controlled Spartans saw it as a threat and took measures to “the arrest of social change, and to fight the universalistic imperialism of Athenian democracy” into their society which included making primitive traditions and taboos more rigid, taking anti-humanitarian steps i.e. 'to shut down all equalitarian, democratic and individualistic ideologies', imposing anti-universalism ('uphold the differentiation between your tribe and all others, do not mix with inferiors'), and lastly mastery -'dominate and enslave your neighbors'. History doesn’t matter when it is about humans we are dealing with -essentially self aware precious presence -an outcome of vibrant open society, since they have evolved into vibrant sophisticated complex present. History repeats when it is held by primitives since they remain trapped in the miracle books of anachronistic religions and market capitalism greed bubble. Lacking any discerning quality of being a human the herd, the primitives, repeats the loop of history incapable and incapacitated to learn or understand or apply their mind. Beware of the forces that nurture these they are constant threat to open society. Onus is on us to see that primitive forces are negated at every step. The only faith that matters is faith in humanity.