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One hears too often the suggestion that some form or other of totalitarianism is inevitable…They ask us whether we are really naive enough to believe that democracy can be permanent; whether we do not see that it is just one of the forms of government that come and go in the course of history…the future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity.
Karl Popper, Introduction, The Open Society and It’s Enemies
What if there was a percentage of people who are just wired this way, with a predisposition to intolerance? What if right-wing authoritarians and the rest of us just have fundamentally different brains?
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In the Open Society and its Enemies, Popper has nothing at all nice to say about Plato; and while he has more temperate things to say about Socrates, the truth is, he simply isn’t very interested in him.
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At a surface level, it is not immediately obvious why a philosopher of science like Karl Popper, concerned with things like the problem of induction, would feel the need to insert himself into social science.
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This post is a defense of the ideal of The Open Society which is presently under serious attack by the “Make America Great Again” crowd, with their various authoritarian, white supremacist dog whistles.
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